Bush’s Olympic event

With the Olympics set to open Aug. 8 in Beijing— demonstrating to the world, more than anything else, the tremendous advances made by 1.3 billion Chinese people after they liberated themselves from colonialist slavery with a 1949 socialist revolution—we were astonished to learn that George Bush was going to lecture the Chinese about human rights on the eve of the opening.

Perhaps “astonished” is an exaggeration. The Bush gang has been so shameless in describing its worldwide war crimes as acts of “liberation” that nothing out of Washington can astonish any thinking human regarding its arrogance and hypocrisy.

Before allowing Bush one word against China, let’s review the Bush gang’s record regarding human rights, freedom of the press and repression. Leave aside for the moment the question of war, aggression, occupation and slaughter, verging on genocide, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Chinese, by the way, have no record of interventions outside their border for the last 25 years, for any reason.

We remind the world of the following key words and names:

Abu Ghraib. Bagram. Guantánamo. The names of these U.S.-run prisons in occupied Iraq, occupied Afghanistan and an illegally occupied piece of Cuba, respectively, have become synonymous with U.S. prison abuse and torture.

Rendition. Prevented from legally using torture on U.S. soil, the Bush administration has globalized it, outsourcing the procedure to client states where committing these atrocities have little chance of getting the torturers into trouble, either now or in the future.

Waterboarding. Alberto Gonzales. A torture technique the Bush attorney general refused to admit is a torture technique.

Raids against immigrant workers. Detention centers as modern concentration camps. Separating parents from their children. Now applied by a government police agency with the acronym ICE against thousands and thousands of immigrants that U.S.-based capitalists were happy to hire at low wages and to prevent from forming labor unions.

The prison-industrial complex. There are 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails.Disproportionately Black, Latin@ and Native, reflecting institutional racism. In total, more imprisoned here than there are in the prisons of China, with its far larger population.

Journalists killed in record numbers in Iraq. Washington doesn’t have to censor the news of the war. The Pentagon simply orders a tank unit to murder the messenger.

Bush will tell lots of lies on the eve of the Olympics. Let’s do our best to expose them.