Elephant in Musth

Elephant in Musth
John Maxwell

'It is apparent, looking at Florida, that the most perfect system can
be subverted by determined saboteurs with enough money - as long as
good people keep quiet.  ... The real George Bush, if he is appointed
President, will use his time to destroy the integrity of the country he
rules, starting with the Supreme Court. Then he can start on dealing
with  the rest of us.  That's his job, and as the American Press has
made plain, nothing needs to be known about him and his  multifarious
incapacities because Big Brother in the giant corporations will tell
him what to do. We are all in a for a very rough ride'  -
"Democracy! Enough Already!" - Commonsense, Dec 10. 2000

The good people seem at last to be coming awake.
After six years of conspicuous slumber and inexplicable silence,
influential actors in the United States  are at last finding the
courage to defy the miasma threatening all of us. All over the world,
it seems, people are beginning to realise that we are being led down
the road to Armageddon by a US Administration lacking either moral
sensibilities, strategic reasoning  or elementary common sense..
The Republican Party in the US Senate has at last rebelled against Mr
Bush's maleficient defiance of International Law and world opinion.
They have been joined by the onetime designated adult in the Bush
Administration, Colin Powell.  They have  rejected George Bush's
attempt to circumvent his own Supreme Court in order to authorise the
torture of foreigners in US custody and to backdate  forgiveness for
all those who obeyed his corrupt instructions to flout the Geneva
Conventions.
This week,  as Carl Hulse says in the New York Times, "On one side
are the Republican veterans of the uniformed services, arguing that the
president's proposal would effectively gut the nearly 60-year-old
Geneva Conventions, sending a dark signal to the rest of the world and
leaving United States military without adequate protection against
torture and mistreatment."
On the other side are the dinosaurs of the Republican Party and the
President and his White House cabal.
The British establishment has long been clear about what Mr Bush has
been up to.
 Lord Steyn, perhaps Britains most respected judge. two years ago
described the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay as a scandalous,
"Law-free zone". A few months ago, the Lords of Appeal
unequivocally denounced the US gulag system, declaring it an
uncivilised affront to humanity and justice. And a few days ago, the
head of Britain's Judiciary, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer,
excoriated the American position in the following words:
"It is a part of the acceptance of the rule of law that the courts
will be able to exercise jurisdiction over the executive.
"Otherwise the conduct of the executive is not defined and restrained
by law.
"It is because of that principle that the USA, deliberately seeking to
put the detainees beyond the reach of the law in Guantanamo Bay, is so
shocking an affront to the principles of democracy.
"Without independent judicial control, we cannot give effect to the
essential values of our society."
It was the second time Lord Falconer had spoken out about the
controversial camp, where 450 terror suspects are thought to be
detained. In June this year the Lord Chancellor denounced Guantanamo
Bay  as a "recruiting agent" for terrorism, and described the existence
of the base as "intolerable and wrong".
In Brussells, the European Parliament this week heard the Spanish
Foreign Miniister report that  "[Spanish] territory may have been used
not to commit crimes as such but as a stopover on the way to commit
crime in other territories," Moratinos said, adding that 66 suspect
flights had made stops in Spain.
What is so shocking is that the President has boldly, flagrantly and
contemptuously attempted to defy and make meaningless, the decisions of
his country's Supreme Court.  It is a court most of whose members
were appointed by Republican Presidents wanting  to castrate the power
of the judiciary to exercise the constitutionally decreed checks and
balances which were thought to guarantee democracy in the United
States. The present Supreme Court  is even more republican than the one
which sanctified George Bush in  the Presidency of the United States
despite his losing the presidential election in 2000.
When I predicted that George Bush, would use his time to destroy the
integrity of his country  many people told me that I was simply
prejudiced against the man; but I had observed his behaviour and came
to the conclusion that he was going to be a disaster for the United
States and a catastrophe for the rest of us.
The starving, brutalised people of Palestine, Darfur and  Haiti, the
terrorised millions in Iraq and the opium growers of Afghanistan are
eloquent testimony to the accuracy of my prediction.
In addition to the attempt to subvert the law, the Bush administration
has openly attempted to samfi the world into believing all sorts of
impossible things.
This week the International Atomic Authority, IAEA, blasted the US
Administration indirectly and Congress, directly, for a brazen attempt
to sell a monumental lie as a pretext for their anticipated war against
Iran.
In an unprecedented broadside from a UN agency, the IAEA denounced a US
Congressional report as 'outrageous and dishonest" including
'serious distortions' and  "erroneous, misleading and
unsubstantiated statements."
The letter from the IAEA was addressed to Peter Hoekstra, the
Republican chairman of the committee that issued the report. The IAEA
said the report contained  a litany of misleading statements, and
falsely (and fantastically) suggested  that the IAEA sidelined an
inspector who believed that Iran was deceiving the IAAEA about the
character of its nuclear ambitions. The IAEA suggested that Congress
should check its facts.
When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said
his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of
Iran as a threat."
 As a substantial minority still understand Saddam to have been behind
9/11.

According to the Washington Post, "Privately, several [American]
intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a
dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to
substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the
office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

The Committee report entitled ``Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat:
An Intelligence Challenge for the United States,'' was published on
Aug. 23.
The report is a classic piece of Republican propaganda. It is
reminiscent of the Administrations attempts to con world opinion to
believe that Saddam Hussein, against the odds and all his
protestations,  possessed weapons of mass destruction and was an
accessory to 9/11. The report's author author, Frederick Fleitz, was
a senior adviser to the U.S.'s UN ambassador, John Bolton, until 2005.

John Bolton in orbit

One of the most dangerous identified lying objects in the Bush
firmament is a short, self-important man named John Bolton. Like many
of the Bush neo-con brains trust, Bolton has a murky history. His most
dangerous exploit up to now was his attempt to con the world into
believing that  the US would be justified in attacking Cuba. He
falsely alleged, in official documents, that Cuba possessed biological
weapons of mass destruction and was peddling them to terrorist
organisations and regimes.
This outrageous lie was finally exploded by President jimmy Carter and
a consortium of experts who visited Cuba to disprove Bolton's
fantasies.
If war is politics by other means, as Clausewitz said, the Bolton
doctrine does not admit that war is failed politics, it holds  rather
that war is preferable to politics. Bolton has been the lead agitator
in attempting to blackmail the Security Council into adopting sanctions
against Iran,  justifying to an American attack on that country.
Bolton has a Napoleonic complex, some would say a Superman complex,
believing that the rest of the world epitomised in the United Nations,
is utterly useless except when it acts as the servant of,  and
cleaner-up for the United States.. His appointment to the United
Nations was not simply a studied insult by Bush and Cheney, it was a
deliberate provocation.
Even in the Republican dominated Congress the move was unacceptable,
and a scheduled, second hearing to confirm his nomination as Ambassador
had to be postponed because at least one republican Senator was
prepared to speak out and vote against this misguided messenger.
The hearing will now await the new Congress, and if my instincts are
accurate, it will fail ignominously in a Senate newly dominated by
Democrats with the support of disenchanted Republicans.
Subverting Democracy
The Republican Administration in the United States could easily pass as
a creation of George Orwell. Democracy is spread by invasion and war
and almost every statement of any importance conceals somewhere within
it a lie.
Right now, a galaxy of Republican Congressmen is either under lock and
key('Duke'Cunningham) under indictment ( Ney and Delay) or under
investigation for criminal misfeasance and malfeasance. The Senate
Majority leader (Frist) is himself under investigation, and if the
Democrats win in November, as I expect, boguis voting or no, even Mr
Bush may find himself impeached.
 In its last two tenancies of the White House the GOP contributed an
impressive list of malefactors up to an including the National Security
Adviser McFarlane and the Secretary of Defense Weinberger who were
saved from jail only by Presidential pardon. Lesser lights, starlets
like Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich and Roger Noriega have contributed more
than their share to the brutalisation and suffering of Latin America.
Those who contributed to the stealing of the 200o election, like John
Bolton and former Ambassador to Jamaica, Sue Cobb, were handsomely
rewarded and le t loose to wreak more havoc.
The emblem of the Republicans, the Grand Old Party -GOP, is, aptly,
an elephant.
Male elephants over a certain age periodically  go into a condition
known as musth, characterised by a huge excess of testosterone. .
Elephants in musth are as eager to fight as to mate, and they are so
aggressive that the normal tribe hierarchy is disrupted, because even
the most senior and biggest bulls will avoid smaller, younger  bulls in
musth because they are so dangerous - like teenage gunmen. Musth is the
Hindi rendering of the Urdu word mast, meaning intoxicated, which comes
from an earlier Persian expression which means poisoned. An elephant in
musth will kill anything in its way - humans including  its keepers,
other elephants or any other animal. Musth elephants are sometime known
as rogue elephants
The behaviour of the Bush administration is in my view, similar to the
behaviour of an elephant in musth. John Bolton expresses the metaphor
perfectly. He is the United States' senior diplomat though he  does
not believe in diplomacy. He is US Ambassador to the UN-  which he
believes is an unnecessary nuisance.  He deals with problems not by
dialogue, but by threats and aggressive behaviour. He is the frontman
for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, as dangerous a group of human beings as
a whole  herd of elephants  in musth. They will not take "Yes" for
an answer. Nothing but total submission will do.
And in their mad career they are fortified by the support of the
American media.
Last week the giant media network ABC, broadcast what it claimed was a
documentary  - entitled "The Road to 9/11"
Before the so-called documentary was broadcast there were several
complaints about the accuracy of the script and it was soon clear that
the enterprise was an assault on history and the truth; it was  the
opening black propaganda  broadside against the Democrats in advance of
the crucial November elections. When the Clinton administration left
office they made sure to warn the Bush administration about the nature
of Al Qaeda and the intentions of Bin Laden. Bush was asleep at the
wheel on September 11, 2001, but the documentary blames Clinton and his
crew for 9/11 and claimed that its conclusions were based on the
official 9/11 Report.
THE ABC documentary is reminiscent of the Swift Boat affair of the last
Presidential election, when the Vietnam war hero John Kerry was painted
as an unworthy coward and Bush, who spent most of  the war in
'undisclosed locations' in Texas and Alabama,  was painted as the
hero.
In the seventies we used to be blasted when we complained about the
malign attentions paid us by the foreign - mostly American - press.
When one sees what they will do to their own heroes and others, we must
consider ourselves fortunate to have escaped without greater damage.
The Haitians, the Halestinians, the Guatemalans and the Chileans were
not so lucky.
Of course, we also forget that September 11 was the anniversary of the
American sponsored coup which killed Allende and thousands of Chileans
and subjected Chile to two decades of terror and bloodshed. The current
President of Chile, Mme Bachelet, was herself a victim of Mr
Kissinger's surrogates.
Copyright ©2006 John Maxwell
jankunnu[at]yahoo.com