Incompetence or intent? You decide.
The inclusion of the
infamous sixteen words about African Uranium in the 2003 State of the Union Address showed the Bush Administration presents known falsehoods as fact.
The
Downing Street memo described BushCo's decision to invade Iraq long pre-dated the "Saddam must disarm or face consequences" smokescreen.
One of Bush's cronies, "You're doing a heckuva job" Brownie, gets in over his head, much suffering ensues on the Gulf Coast, Bush follows this by nominating his personal lawyer/cheerleader to the Supreme Court, yet
cronyism continues to run rampant.
Last week the LA Times exposed in meticulous, gory detail the story of
Iraqi defector/informant "Curveball" who fed the CIA what Cheney wanted to hear: he claimed knowledge of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons. Sadly, this was untrue, his story was concocted for personal gain, as the CIA was told by it's German counterpart...at the time!
Ahmed Chalabi was paid millions by the Defense Department to provide false information about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, is still under investigation for sharing classified information about code-breaking with Iran, yet just this month
was granted audience by Vice President Tricky Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (who stands to
profit hugely from the Avian Flu scare, by the way), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, and other ranking members of the Bush Administration.
In 1974
Jonathan Schell wrote:
"[T]he distortions in the conduct of the presidency which deformed national politics in the Vietnam years -- the isolation from reality, the rage against political opposition, the hunger for unconstitutional power, the conspiratorial mindedness, the bent for repressive action."
When will we stop crucifying the "bad apples" and start investigating the puppeteers pulling the strings? When will we open our eyes to what the world already knows --
just how dangerous these maniacal incompetents are -- and strip them of their immense power?
The second
article of impeachment against (not-nearly-as-tricky-as-our Tricky Dick) Nixon concerned distortions of presidential power in the name of national security, including the use the CIA and FBI to violate civil rights for political purposes. As Watergate reporter Judith Colburn asks in the piece excerpted below, "The facts may be different, but do the charges themselves sound familiar?" She also connects some dots from Watergate to Iran-Contra to today, showing us where Iraqgate is likely headed: presidential pardons, at best.
John Dean was indeed right. The Bush Administration's excesses are "worse than Watergate," in part because the power that has congealed in presidential hands is much greater than Nixon's imperial presidency held in the early 1970s. As a result, its zealotry, secrecy, deceit, and abuses of power are more akin to the secret bombing of Cambodia or the Iran-Contra affair -- scandals which did not unseat presidents -- than Watergate itself. In both the bombing of Cambodia and Iran-Contragate, a power-hungry White House kept secret foreign policies that it knew neither Congress, the courts, nor the public would be likely to approve -- even though Americans have traditionally been only too eager to give the White House a blank check on national security. No one was indicted for the secret bombing of Cambodia. In Iran-Contragate, eleven top administration officials, including two national security advisers and an undersecretary of state were finally convicted, but the first President George Bush rushed to pardon four of them as well as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (even before he could be indicted). The specter of this resolution of the Libby case recently prompted Democrats and then a group of CIA officials -- to little media attention -- to write the President demanding that he go on record indicating there will be no pardons in the Plame affair. They received no reply.
Read
more.
