About the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, many of us long ago gave up asking, Can things get any worse? Because ever since Mister Bush did his choreographed strut out onto the flight deck of the positioned-for-the-best-photo USS Abraham Lincoln to make his Mission Accomplished vindication speech, worse has been operative word.
Not from Administration officials, obviously. For them, the words have been "stay the course" until we "turn the corner" against the "desperate" insurgents in their "last throes."
With all those now abandoned even by the most stubborn diehards, the only remaining White House catch-phrase is the astoundingly hollow "support the troops," delivered in red-white-and-blue tones by these patriot-scoundrels. They and their captive pundits simultaneously snarl that it is we dissidents who are undermining the troops because we dare to challenge the policies that have gotten them killed and maimed every day these past four years for no reasons other than the arrogance, greed, corruption, incompetence and twisted vision of domination engendered by the White House and its appointees. Orwellian doesn't go halfway to describing it.
Worse. Worse. Each day worse. For Americans, for Iraqis. Bush's splurge of fresh cash and exhausted, ill-equipped, inadequately trained soldiers is supposed already to be improving matters. Senator John McCain's trip to market showed how grotesquely untrue that is.
Today, Ned Parker reports in the Los Angeles Times on yet another example of how the Administration is making matters worse:
U.S.-run detention camps in Iraq have become a breeding ground for extremists where Islamic militants recruit and train supporters, and use violence against perceived foes, say former inmates and Iraqi officials. ...
Iraqis swept up in security operations and held indefinitely while the Americans try to determine whether they have any links to the insurgency are susceptible to the extremists' message, former detainees said.
Their accounts of life in Camp Cropper, the main U.S. detention center at the Baghdad airport, indicate that three years after the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, the U.S. is still struggling to find a balance in the way it runs its detention system. ...
After the Abu Ghraib scandal, the U.S. pledged to speed up processing of detainees, the vast majority of whom the International Committee of the Red Cross said had been wrongly arrested. But as U.S. troops continue to confront the insurgency, the inmate population has soared, to 18,000, from 10,000 in 2003. ...
Iraqi officials also struggle with a crowded system where prisoners can languish as long as two years before getting a trial. But they say the Americans have allowed militants to flourish in their facilities.
"It looks like a terrorist academy now," said Saad Sultan, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry's liaison to U.S. and Iraqi prisons. "There's a huge number of these students. They study how they can kill in their camps. And we protect them, feed them, give them medical care.
"The Americans have no solution to this problem," he said. "This has been going on for a year or two, we have been telling them." ...
An Iraqi official who works on issues related to the Sunni insurgency said he had received a report that a moderate Sunni fighter had been killed at Camp Cropper. "The report came back to me that the Americans were in complete denial," he said the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. "They said, 'No such thing happened. Everything is under control.' That's not true."
"Not true." "Complete denial." "No solution to this problem." The perfect summing up of nearly four years of the Bush Administration's bloody occupation of Iraq.
Every day, worse and worse. You'd almost think they were doing it on purpose.
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