Bush NOT YET Indicted For Monstruous Crimes In Iraq, BUT US Senate Finally Repeals Iraq Invasion Authorization. Vatican In Turn Repudiates Its Own Invasion Authorization, 5 Centuries Later, A Part Of US Law. Trump Indicted For Hushing.

Abstract: The US Senate implicitly recognized, on March 29, 2023, 20 years too late, that authorizing the invasion of Iraq was a crime, and repealed it. However, Bush Junior and his accomplices, who lied extensively to get that Senatorial authorization, and ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people, are NOT yet indicted. The damage the Bush gang inflicted on the Middle East and the concept of democracy has been historical, as they not only invaded Iraq illegally, but they also dismantled the Iraqi government, army, adminstration, police  and rule of law, all of which are war crimes which destroyed much of civilization in Iraq [1]. But Trump is indicted for hushing a sex claim by a sex entertainer.

Perhaps encouraged by the US Senate’s bold recognition of error, nearly 500 years after papal decrees authorized Europe’s expropriation of the Natives all over the world, the Vatican repudiated those three decrees on Thursday, March 30, 2023, saying the “Doctrine of Discovery” that was used to justify snuffing out Indigenous people’s culture and livelihoods is not part of the Catholic faith. The Doctrine Of Discovery also helped to kill everybody non-white.

The Vatican’s infamous decrees were made into US law in 1823. US law recognized that when a European, or American white, discovered some land or gold, it was his, and the Natives could go to hell.

Much of US racism originated as simple greed, no holds barred. White Anglo Saxon judges in America, in the late seventeenth century decided that non-white color of the skin demonstrated that the bearer of said colored skin was an alien, and thus couldn’t own property. When is “American” Justice going to recognize that fundamental crime? It would help to condemn the criminals who organized the invasion of Iraq mostly for making fracking profitable in the USA…

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Bush attacks Bagdhad, after enormous lies: not a crime, not even a war crime, say Democrat prosecutors, nothing to see, and Biden approved it, anyway.

Trump Derangement Syndrome Alive And Well:

Trump belongs to the establishment, but always hated it (for having been discriminated against while young, as a non-member of the Manhattan elite, the way his family saw it). That made him popular, and led him to embrace a number of policies… which Biden pursued with even more gusto (waking up to China, re-industrializing, strong defense, leading Europe by the nose, same immigration policy, etc.).

The establishment also discovered that Trump bashing was an excellent distraction to focus away from issues which could threaten the establishment.

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Trump was indicted by a partisan “Grand Jury” for having made a NDA, a Non Disclosure Agreement with an entertainer, and claiming that this NDA interfered with US elections. NDA are an old tradition, completely legal, and are often described as “hush money”. Whatever it is, an NDA is completely routine, and generally not a crime. I personally know very well several people with NDAs. one can get into a NDA precisely because one has done nothing wrong, but precisely because another party has done something wrong, and, after compensating for the damage they caused get in exchange a promise not to disclose. 

This is a seven-year-old case that federal prosecutors of the Biden administration declined to act on.

Democrats have “done the unthinkable,” Trump said, “indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.”… while Trump is officially running for president… and leading the opposition to Biden.

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Prosecuting and persecuting the main opponents for sex and, or corruption is a tradition of non-democracies. Example of Malaysia:

In Malaysia the former Deputy PM was prosecuted for “sodomy”, a serious crime in this Muslim majority country. The Anwar Ibrahim sodomy trials were an entertaining circus, but also a monstrous attack against human rights. The first trial was held in 1998, and resulted in former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim being convicted, and given a nine-year prison sentence. Never mind that he had five daughters and a son… 

In 2008, as Anwar was making a political comeback. The  police claimed that Anwar had forcibly sodomized a 24-year-old man. When it was pointed out that a 61-year-old man is unlikely to physically overpower such a young opponent, the complaint was changed to “homosexual conduct by persuasion”. Sodomy, even if consensual, is punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment and whipping under Section 377B of the Malaysian Penal Code. 

The Federal Court five judges then condemned the 67 year old main opponent to five years in jail for sodomy. Then for good measure, his daughter, a MP, was arrested for talking against the conviction.

The king pardoned Anwar in 2018.

Anwar bin Ibrahim has served as the 10th Prime Minister of Malaysia since November 2022.

However, 

 

SOME US PRESIDENTS, IN THE LAST CENTURY, HAVE COMMITTED SERIOUS CRIMES. The worst cases were:

Banana Republic US presidents working for United Fruits and its ilk. As decried by USMC general Smedley Butler: “War is a racket”.

In War is a Racket, Butler wrote: “In the World War [One] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War….How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?….The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? …Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds…For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.” 

Butler died at the age of 59 in 1940.One can presume that all the presidents he served under, including FDR, were war criminals engaging in the Banana Republics enforcement that Butler described. Butler was the most decorated Marine in US history.

Even before 1931, Butler spoke out against Fascism and for Italy’s tyrant Benito Mussolini. Butler was punished for telling the truth about Mussolini, and avoided court-martial by accepting a reprimand. Because of his rank, he wrote his own reprimand.

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PRESIDENT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, FDR: was a war criminal for not intervening against the fascist regimes in a timely manner, and, instead, weaponizing them: FDR was fully informed, but he preferred to dislike the French and aspire to grab their empire rather than to do anything against the Nazis (as the French implored him to do as early as 1933). At the same time, FDR knew war was coming, as he ordered the building of 24 large “fleet” aircraft carriers as early as 1933, a truly enormous number, larger than all other world navies put together. So the French government persuaded FDR that war was coming, and FDR decided to make an enormous profit out of it by taking out Europe, grabbing all its empires, and establishing a post world war world led by the USA. That was an enormously cynical approach, as critters such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Hirohito became as many knives to stab the existing world order with.

 

It goes without saying that this view of history is not admitted by the establishment which FDR established. However it is partly used by tyrants Putin and Xi, and it works, because it is fundamentally correct. 

 

If he had been driven by morality in the most humane sense, FDR should have intervened, or at least stop supporting, or put an end to the collaboration of US businesses with the Soviet Union (oil, FDI and other business development, massive war support, gift of half of Europe at Yalta), Japan (oil), Mussolini (oil and all sorts of FDI), Nazi Germany (massive FDI, oil, failure to honor military guarantees to France), and Franco (oil, massive FDI, US credit). USSR

FDR bait and switch with fascism is an enormous story hiding in plain sight. 

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Truman: no obvious war crime. Nuclear bombs saved lives. Truman was no friend of Stalin, differently from FDR, who also befriended Saudi founder and super hero Ibn Saud in his dying days.

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PRESIDENT EISENHOWER Pursued FDR’s Policies: Stalin friendly, Einsehower had already written to Stalin during WW2 to convey his love, or at least that he, Eisenhower, would not let Patton get to Berlin before the Soviets did. This outrageous meddling of an active US general into world politics is (wrongly) ignored. Initially Eisenhower derided the Democrats’ obsession with Iranian oil, but after a few months in the presidency, he agreed with them.

In March 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles directed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was headed by his younger brother lawyer Allen Dulles, to draft plans to overthrow Iranian PM Mossadegh. The two Dulles had represented around a thousand Nazi companies when the Reich was great and very profitable. 

The anti-Iranian plan was enacted by exciting and using the ayatollahs against Mossadegh. That was certainly a war of aggression which Iran has to live with, even seventy years later: Eisenhower and the Dulles launched a thousand ayatollahs. 

. In 1956, as Kruschev (USSR strongman who had been top commander at Stalingrad, and top Stalin henchman) threatened to nuke London and Paris, and invaded Hungary, killing 40,000, Ike organized a UN vote condemning France, Israel and the UK.

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JFK: no obvious crimes. The invasion of Cuba had been organized by the CIA under Ike. When it faltered, JFK immediately backed off. Many believed that abortion of invasion resulted in JFK’s assassination as many powerful interests in the US were exasperated by JFK and his brother Bobby. JFK had been involved in Vietnam, but the US involvement there started under FDR as an anti-French maneuver…

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Nixon: However exasperating and keen to bomb people at Christmas, to foster negotiations, Nixon actually finished the war with North Vietnam and opened the US to Mao. So no major war crime.

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Ford: No war crime.

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Carter: The war crime was to launch a civil war in Afghanistan by exciting Muslim Fundamentalists. A repeat of what had been done by the CIA and Einsenhower against Iran in the 1950s. .

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Reagan: invaded Grenada, Panama, chasing dictators: not really a crime it turned out in the fullness of time. However, Iran-Contra was definitely a serious crime… None of the participants could remember anything, though, so the prosecution faded away… 

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Bush Senior: His administration may have organized a bait and switch with Saddam Hussein, who was dumb enough to fall into it. Not a war crime, though.

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Clinton: Blockade of Iraq went too far, children died from lack of medications.

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Bush Junior: The invasion of Iraq under false pretense was definitely a major war crime.

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Obama: Followed the French in getting rid of mass murdering Libyan dictator, definitely absolutely not a war crime: I advocated for a military intervention stridently. BHL then followed me, then Sarkozy, etc. Another intervention, this time against Assad in Syria for using nerve gas, killing thousands of civilians was aborted by Obama when the French pilots were already in their planes. The result was that Putin intervened to save mass murderer Assad. So Obama was a big chicken, and that was his main crime, arguably, I must admit, even worse than a war crime. 

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Trump: No war crime. Sent real weapons to Ukraine, including Javelins.

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Biden: Dropped the ball in Afghanistan, condemning more than twenty million females to servitude. Not a war crime, and not abominable like FDR’s Machiavelian weaponization of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s… Behaved well in Ukraine after initial confusion.

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It’s important to punish the crimes of politicians. But first one has to define what criminality is. Considering the state of US society, focusing on the main political opponent’s payment to a sex entertainer with a big loud mouth is beyond absurd: it means that this sort of absurd focus on non-problems is the desired effect, or, worse, that this is actually an an atempt to intefere in the next presidential election. Then Nancy Pelosi, in case we don’t get the outrage, grandly declared that Trump was free to “prove his innocence“. One can thus verify that Nancy, daughter of a Congressman and mayor, didn’t go to law school, just debutante school. Yes, we are free to try to prove we should be free. But, the way things are going, not for long…

If a US president can be hounded that bad, what of common folks?

Patrice Ayme

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[1] That the Iraq invasion by Bush in 2003 was fundamentally initially UN-illegal, and now, as it has turned out in 2023, US illegal, was the fundamental flaw which condemned the attempt to turn Iraq into something better, and a symbol of progressing democracy. “Fatal decisions” by the occupying Bush forces made Iraq into a bush war, but not only:

In the years since, many western writers and journalists have argued that Bremer’s first two fatal decisions – the disbanding of the Iraqi army and all security apparatuses, and the banning of members of the Ba’ath party from public jobs, both of which left hundreds of thousands of men without pension or salary – helped instigate the insurgency that would consume the country. These western pontificators lamented the stupidity of Bush and the neocons. If only, they said, they had done their homework and planned for the post-invasion Iraq, things could have been so different. But the truth is that the occupation was bound to collapse and fail, because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to instantly become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.

The war that was based on a lie not only destroyed Iraq and unleashed a sectarian war that would engulf the region, but it permanently crippled democracy in the Middle East. So, democracy was another victim of the criminally incompetent administration. “You want democracy? Didn’t you see what democracy did to Iraq?” became the repeated refrain of dictators and potentates throughout the region.

Humanism Is Progressivism, And That Means Better Tech Like AI… Under New Laws!

The Catastrophe Theory Of Tech Is As Old As Humanity. Artifical Intelligence Must Be Developed..

Many of the creators and little helpers of AI, Artificail Intelligence, are keen to prophetize its enormous dangers in apocalyptic tones. See in the NYT David Wallace-Wells in  A.I. Is Being Built by People Who Think It Might Destroy Us (March 27, 2023)

AI is a new tech, like once the knife was a new tech. Yes, AI can be used to kill, but it can also save lives. Overall, AI, like the knife, augments human power. Neither the knife nor AI were born as moral agents. They were born as power agents. And that is good because we need to augment our power. A reason is that’s what our ancestors have done for 100 million years, so progressing with higher tech and greater intelligence and culture is intrinsically human. Humanism means progressivism, and that means, in the fullness of time, more powerful tech. 

But also, if we don’t push forward with better and more powerful tech, perhaps 99% of humanity has got to go: even returning to Middle Age living standards with Middle Age tech is not an option anymore. Roman mines could only be used again, 19 centuries later with new tech which enabled miners to excavate deeper. 

Indeed, technological exhaustion is what happened to Roman civilization: once the good mines were exploited, the Romans ran out of metals, and this had consequences all over the Roman economy and military. Ultimately up to 90% of the population died in many parts of the empire. The Franks restarted civilization a millennium later with new mines (where the Romans had not been) and more powerful tech (such as hydraulic hammers).

We have seen this sort of hysteria before: when exiled engineering professor Denis Papin built the first steam engine and powered a boat with it, the boat moved one hundred kilometers down a river, and was destroyed by monks as a devilish creation. This unfortunate event slowed down the adoption of steam tech by a generation and made a lesser mind, Watt, the officially, anglosaxon approved, fake originator of the steam engine. In 1974, Paul Berg from Stanford, who was going to finish a dangerous recombinant DNA experiment, called to order by his colleagues, in turn called for a moratorium in what he nearly did, and stiffer guidelines were elaborated in conveniently idyllic Asilomar the yeat after.

AI is a new tech, like once the knife was a new tech. Yes, AI, like a knife, can be used to kill, but it can also save lives. Overall, AI, like the knife, augments human power. And that is good because we need to augment our power. Especially now that our present tech is completely unsustainable, particularly in light of having eight billion people around: so we need better tech. Another reason is that progress is what our ancestors have done for 100 million years, and tech progress particularly so in the last three million years, so progressing with higher tech and greater intelligence and culture is intrinsically human. Humanism means progressivism, and that means, in the fullness of time, more powerful tech. 

But also, if we don’t push forward with better and more powerful tech, perhaps 99% of humanity has got to go: even returning to Middle Age living standards with Middle Age tech is not an option. 

This sort of technological gap between the tech which was needed and the actual technological regression that was occuring is what doomed Roman civilization: once the good mines were exhausted, with the tech they had, the Romans ran out of metals, and this had consequences all over the Roman engineering, society, economy and military, launching an ever greater to fascist order as industry entered regression. Ultimately all of Roman socioeconomy imploded in an avalanche of consequences and up to 90% of the population died in many parts of the empire. The Franks restarted civilization a millennium later with new mines (in Eastern Europe, where the Romans had not been) and by developing more powerful tech (such as hydraulic hammers). 

AI doesn’t have a mind of its own: its operators will have to be corralled legislatively, and the sooner, the better. 

AI is just one more potentially destructive or potentially constructive tech around. We need to focus on progress, not regression.

Just as operators of CO2 machines and industry, and those with access to WMDs, etc. Speaking of that, WMDs, operated by AI or not, are the worst problem. The strategic arm of the US department of defense is deliberately equipped with obsolete tech disconnected from the Internet to prevent penetration by hostile AI. So the worry about hostile AI playing around with nukes is nothing new, it surfaced many generations of AI ago, in all too real incidents, for example when a rogue training tape simulated a massive nuclear attack. And the answer is NOT to do away with AI, but to do away with nukes except a few to do away with potential hostile bolides of extra terrestrial origin detected too late for other deflecting tech…

AI doesn’t have a mind of its own: its operators will have to be corralled legislatively, and the sooner, the better. 

AI is just one more potentially destructive or potentially constructive tech around. We need to focus on progress, not regression.

Just as operators of CO2 machines and industry, and those with access to WMDs, etc. Speaking of that, WMDs, operated by AI or not, are the worst problem.

Very beautiful French Riviera, with Monaco and Cap Martin in 2022. Yes much of that beauty has to do with tech, namely gigantic buildings and mighty ships. In the Middle Ages, brand new Notre Dame de Paris was the world’s tallest building (bigger and taller cathedrals were soon built). But Monaco has now many much taller buildings. So tech can have an authentic beauty, besides the comfort it can bring.

We are Homo Technicus, even more than Homo Faber. (I will explain this another day…)      

AI is the solution to Big Data… And, overall, the solution to stupidity. Let it rock and roll…

Patrice Ayme