Calling Bullshit

Great editorial by Philip Gailey in the St. Petersburg Times:

If only George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld hated war as much as they hate admitting a mistake. To hear them tell it, Iraq is a success story and the Guantanamo prison is a tropical paradise.

[…]

Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, provided a sober reality check on the Iraqi insurgency. "I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," he told the committee, adding that insurgency's "overall strength" is about the same. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency."

Was the general off-message? Only last month Dick Cheney assured us that the insurgency was in its "last throes." Asked if he was contradicting the vice president, Abizaid sidestepped the question, saying, "I gave you my opinion."

[…]

Meanwhile, Cheney shrugged off charges from domestic and foreign critics that Islamic detainees have been abused at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "They're living in the tropics," he said in a CNN interview. "They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want."

Except due process, perhaps.

Read the whole thing. It’s good.