Sounds like Bush is cannibalizing his small circle of congenial collaborators.

Reminds me of a story in Christopher Hibbert's great book, The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment. The book details the great cruelty that took place in the British "justice" system over the years.   

The story was in a section where Hibbert was writing about Britain sending prisoners to Australia after the American Revolution. The American's had more or less closed their borders to British riff-raft (except for British immigrants.) I believe the criminals sent south were petty criminals. Britain didn't have television back then so they made the most out of publicly mutilating and killing anyone who was hungry enough to steal more than a loaf of bread.

Hibbert talked about the severe punishments in the penal camps - quoting witnesses seeing blood gushing down a flogged prisoner's back and squashing out his shoes at every step - a dog licking the blood off the triangles and ants carrying away pieces of human flesh - a pair of scourgers relieving each other so that they could inflict one hundred lashes in about an hour without getting exhausted - both bespattered with blood like a couple of butchers.

Hibbert follows this on page 146 with a little story that Bush and his buddy Chalabi made me remember.
[
… convicts committed crimes so that they might be executed; sometimes three men drew lots to decide who should be murdered, who victim and who witness; others went off to almost certain death in the wilderness rather than go on living in the fearful camps.

One of these men was Alexander Pierce whose experience, horrifying as they are, were not exceptional. Pierce and some of the other men who were working in a gang on one of the islands decided to steal a boat and make their escape to the mainland. Their theft was discovered and they made for the barren hills where after a time they became obsessed by thoughts of food. One of them said he was so hungry that he could eat a man. The likes had been done before, he said, and it 'tasted much like pork.'

That night, another member of the gang, who had once acted as flogger at the convict station, had his throat cut. Some of his companions bled him, cut off his head and eviscerated the trunk. They fried his heart and ate it. Four days later another man was killed; and while eating parts of his heart and liver yet another man was struck down from behind by one of his fellow cannibals. Only Pierce and two others were left now, and these three men went on alone. One of them lagged behind the others and fell down exhausted. The leading man, Greenhill, went back and finding him asleep killed him with an axe. Greenhill strapped the axe to his body so that Pierce should not take it from him and rejoined his now remaining companion.

That night after Greenhill had gone to sleep with the axe strapped to his body, Pierce, so he later confessed, began to fear he would be killed in the morning. So he got up and killed Greenhill instead. He cut off an arm and part of a thigh and went on by himself. In the morning he wandered into a flock of sheep and killing a lamb, he ate it raw.

Soon after this he was recaptured. But he escaped again the following year with a man named Cox whose mangled body was found some days later. When Pierce was captured for the second time he was still carrying the bread and pork and the fish with which he had escaped. He had killed Cox, he said, because food from the human body, particularily the thick part of the arm, was 'by far preferable.'