Bush Presidential Library Bans War Crime, Torture Material

This Thursday, former President George W. Bush will dedicate his $500 million, 226,000 square foot Presidential Library at SMU in Dallas. For a man who should be confined to a prison cell for pre-emptively and criminally launching the Iraq War ten years ago, Bush the Younger is living pretty high. Already comforted by millions of Bush family wealth, Bush is paid up to $200,000 per speech, as long as its not in a country that would arrest him for war crimes, and collects an annual pension worth over another $200,000, including travel expenses and mailing privileges. Bush found that criminal war and torture, the two most grievous hallmarks of his presidency, most certainly do pay. His library will air brush out his criminality and mendacity for getting millions killed, injured or made homeless in a senseless bit of empire building in the Middle East; empire building that in fact failed. It will not include the recent bi-partisan report that found it "indisputable" that the Bush Administration, at its highest levels, instituted a world wide regime of long term torture.

Nor will you find a shred of guilt in Bush's pronouncements leading up to the Grand Opening, April 25. “I’m comfortable with what I did... “I’m comfortable with who I am,” Bush offered a NY Times interviewer. “Much of my presidency was defined by things that you didn’t necessarily want to have happened.” Maybe there were some things President Bush didn't want to have happened - Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. But criminal war and torture? They are most appropriately defined by one of Bush's most infamous quotes, disgracefully used in taunting the Iraqi insurgents who were daily blowing up our canon fodder with improvised explosive devices: "Bring it on".

Also published at Glen Ellyn Patch, April 22, 2013