Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

"Farkhan, a Shiite Muslim, appeared to follow along as the U.S. officers said he had been detained for membership in the Mahdi army, the anti-American Shiite militia.  But he looked totally baffled when they also accused him of working with al-Qaeda in Iraq, the extremist Sunni Muslim group that kills Americans and Shiites.

"'I don't understand how that could be possible,' said a visibly flustered Farkhan, a welder from the southern city of Iskandyah, who denied all the accusations.  `They are Sunni.  I am Shia.'"

The three U.S. servicemen who interviewed Farkhan were not lawyers.  Their assignment was just to judge if he was a security threat to the so-called U.S. coalition.  

With such obviously confusing testimony as well as such questionable analysis, it is not surprising that they said he probably did constitute a security threat.  This threat was not described to the Washington Post correspondent.  They decided to hold Farkhan in the Iraqi prison another six months:

"This proceeding is what has amounted to due process for many of the 100,000 prisoners who have passed through the American-run detention system in Iraq."

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, however, has been far more publicized by the media.  However, 100 times more prisoners have been held in Camp Bucca and other Iraqi prison sites.  Prisoners here have far fewer legal rights and no oversight whatsoever by the U.S.A. court system:

"The Iraqis are not charged with crimes, permitted to see the evidence against them or provided lawyers."

Is this the democracy and freedom George W. Bush declared U.S. service personnel are heroically serving and all too often dying for?

How could any truly ethical U.S. citizens vote to put George W. Bush in power for a second term once the real reason for launching the Iraq War was exposed?

There were no weapons of mass destruction.

But there was a third of the world's oil supply under the soil of Iraq.

Can that reality explain the Iraq War?