Jackson Hole Underground

The bald eagle has landed.

Devious Dick is back in Jackson Hole for Fourth of July weekend, according to well-placed sources. He did not attend the parade this morning (where he might have faced a mob), but perhaps he’ll be ferried by chopper to the Music in the Hole concert, of which he and his wife are fans.

Since we’re such patriotic, freedom-loving Americans, we thought we’d celebrate this Independence Day with some ol’-fashioned Communist bashing.

Oops. Turns out the military trainers the U.S. government sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2002, under the direction of the Creep Veep, gave our soldiers a lesson in torture tactics pioneered by … the Communist Chinese during the Korean War.

The Chinese used these tactics — sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, standing for long periods of time — to “obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners,” the New York Times reports.

The trainers based their lesson on a chart the U.S. Air Force developed during the 1950s as it sought to train our soldiers to resist the very same techniques.

“The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: ‘Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance,’” the Times reports. Nice work, keystone commies.

[In case anyone is wondering whether waterboarding, another of the tactics implemented by the Bush administration, is, in fact, torture, a journalist we admire greatly, Christopher Hitchens, says there’s no doubt. Hitchens, bless him, subjected himself to waterboarding and wrote a piece about it for Vanity Fair.]

Happy July Fourth, Chairman Cheney!

(Editor’s note: This post comes from Favio Snimp, just back from motorcycle racing across the Sahara and never afraid to be a contrarian.)

If you’re likeable, recently deceased and have been on TV a lot, you’ll get rave notices. Tim Russert certainly is getting his air time, right up there in Anna Nicole Smith territory. MSNBC seems to have instantly commissioned “Dirge for Tim for Lone Plaintive Horn” and repeats it often.

What, exactly, did Tim Russert offer to our needy nation? All the grim lamenters, on TV and in newspapers, agree. He was “the real deal.” He was “the ultimate dad.” An unending variety of accolades repeat the same sentiment: Russert was a regular guy who loved his family and remained faithful to the Buffalo Bills.

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I know Bush bashing has become somewhat passé, but try as we may to look toward the future, it’s hard to get past the crimes and ineptitude of this administration and the fact that we’re apparently letting them get away with it.

What set me off recently — besides the admission by former White House flack Scott McClellan that the case for war with Iraq was exaggerated, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report that confirmed that confession — was this excerpt from a new book by retired Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the former U.S. commander in Iraq.

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As I drove north in Grand Teton National Park yesterday morning, I listened as Fish-mon of KMTN played Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon” on the radio in honor of Memorial Day.

The lyrics, written from a soldier’s perspective in Vietnam, convey some powerful imagery of combat and camaraderie:

We came in spastic like tameless horses
We left in plastic as numbered corpses
And we learned fast to travel light
Our arms were heavy but our bellies were tight

… We had no cameras to shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe and played our Doors tapes
And it was dark, so dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers we’d write

As I imagined what it was like for these men hunkered down in the midst of war, I passed the Jackson Hole Airport, where Air Force Two was parked on the runway. How fitting, I thought, that the great warrior Dick Cheney is resting comfortably in Jackson Hole for Memorial Day weekend, while the 150,000 or so U.S. troops he foolishly sent to Iraq are fighting for their lives.

Like many in east Jackson, I had been awakened around 7 a.m. by Cheney’s convoy of Blackhawk helicopters thundering over town. As if the luxury vacation weren’t infuriating enough, the thought of burning aviation fuel to go fishing or play golf was like injecting Napalm into one’s veins.

We all go down together, right?

Just when I think it’s OK to move beyond the outrage over the Bush-Cheney administration, along comes a story like this one from yesterday’s New York Times:
“The Message Machine.”

Sure to win a Pulitzer, the story is a superbly written, thoroughly documented exposé of the propaganda campaign the Pentagon has been waging, quite successfully, through the U.S. media.

Turns out those retired generals and military officers you see on TV, ostensibly as “independent” analysts, have been carefully groomed by the Department of Defense to manipulate public opinion and promote the war. In return, these analysts — many of them lobbyists for the defense industry — receive access to the highest-ranking officials awarding contracts for Iraq.

In essence, you keep our war going, and we’ll make sure you get rich off it.

One of the retired officers who participated in the campaign called it “MindWar.” Another, Gen. James T. Conway, then of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as Iraq began to disintegrate into civil war, “The strategic target remains our population.”

George Orwell couldn’t have envisioned it any better.

How Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al are not in prison is absolutely bewildering. These men are traitors, they are terrorists, and they belong in the gulag they created at Guantánamo.
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Also, from the op-ed page, don’t miss Alexandra Fuller’s essay on the gluttony of the energy industry in Wyoming.