Tag: W Bush

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Bush Maintains Opposition to Doubling Aid for Africa

WASHINGTON, June 1 – President Bush refused on Wednesday to budge on his administration’s opposition to doubling aid for Africa, a major proposal on the agenda for a summit meeting of industrial nations next month in Scotland.

The long-simmering dispute could culminate next week when Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who has advocated the plan, visits Washington in advance of the July session, a meeting of the Group of 8. As host of the meeting, Mr. Blair set the agenda, and he argued during his successful campaign for a third term in office that the world’s richest nations had to make a $25 billion increase in support for Africa. But Mr. Bush has been cool to the idea from the start and has resisted making new aid commitments.

Asked Wednesday about the issue, Mr. Bush said, “It doesn’t fit our budgetary process.”

Meeting the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, Mr. Bush also renewed his administration’s declaration, first made by Colin L. Powell when he was secretary of state, that genocide was taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Crisis in DarfurMr. Bush has said almost nothing about Darfur this year, and several human rights groups have criticized him for paying too little attention to the issue. But on Wednesday he noted that the deputy secretary of state, Robert B. Zoellick, was on his way to the region for his second trip.

Congress recently approved $50 million in additional aid for refugees in Sudan, and the United States has committed to providing transportation for Rwandan troops who are going into the area as part of an African Union force that is expected to number about 7,700 troops.

If the word “genocide” was on Mr. Bush’s mind, it may be because he had dinner on Tuesday at Mr. Powell’s home in Virginia. But Mr. Mbeki sat in silence when Mr. Bush used the term, refusing to declare that the Sudanese government was responsible for the killings in the region.

“It might be fine for some in the United States to make all kinds of statements,” he said later. “If you denounce Sudan as genocidal, what next? Don’t you have to arrest the president? The solution doesn’t lie in making radical solutions – not for us in Africa.”

While the Darfur crisis, along with the problem of AIDS, has dominated the administration’s debate about assistance for Africa, Mr. Blair’s call for a vast increase in the amount spent to fight poverty has created considerable tension between Washington and Britain.

In March, Mr. Blair called on rich nations to double aid to Africa while challenging African nations to end the corrupt practices that have undercut so much aid in the past. Pointing to the poverty in Africa and the deaths of millions of children there each year, Mr. Blair called improving the continent “the fundamental moral challenge of our time.”

But he has run into opposition in Germany and Italy, which are both Group of 8 members. Mr. Bush’s opposition, if it holds, could doom the effort at the meeting in Scotland. Mr. Bush has his own agenda for the session, including nuclear proliferation and the situation in Iraq.

In an interview, Mr. Mbeki said his meeting with Mr. Bush had been part of a two-week campaign to speak with the leaders of the eight industrial countries about Mr. Blair’s initiative, and to forge a consensus on how to help Africa. South Africa is the only African nation that will attend the annual summit meeting.

“President Bush responded extremely positively to all of the suggestions for the meeting,” he said, though he stopped short of saying that Mr. Bush had made any new commitments.

Mr. Mbeki is seeking more development help for Africa, a reduction in agriculture subsidies that compete with African exports and relief of the debt of the poorest countries. He urged the wealthier nations to choose their own ways to help and noted that the European Union was considering imposing a new tax to finance the program. “I am absolutely certain President Bush is willing to commit whatever is required,” he said.

But in the United States, such a tax would be antithetical to Mr. Bush’s philosophy, and a tax aimed at foreign assistance is most likely to run into considerable resistance within Mr. Bush’s own party.

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“We’re spending money on clean coal technology. Do you realize we’ve got 250 million years of coal?”
— President George W. Bush – Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005

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There’s no intimacy with these families… nooo…

I’ve been reading a few MSM reports on the descussions between the US President George W. Bush and the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz at his Texas ranch. This photo shot sums up the tight relationship between the two. I wonder if Bush was always this chummy or just given the fact that he has control over Iraq oil, he feels he’s got a little more say in this matter.

This is a President whose response to record oil prices consists of repeating the mantra “Tell Congress to pass my energy bill” year after year, shameful photos like this get taken. Never is democratic reform for Saudi Arabia mentioned in these reports or within his discussions with the House of Saud. We continue to lose thousands of troops in Iraq to death and permanent injury, supposedly to secure that country for democracy. Yet women in Saudi Arabia are far less free than women were in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the press is just as restricted, and Saudi Arabia tolerates far less religious freedom. In almost every way, Saudi Arabia is more intolerant, restrictive, and oppressive than Saddam’s Iraq. Perhaps that has something to do with why most of those who attacked us on 9/11–including Bin Laden–were from Saudi Arabia, and not a single one was a product of Saddam Hussein.

The National Review has a good write up on this which you should read.

“If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.”
~ Lyndon B. Johnson

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It is better to return to the truth than persist in error

A quote from an audio tape released by Usama bin Laden recently directed towards the American people and focused on not only his intentions for the war but his reciprocation of the truths and reasons for the Bush Administrations entrance and continuance for the war in Iraq.

He speaks to the American people more openly than our own administration and this is even more true with the open American censorship of the actual depth of message on his latest audio tape. In his own words Usama shows how the Bush Administration doesn’t actually want to rid the world of al-Qaida, he needs al-Qaida to further the proliferation of American business in the middle east, including the fields of arms, oil production and construction/reconstruction business on going in Iraq by American companies (especially those that contributed politically to our current president’s election.)

Usama begins:

“I say to you [the American people] that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom.

If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example – Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don’t possess defiant spirits like those of the 19”

He implores the American people to wake up to Bush’s own deception:

“But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.”

Speaks about the “expertise” and implied corruption of politicians in America:

“So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretense of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn’t forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region’s presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.”

He talks about how easy it is to bait the current administration into a fight and how there are no winners for this scenario but the government contracted companies that provide munitions, infrastructure and contracts to fight and rebuild the battle zone… makes me think that his next move will be to bait American into Iran. There are no winners and in fact there are only losers, the bigger will be our country because of the financial disadvantage this “war” puts us in for our future generations – example the Russia and al-Qaida fight:

“This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat… So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

He pokes fun at Bush’s incompotence:

“It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, the time when they most needed him.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, we were given three times the period required to execute the operations”

And again the reasons for the war in Iraq are simple from the outside of our country but blurred by our own media and current Administration’s deceptive message:

“But the darkness of the black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.”

The consequences of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“So I say to you, over 15,000 of our people have been killed and tens of thousands injured, while more than a thousand of you have been killed and more than 10,000 injured. And Bush’s hands are stained with the blood of all those killed from both sides, all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business.”

Presented here is the message in full English translation:

Full transcript of bin Ladin’s speech – Nov. 2004 (copy-paste link)
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-98FB-4A1C-B21F-2BC36E87F61F.htm

What do you think… if not knowing that this speech came from Usama bin Laden, would it make you think any different? the same or do you believe this is just a “mad man’s” rhetoric designed to confuse the American public?