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!

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 town gears up for the Jackson Hole Film Festival, tonight there will be a showing of an off-festival movie that revs the debate over snowmobiles into a full-throttle indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s approach to government.

“A Snowmobile for George” is the story of California filmmaker Todd Darling’s ride into the exhaust cloud of deregulation. Following his own curiosity after buying a sled, Darling races from the controversy over allowing snowmobiles in Yellowstone to runaway coal-bed methane drilling in the Powder River Basin to a hideous die-off of salmon on the Klamath River.

The 96-minute film will screen at 6:30 p.m. at the Jackson campus of Teton Science Schools, off Highway 22. The event is being sponsored by the Western Organization of Research Councils, an association that represents ranchers and other landowners on issues of water, air and soil quality. On hand will be George Smith, a cowboy poet from Sheridan.

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.

Five years ago today the bombs started dropping on Baghdad as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney embarked on our $2 trillion disaster.

The toll since then: 3,990 U.S. soldiers dead, 29,395 wounded, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqis dead,  5 million refugees, and untold thousands of U.S. veterans suffering from psychiatric and other disabilities.

The scope of this disaster is still lost on those responsible, but here in Jackson Hole, we remember. Community activists and visiting guests have organized a vigil beginning around 5:30 p.m. today on the Town Square.

According to a posting on the Web site 5 Years Too Many, the event will include a demonstration against the war and candlelight vigil in support of the troops. The goal is “remembering those lives forever affected” by the conflict.

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