The Idiots Are In Charge Of The Asylum

More proof today (as if it were needed) that the Bush administration has unleashed a wave of hysterical, militant stupidity both at home and across the planet.

Ted Rall highlights the case of two 16-year-old girls From New York City who have "vanished into the netherworld of a Homeland Security gulag"...

In early March, the New York Times reported on April 7, one girl's parents "went to the local police station house" in the Queens Village neighborhood because "their teenage daughter...had defied their authority." Things calmed down and the parents, believing their daughter had been scared straight, asked the NYPD to forget the whole thing.

It was too late for that.

Without a warrant, NYPD detectives and federal agents burst into the girl's home--no wonder they don't have time to look for Osama!--where they "searched her belongings and confiscated her computer and the essays that she had written as part of a home schooling program," say her family. "One essay concerned suicide...[that] asserted that suicide is against Islamic law." The family is Bangladeshi. They are Muslim. That, coupled with the mere mention of suicide bombing in her essay, was enough to put the fuzz on high alert.

Although she is conservative and devout, the girl and her parents vigorously deny that she is an Islamist extremist (not that such opinions are illegal), but this is post-9/11 America and post-9/11 America is out of its mind.

Based solely on an essay written by one of the two, the FBI says both girls are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to become suicide bombers." But the feds admit that they have no evidence to back their suspicions. Nothing.

"There are doubts about these claims, and no evidence has been found that such a plot was in the works," one Bush Administration official admitted to the Times. "The arrests took place after authorities decided it would be better to lock up the girls than wait and see if they decided to become terrorists," another told the New York Post. The same logic could be used to justify locking up any Muslim, or anyone at all. Heck, maybe that's the idea...

As one Bush official told the New York Times:

"Authorities decided it would be better to lock up the girls than wait and see if they decided to become terrorists."

This is the Bush Doctrine in action, folks.

And while Italians remain up-in-arms at the US military's exoneration of the soldiers who killed Nicola Capilari, the same mad military logic is likely to exonerate another US soldier who shot two Iraqis because "I thought they were attacking me." Never mind that he shot them in the back. Never mind that witnesses said there was no justification for the murder.

Again, this is the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive killing taken to its logical extreme.

And The Guardian has more details of rampant military madness from Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), who finally concluded this week - once and for all - that Iraq does not and never did have WMDs as the Bush administration hysterically claimed.

Duelfer says the hunt for WMDs was botched from the very beginning, with the wrong people detained and the wrong people asking them the wrong questions.

The report reserves its most scathing remarks for the manner in which military intelligence went looking for weapons immediately after the war.

First, the US "black list" of scientists wanted for questioning was full of holes. "Some very despicable individuals who should have been listed were not, while many technocrats and even opponents of the Saddam regime made the list and hence found themselves either in jail or on the run." Mr Duelfer wrote, adding that some of the former had been released in the first few months after the war.

He found that military interrogation techniques, designed to acquire quick tactical battlefield intelligence, were ill-suited to gaining a broad understanding of complex weapons programmes.

"It was like trying to use a spanner for a hammer," Mr Duelfer said. "This investigation was a cross between a homicide investigation and a doctoral dissertation.

Duelfer adds that there is no reason to continue holding 105 Iraqi scientists in detention, as if there ever was. He also says that there is no proof at all to support Dick Cheney's theory that Iraqi WMD might have been smuggled to Syria before the invasion.

And here's the icing on the cake of corrupted military madness conjoined with rampant commercialism in a no-holds-barred Big Business good old boys yeeha! rape and plunder environment: BUSH WANTS TO BUILD OIL REFINERIES ON US MILITARY BASES!

I kid you not.

UPDATE: And yet another incidence of idiocy - a US helicopter gunship in Iraq may have killed a Canadian by mistake.