[Peace-discuss] More Bush lies

[Paul Patton]

*Afghan Absurdities*
 by  James Bovard <http://www.fff.org/aboutUs/bios/jxb.asp>, Posted
September 28, 2005

 Americans have heard many news reports about Bush administration falsehoods
on Iraq. However, the scams of Afghanistan have not gotten as much attention
as they deserve. Following are some examples of how the Bush administration
has misled the American people regarding Afghanistan.

In the wake of the U.S. military victory over the Taliban, President Bush
warned America in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002,

Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears.... We have found
diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities....
What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our
war against terror is only beginning.

 The news that al-Qaeda was targeting American nuclear reactors was the most
chilling revelation in Bush's speech. Senior CIA and FBI officials gave
background briefings to the Washington media in the wake of the speech,
amplifying the threat that Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda fighters were
targeting U.S. nuclear-power facilities. This news made the terrorist threat
far more ominous and may have spurred support for Bush's preemptive war
policy.

Two years later, the Bush administration admitted that the president's
statement was false and that no nuclear-power-plant diagrams had been
discovered in Afghanistan. A senior Bush administration official told the *Wall
Street Journal,* "There's no additional basis for the language in the speech
that we have found." Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Edward McGaffigan, who
had testified in 2002 on this issue in closed hearings on Capitol Hill,
commented that Bush was "poorly served by a speech-writer."

When word began circulating that the nuclear-power-plant story was a hoax,
at least one White House official refused to raise the white flag. *Nucleonics
Week* reported that National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack
denied that Bush ever claimed the nuclear-powerplant diagrams were found in
Afghanistan. McCormack told *Nucleonics Week,* "We stand by the line in the
president's speech." McCormack emphasized that, although Afghanistan was
mentioned in sentences before and after the bombshell about discovering U.S.
nuclear-powerplant diagrams, the word "Afghanistan" did not appear in that
specific sentence. He revealed that Bush's comment was merely referring to
the possibility that terrorists might access the websites of U.S.
nuclear-power plants. McCormack said,

In terms of wording of the president's speech, at the time we didn't want to
talk in public about what we knew about the ability of al-Qaeda to access
the Internet and download information from the Internet.

 But the FBI had revealed months earlier that the 9/11 hijackers routinely
used the Internet to communicate with one another.

That Bush's Afghan nuclear claim was bogus popped up in the news for a day
or two and then vanished. Almost no one on Capitol Hill showed any interest
in investigating.

*Sham women's lib*

In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush, listing the achievements of
the invasion of Afghanistan, declared, "The mothers and daughters of
Afghanistan were captives in their own homes.... Today women are free."

But most Afghan women have yet to experience the Bush deliverance. A January
2003 UN report on conditions in rural Afghanistan concluded that "the
situation of women has not changed to any great extent since the removal of
the Taliban."

The U.S. State Department, in a February 2004 report on Afghanistan, noted
the following imperfections in Afghan equal rights:

 Kabul police authorities placed women under detention in prison, at the
request of family members, for defying the family's wishes on the choice of
a spouse.

Tribal elders resolved murder cases by ordering defendants to provide young
girls in marriage to the victims' families, in punishment for the murder.

In some areas, women were forbidden to leave the home except in the company
of a male relative.

Some local authorities excluded women from all employment outside the home,
apart from the traditional work of women in agriculture.

In Herat province, ruler-warlord Ismael Khan closed down all beauty parlors
and banned women from working as tailors.

The government of the Nangarhar province banned all women entertainers from
radio and television in April 2004.


*Barbarity oversold*

Like a knight in Mark Twain's *Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court,*Bush continually inflates the size of the dragons he has
supposedly slain.
In a speech in Louisville, Kentucky, on September 2, 2002, he bragged, "We
went in to liberate people from the clutches of the most barbaric regime in
history." This was an upgrade for the Taliban, since Bush usually
characterized them as only "the most barbaric regime in modern history."

The Taliban were brutal and killed tens of thousands of civilians during
their five-year rule over most of Afghanistan. But on a year-to-year basis,
the Taliban may have been less bloodthirsty than the Northern Alliance,
which ruled most of Afghanistan in the mid 1990s and whose factions killed
more than 25,000 civilians in Kabul alone. The Taliban's brutality never
approached that of the Soviet military, which killed 1 to 2 million Afghans
between 1979 and 1989.

Many governments have far exceeded the Taliban's carnage. Three million
North Koreans have perished because of their government's brutal repression
and its destruction of the agricultural sector. More than a million people
were killed by government forces and rampaging paramilitaries carrying out
ethnic-cleansing campaigns in Rwanda and Burundi in 1994. The Khmer Rouge
killed an estimated 2 to 3 million Cambodians beginning in 1975 — almost a
third of the population. Nor does the Taliban's grisly record compare with
that of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, or Mao's China. And many
conquerors in earlier history make the Taliban look like pikers.

*American-made victims don't count*

The Taliban's barbarism does not absolve the U.S. government from its
abuses. Though the Bush administration continually portrays the U.S. defeat
of the Taliban as a triumph for human rights, the U.S. military has
routinely covered up its abuses of Afghan civilians.

The Bush administration continually seeks to ignore, shrug off, or
misrepresent actions of U.S. forces that kill innocent Afghan civilians.
After the United States killed 15 Afghan children in two separate bombing
incidents in December 2003, the Afghan government, the United Nations, and
other organizations demanded a public accounting. The military conducted its
own investigation of an incident in which 9 children were killed and
concluded that it was blameless. The results were top secret, but, according
to U.S. military spokesman Bryan Hilferty, "The investigating officer said
we used appropriate rules of engagement and did follow the law of conflict."


Human Rights Watch condemned U.S. practices in a March 2004 report, noting
that "civilians are being held in a legal black hole — with no tribunals, no
legal counsel, no family visits, and no basic legal protections." The report
declared,

There is compelling evidence suggesting that U.S. personnel have committed
acts against detainees amounting to torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading
treatment.

 The deaths of two Afghans being held at the U.S. Bagram air base were
officially classified by military doctors as homicides resulting from "blunt
force injuries."

*The Taliban forever vanquished*

On November 30, 2003, in a speech to U.S. Army troops at Fort Carson,
Colorado, Bush declared,

Working with a fine coalition, our military went to Afghanistan, destroyed
the training camps of al-Qaeda, and put the Taliban out of business forever.


 Shortly after Bush's announcement, the U.S. military launched Operation
Mountain Blizzard to fight Taliban elements and terrorist suspects in the
southern part of Afghanistan. Mountain Blizzard was so successful in putting
the Taliban "out of business forever" that the United States brought in
thousands of reinforcements and launched Operation Mountain Storm in March
2004.

On the main road in the Zabul province, "the Taliban have set up daytime
road blocks. They scrutinize vehicles for potential targets to kill or
kidnap. Four engineers working on that road have been kidnapped, and 15
Afghans working for the central government have been killed in the past
three months," according to a February 2004 report in Canada's *Globe and
Mail.*

The Taliban continue to pose a mortal threat to many Afghans who seek
progress and stability in their country. As of March 2004, the Taliban and
cohorts controlled roughly a third of Afghanistan, primarily in the southern
areas adjacent to Pakistan. Gen. James Jones, the U.S. commander of NATO
forces in Afghanistan, testified to Congress in January 2004 that enemy
forces "have some military capability to psychologically demoralize us." The
UN Development Program warned in March 2004 that Afghanistan may again
become a "terrorist breeding ground" unless it receives far more
international aid.

*Conclusion*

As long as the Taliban have not reentered Kabul in triumph, Bush can
continue to portray the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as one of the greatest
humanitarian triumphs in history. He inflated the victory over the Taliban
to make himself appear as not only a great military conqueror but also a
savior of part of humanity. He is playing on the ignorance of Americans who
vaguely recall the television news broadcasts showing the U.S. troops'
victories but otherwise followed few, if any, of the details of what has
happened in Afghanistan since late 2001.

*James Bovard is author of The Bush
Betrayal<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/140396727X/qid=1086782027/sr=8-5/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i5_xgl14/102-8261330-7082558?v=glance&s=books&n=507846/thefutureoffreed>as
well as Lost
Rights<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312123337/qid=1086782027/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-8261330-7082558?v=glance&s=books&n=507846/thefutureoffreed>(1994)
and Terrorism
and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of
Evil<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403963681/thefutureoffreed>(Palgrave-Macmillan,
September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The
Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email <jbovard at his.com>.*

*This article originally appeared in the June 2005 edition of Freedom Daily.
*
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