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BUSH ADMINISTRATION AS DANGEROUS NOW AS BEFORE

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Bush administration as dangerous now as before

Haroon Siddiqui says Canada should remain vigilant about potential

fallout

 

 

HAROON SIDDIQUI

 

 

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The crises engulfing the White House could not have come a day too

soon, considering the consistent and blatant abuse of power by the

Bush administration over five years.

 

The indictment against Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney,

and the ongoing investigation of Karl Rove, the top political adviser

to George W. Bush, speak to more than the crime of outing a secret

CIA agent.

 

That was just a small part of a broad pattern of deceit and double

standards set by the president and his cabal of ideologues.

 

Their mode of governance has been to do whatever they could get away

with, including waging an unwarranted war on false pretences by

fixing intelligence and exploiting public fears.

 

Libby was part of the neo-con clique of Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul

Wolfowitz (now at the World Bank), John Bolton (at the United

Nations), Zalmay Khalizad (current envoy to Iraq) and others who, in

the 1990s, called for invading Iraq to preserve " U.S. access to oil "

and to foster the safety of " friends and allies like Israel. "

 

Once in power, they wasted little time after 9/11 to put the Iraq

plan into action, and fixed the facts to justify it.

 

Hence, the tall tales of Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda, his

weapons of mass destruction and the phoney story of nuclear cake from

Niger, which is what CIA agent Valerie Plame's husband Joseph Wilson

discredited, only to see a vengeful White House blow her cover.

 

The probe into Libby and Rove will mean something only if it serves

as the start of a process of holding this administration fully

accountable for the deaths of 2,000 Americans and between 30,000 and

100,000 Iraqis, and the torture of hundreds in American detention

centres.

 

The people who gave us Iraq are now targeting Syria and Iran, and are

likely to get more belligerent in the days ahead to divert attention

from their mounting domestic woes.

 

Canadians need to be alert to the possibility that Stephen Harper and

other local chicken hawks, who wanted Canada to go to war in Iraq,

may now want us to do Bush's bidding in his new ventures abroad.

 

The regimes in Iran and Syria do have a lot to account for.

 

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants Israel to be " wiped off

the map, " a racist and anti-Semitic notion that Canada and others

have rightly condemned. He also wants to pursue a nuclear program.

 

Syria is not co-operating with the United Nations' probe into its

alleged complicity in the Feb. 14 killing of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon.

It is also funnelling arms to Palestinian militias in Lebanon.

 

But Bush has a broader agenda against these two anti-American and

anti-Israeli states: he wants to impose economic sanctions on both,

and perhaps even engineer regime changes.

 

That's where much of the world, led by Russia and China, parts

company with Bush. Canada should as well.

 

The Arabs, in particular, fear the kind of chaos Bush has created in

Iraq, which threatens to destabilize the entire region.

 

His diplomatic offensive on Syria/Lebanon is also open to accusations

of hypocrisy:

He wants the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon disbanded, while turning a

blind eye to the Kurdish and Shiite militias in Iraq.

He strikes moral poses on Syria but sent detainees to the torture

chambers of Damascus, which is how Canadian Maher Arar ended up

there.

 

Canadian hands are not clean either. It was only after an independent

inquiry concluded that Arar was indeed tortured in Damascus, as were

three other Canadians, that Ottawa has now acknowledged that fact.

Having done so, it is busy blaming Syria to deflect any questions

about Canadian complicity.

 

Worse, even as Pierre Pettigrew demands that Damascus prosecute

Arar's torturers, his government has been trying to deport Hassan

Almrei, a Syrian detained in Canada, to the same Syrian torture

chambers.

 

The Bush presidency has been dangerous to the world and to America

itself. Canadians need to remain vigilant about its potential fallout

on us.

 

 

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Haroon Siddiqui writes Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer/ContentServer?

pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly & c=Article & cid=1130622380

125 & call_pageid=968256290204

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