Cheney Offended by Amnesty Int’l Report

The report Amnesty International released last week said prisoners at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba had been mistreated and called for the prison to be shut down.

“Frankly, I was offended by it,” Cheney said in the videotaped interview. “For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously.”

I have to admit, I’m starting to rather enjoy the White House’s “kill the messenger” approach to human rights abuses.

Interrogators at Gitmo beat confessions out of innocent prisoners? Says who? The Associated Press?

Someone round up all the relatives of Johannes Gutenberg. That’ll teach him to invent the printing press.

Guards at Abu Ghraib threatened naked prisoners with vicious attack dogs? And there are pictures?

Get Kodak on the horn. Someone is going to pay.

And bring me the Constitution and a bottle of White-Out. I’ve always felt like we’ve got one amendment too many.

Inquiry Finds Some Quran ‘Mishandling’

[A] prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Quran in the toilet has told … investigators that he never witnessed any form of Quran desecration.

The general said he could not speculate on why the prisoner did not repeat his earlier statement about a guard flushing a Quran in a toilet.

I’m guessing his recanting probably had something to do with subtle threats against his well-being, as well as not-so-subtle electric shocks to the testicles and anus.

“I’d like you to know that we have found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Quran down a toilet,” Hood said.

Did we flush it down the toilet? No. Of course not. There may have been a little mishandling — a little accidentally dropping the Koran into flaming latrine overflowing with human excrement — but at no time was a toilet ever flushed.

“We did identify 13 incidents of alleged mishandling of the Quran by Joint Task Force personnel,” [Hood said.]

Of the 13 alleged incidents, five were substantiated, he said … [T]he five cases “could be broadly defined as mishandling” of the holy book, but he refused to discuss details.

In three of the five cases, the mishandling appears to have been deliberate.

This is the good news?

“Attention all Arabs. That story you read about in Newsweek? The one that caused you to riot and kill two dozen people? Total crap. The real truth? Between 5 to 13 times worse. Now please get back on your camels and go back to your tents.”

The United States Army: Fighting Fire With Gasoline.

“None of these five incidents was a result of a failure to follow standard operating procedures in place at the time the incident occurred,” Hood said. Later, he said there was no written version of a standard operating procedure during the first year prisoners were held at Guantanamo.

See? It’s okay. Nobody was breaking any rules. Mostly because, um … there weren’t any.

Unless you count Allah’s. But who really cares what he thinks? I mean, if you don’t include the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims … probably nobody.

Spector’s Past Gun Play to Figure in Trial

A prosecution motion filed in February said the incidents showed Spector had a “common plan” of using guns “to intimidate women into staying with him.”

I don’t buy it. Why would Phil Spector need to resort to violence to get women to sleep with him when he’s such a hot package?

Party celebrating assassination survival bombed

The Tal Afar attack, which happened about 7 p.m., targeted a tribal gathering at the home of Sheik Hassan Bakdash, who was celebrating his surviving an assassination attempt a couple of days ago.

You are cordially invited to this Saturday’s “I Survived The Assassination Attempt At The I Survived The Assassination Attempt Party Party,” to be followed shortly afterwards by the “I Was Mortally Wounded At The I Survived The Assassination Attempt At The I Survived The Assassination Attempt Party Party After-Hours Bash.”

All revelers receive complimentary drinks, appetizers, and blood transfusions.

Bush Vows to Veto Stem Cell Legislation

“I’m very concerned about cloning,” Bush told reporters in the Oval Office. “I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable.”

I can totally understand his trepidation. One minute we’re curing cancer and regrowing severed spinal cords, the next minute we’re living in a world of mindless automatons.

What scares Bush most are not the short-term benefits of cloning, but the long-term concerns.

Bush began Friday at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast where he reaffirmed his position on sensitive issues such as abortion and stem cell research. He urged people to “pray that America uses the gift of freedom to build a culture of life.”

Because nothing says “culture of life” like letting millions of people suffer and die from diseases that can be cured through stem cell research.

And he recalled the legacy of the late Pope John Paul II, saying “The best way to honor this great champion of human freedom is to continue to build a culture of life where the strong protect the weak.”

But if that doesn’t work out, then we’ll settle for building a culture of American imperialism where the strong invade the weak and steal their natural resources.