Reminds me of a joke
The joke is:
Q: President Bush, why are you so sure Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?
A: We still have the receipts.
The Bush administration enthusiastically congratulated itself this week for including abuses by Iraqi authorities in its annual report on human rights violations. One State Department official called it proof that "we don't look the other way." But the report did look away - from American involvement in the mistreatment it decried. In the end it was another sad reminder of the heavy price the nation has paid for ignoring fundamental human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo; in the secret cells where the C.I.A. holds its unaccounted-for prisoners; and at home, where President Bush continues to claim the power to hold Americans in jail indefinitely without the right to trial.
The administration's refusal to remedy these abuses - or even acknowledge most of them - leaves the 2004 human rights report heavy with irony and saps its authority. Not only did the report fail to mention that the Iraqi government it criticized was appointed and controlled by the United States, but it also chastised the local security forces for the same kinds of arbitrary detentions, abusive treatment and torture that have been widespread in American military and intelligence prison camps. Indeed, some of the practices the report labeled as torture when employed by foreign governments were approved at one point for American detention centers by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
