The Weak Leading the Strong: Bush Rewards his failures

• All Good for Bush & Corporate Media: NO ONE Responsible for US Torture, 9/11 Failures and Iraq Intelligence WMD "Failure"
  

U.S. INTELLIGENCE was "dead wrong" in its pre-war beliefs about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, a U.S. presidential commission reported 10 days ago. And just as wrong about nearly every other charge levelled at Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This is the third preposterous whitewash foisted on credulous Americans. Whitewash One was the 9/11 investigation. That commission found no one responsible for allowing the worst attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor, though Bush and Rice were bombarded with warnings that an assault was imminent. The awkward fact that then-attorney general John Ashcroft actually cut spending on terrorism right before 9/11 was conveniently ignored. Whitewash Two: Torture scandals at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. detention camps. Seven senior military investigations found only a few cases of "minor misconduct" and "isolated abuse" by low-ranking personnel. The torture of prisoners by electricity, freezing, drowning, sleep and sensory deprivation, beatings, dog attacks, and sexual humiliation were, claimed the Pentagon, all the fault of a few trailer trash sadists, though the chain of responsibility for these war crimes clearly ran right up to the secretary of defence. Three whitewashes later, many Bush administration officials arguably guilty of monumental blundering or even possible criminal acts have instead been richly rewarded.

• Donald Rumsfeld, accused Geneva Conventions violater, was renamed Pentagon chief.
  
• National Security Adviser Rice, asleep on guard duty on 9/11, became secretary of state.
  
• Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz was forced on the World Bank as its new chief.
  
• Loudmouth neocon buffoon John Bolton was nominated UN ambassador;
  
• faithful apparatchik John Negroponte was made intelligence czar.
  
• Only the CIA's hand-kissing chief, George Tenet, lost his job, albeit with a Medal of Freedom.
  
• White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, who wrote briefs justifying torture, was named attorney general. Poor bumbling Colin Powell went from secretary of state to deserved obscurity. [more]
• Pictured above: President Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December  on three central figures of the Iraq war: from left, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who led the invasion; L. Paul Bremer III, who led the occupation; and George J. Tenet, who as intelligence director built a case for war. Bremer is responsible for the missing $9 Billion [more]