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bush administration shit list: a thread
this will be a fairly long one, i’m just gonna run through the big names and highlight the comically evil shit they’ve done. i was planning on ranking them in ascending order, but have realized that they are all guilty of war crimes in their own unique ways, so they’re unranked
first off we’ve got karl rove, who was the bush administration’s spin guy. he was initially scouted due to his prominence in campus republican activism — we now know that rove was successful bc he had access to the campus democrats’ internal memos, not bc he was a brain genius
before he took office, rove ran smear campaigns against other republican nominees to win Bush the White House. one of those campaigns involved spreading rumors that John McCain’s adopted bangladeshi daughter was born out of wedlock.
fast-forwarding (for clarity’s sake) to the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, rove chaired the White House Iraq Group, which hammered out spin campaigns and focus-grouped propaganda, including the phrase “axis of evil” & line “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud“
for more on Rove, including the time he outed an active CIA agent after her husband spoke out against the war, check out this article: https://truthout.org/articles/the-lies-of-karl-rove/
next on the list is john bolton, who recently made headlines by taking a “principled” stand against trump. libs don’t like to remember that the past few decades of bolton’s career — since at least 2002 — have been centered on regime change in iran https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/john-bolton-has-wanted-war-with-iran-since-before-you-were-born/
bolton has also agitated for regime change in North Korea, Syria, and most recently Venezuela. his obsession with regime change in iran has frequently allied him with the MEK, an ex-marxist organization turned shady cult of personality that shares bolton’s goal of regime change
while its harder to pin why Rove and others did what they did, bolton‘s nonstop commitment to overthrowing foreign governments makes his motives pretty transparent. a few years before libs started claiming him as a member of the #resistance, he wrote this: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html
our third war criminal is john yoo, a lawyer whose exploits include (1) making the torture of indefinitely-detained inmates at guantanamo bay legal, (2) giving Bush a legal loophole to invade if congress tried to block it, and (3) backing surveillance programs like PRISM
more recently, he was one of the only people who consistently criticized Obama’s drone program for being too reserved. in 2012, he urged Obama to view “terrorists” as “the enemy of all mankind, who merit virtually no protections under the laws of war.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303665904577452271794312802?reflink=share_mobilewebshare
the next year ,Yoo took issue with an obama administration memo that promoted drone striking US citizens — he worried that forcing soldiers to avoid killing US civilians might distract them from their more important concern, which is killing people https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323951904578288380180346300
the last one for this thread (because it’s getting long) is dick cheney. he was at the reins in the aftermath of 9/11, basically taking over the war room and pushing for intervention in Afghanistan.
he *personally* pressured intelligence analyst Nada Bakos to fabricate ties between Saddam Hussein and the future founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, to justify the war. this lie would allow Zarqawi to gain an extensive following & found AQI after de-baathification
cheney left his position as oil company halliburton’s CEO with tens of millions and company stocks as severance. he then ensured halliburton would be granted an exclusive 7 billion dollar contract to steal Iraqs oil, the profits of which would feed back into his stock dividends.
out of everyone on this list, cheney is probably the worst. he’s not just responsible for our invasion of afghanistan or iraq — he’s also partly responsible for the formation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whose affiliate cells in Syria would go on to become the islamic state
