Bush confesses....

Bush has finally admitted to the existence of CIA secret prisons abroad, after 5 years of silence. According to him, these detention centers have deterred possible attacks on US soil. Please! The intelligence we have gathered from having these detention centers is so inconsequential that most of our efforts to extract better and more sophisticated intelligence are currently being diverted by overstepping our timeline in Iraq. After Bush leaves office, we will be left with no diplomatic influence in the world, a poor and battered military, no significant breakthroughs in intelligence gathering and so indebted that our intelligence infrastructure will resemble Russia’s in the 1990’s. We have wasted precious resources with the war in Iraq, our counterparts fighting the war on terror seem to be in the right track when it comes to intelligence gathering, like Britain. Wake up Bush, let’s stop fighting this useless war and concentrate all of our brains and pockets finding better intelligence solutions to fighting terrorism, because guess what? Acts of terror are here to stay.

On torture

Last week we learned in dismay that two American soldiers had been kidnapped by the insurgency at a security checkpoint in Iraq. It is the first time the insurgency has succeeded in kidnapping American troops. It is a scary situation. Why? As this war drags on, so does our military and ideological confidence (this is as much a military as an ideological war). Since this administration has been accused of torture, and as we continue to knock on doors of countries were it is legal and acceptable (outsourcing torture), we have exacerbated this issue to the point of no return.

Before we were accused of torturing enemy combatants, we could protest the abuse of our soldiers and contractors in captivity and be supported by our allies. Unfortunately, this is not the case today. Thanks to the Bush-Cheney torture policy, our two soldiers have no considerable protection and we have no justification to evoke the Geneva Convention, after it has been chewed up by this administration. This is why torture is always wrong, no matter the circumstances. Generations of American troops have cemented the idea that torture was unthinkable. No longer. This is just one of the many things gone wrong on this war.