While it wasn’t her point, Nell’s excellent post earlier this week (”Prepare to Dare or Prepare to Despair“) reminds me that I’ve been less energetic than I should have been in supporting and discussing Dennis Kucinich’s H.Res. 1258 resolution calling for George Bush’s impeachment. The lengthy resolution presents 35 articles of impeachment, leading with Bush’s propaganda campaign for the Iraq war:

Thirty-four years ago last week, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States after he was proved to have used agencies of the US government to spy on his domestic political enemies, among other crimes.
Barely a month later, on Sept 4, Gerald Ford, his Vice President. pardoned Nixon for any and all crimes he might have committed as president, calling the situation “a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it.”

Sound familiar?

Nixon, who had been the first president to claim executive powers well beyond the Constitutional limitations put on the office by the Founding Fathers and the first to deliberately and with malice betray that Constitution in ways that wounded the nation so deeply that the effects are still being felt 30 years later, never saw a trial, never saw a minute in jail, never – to the disgust of the country he had treated like a dictator treats a banana republic – never saw a single consequence for criminal actions taken against all of us except the loss of the office he had violated repeatedly, not only without remorse but arrogantly insisting to the end that he had done nothing wrong.

Present VP Richard Cheney began his career in govt under Nixon, first as Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant at the OEO, then as Gerald Ford’s chief-of-staff after Nixon resigned and Ford became president. He has said that he developed the concept of the “unitary presidency”, in which he claims monarchical powers for the executive, in response to what he considered the “hounding” of Nixon from office.

Barely 12 years after Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s blanket pardon, President Ronald Reagan proceeded to appoint a rump government within the White House whose job it was to break laws and evade Congressional legislation and oversight – its Constitutional prerogative. In what came to be known as the Iran/Contra Affair, laws that were properly passed under the Constitution by the Congress of the United States were blatantly and recklessly violated in an arms-for-hostages deal that Reagan himself had publicly forbidden but privately ordered DefSec Casper Weinberger to carry out.

In all, 14 Reagan Administration officials were charged with crimes and 11 were convicted, including Weinberger and Ollie North. NOT ONE SAW A DAY OF JAIL TIME. North’s and John Poindexter’s convictions were overturned on technical grounds, and Federal prosecutors refused to try them again, possibly because they were aware that in the waning days of his administration, President George HW Bush was going to pardon them all, unconditionally.

And so not once, but twice, American presidential administrations have defamed and trampled on some of the most serious and solemn provisions of the Constitution of the United States WITHOUT LEGAL CONSEQUENCES OF ANY KIND FOR ANYONE INVOLVED. But most especially there was no action whatever taken against those at the top levels of govt who had ordered those violations: the president and the vice president.

Is it any wonder that the Bush Administration felt free to do whatever it wished, to violate US law, the Constitution, and Congressional orders lawfully given? To do its business entirely in secret, refusing even to let the Congress itself know what it was doing? The lesson they had learned and learned well was that a president could ignore laws, the Constitution, Congress, the judicial branch, and the people themselves WITHOUT FEAR THAT THEY WOULD EVER HAVE TO PAY A PRICE FOR THEIR CRIMES.

But the real tragedy is not in the lessons the criminals learned but in the lessons we, the people, have learned. Nixon, Iran/Contra, and now George W Bush, have taught us that we have no protection from runaway govt. That our politicians can violate the laws with impunity. That powerful men are allowed to do in the US as they have done everywhere else – betray the law, betray the people, betray their trust, lie, steal, even kill – and they will never have to pay the price for their illegal, unethical, immoral acts. That – and this is the worst consequence of all – the promise of America that has been held out as an example to generations of men and women longing to escape the tyranny of the rich and the powerful, that that promise is dead. That it is at best meaningless lip service. That the rich and powerful can get away with anything, and that our so-called “equality” is a sham.

Yet as bad as all that is, we have not yet hit bottom. If we return to the example of the Catholic Church in the previous post, we know that this is but the beginning of an unrelenting and inevitable process of decay if we insist on imitating their “move on”, “get past it” policy of denial and avoidance.

The history of the GC’s tells us that for as long as we avoid, so will the decay advance, even for 1000 years. The more recent history of the modern conservative movement tells us that modcon True Believers feel their sense of entitlement like a perpetual itch. They will not quit, they will not stop trying to get – by hook or, more likely, by crook – what they believe they are owed: power over the rest of us. And if they face no consequences for their actions, consequences serious enough to deter them from doing it all again the first chance they get, Church history says that we have a long way down yet and long before our thousand years are up, we will no longer be living in even the semblance of a democratic equality. The rich and powerful will run everything, the whole society will be as corrupt as the Bush/Cheney Regime, and the American Dream of freedom and equality for all will have become a nightmare of modern feudalism.

At this point, you are the only ones who can prevent this from happening. Please reconsider your decisions. For all our sakes. For the sake of our democracy. For the sake of our future.

Of all the world’s ultraconservative institutions, including empires and monarchies, arguably the longest-lived and least flexible of them is the Catholic Church. For some 2000 years, for 3/4 of which it was the single most powerful body in the Western world, forcing kings and empires to obey its dictates, it has survived virtually intact even as its enemies have fallen by the historical wayside. Empires are gone, kings dethroned, feudalism a bygone historical oddity but the Church remains, essentially unchanged, doctrinally at least, from the Church as it was in the very beginning. If there is a conservative success story – and there are very few – it must be the Catholic Church’s survival through ages of chaos and massive change.

We may ask, how did they do it? And at what price? The answers to those questions provide the modern world with a cautionary tale for, yes, it survived, but it did so at the cost of its integrity, its influence, most of its power, and the lives of millions of innocent people, most of them non-Catholic. As for the “how?” I can answer that in a single phrase: through evasion and a stout refusal to address risky realities. In other words, it ran like a rabbit.

~~~~~~~

The Church in Crisis: A History of the General Councils, 325-1870 by Catholic historian Monsignor Philip Hughes is a popular summarization of the background and actions of over 1500 years worth of General Councils of the Catholic Church. “General Councils”, as opposed to local or regional councils, are periodic gatherings of the entire Church structure – archbishops, bishops, cardinals, monks, prelates – the entire gamut of the hierarchy from every country on the globe. They meet at irregular intervals and only when they are called to meet to resolve weighty issues that involve the entire Church, usually theological issues, and while they’re at it they promulgate and vote on a list of canons (laws that regulate the actions of Church members much the same way that civil laws regulate the actions of citizens).

There are two things we can say about every GC from the first, the council of Nicaea in 325, to the Council of Trent 1200 years later.

1. They were rubber stamps, every single one of them. Each of them – and there were 18 – met with orders from the pope laying out what they were to do and how they were to decide each question of canon law and theological dispute already in their hands. In no case, whatever blustering some did, whatever objections some loudly proclaimed, did any of the legal GC’s disobey those instructions. They might change a little wording here and there in order to assert their limited power, but they never materially altered what Authority told them to do. (They reminded me of the Democrats bragging about how they had won “major concessions” from Bush over the FISA bill when the “compromises” they had “won” amounted to little more than the bishops’ changing of an insignificant word in a papal canon to prove they had done something.)
2. They consistently ducked every serious issue of theology or clerical behavior except heresy. While they came down like a ton of bricks on anyone who deviated even slightly from papally-approved dogma, every other issue that had raised its ugly head since the last GC was invoked was swept swiftly under the carpet, usually on the orders of a pope who feared retribution from either a political source (the wars between the popes and various kings and emperors are infamous) or the laity itself. Delay, denial, and disinterest were every pope’s best weapons when it came to avoiding confrontation, and they weren’t shy about using them.

The classic example of papal and episcopal duck-and-cover is probably the issue that finally brought about rebellion in 1517 when Martin Luther broke away from the Church and began the Protestant Reformation. It will be a familiar one to those following the ins-and-outs of the Bush GOP as it has run amok the last 8 years.

Corruption.

As early as the Council of Ephesus in 431, the issue of bribery was already simmering behind the scenes. In a theological confrontation between two antagionists, a pope-approved Cyril and a pope-disapproved “heretic” named Nestorius, Cyril – who was a pretty rich prelate – decided to bend the issue a bit by spreading some of his wealth around. Hughes admiringly quotes a French historian, Msgr Pierre Batiffol, “At the court every man had his price, and Cyril did not stop to count the price.” Hughes then gives us a sense of what that meant.

We have a list of the valuable presents that flowed in, carpets (of various sizes), furnishings, valuable silks, jewels, ivory chairs, ostriches, and good plain golden coin. Of this last, one group of fifteen high personages “touched” between them the equivalent of nearly a million dollars.

Cyril won the argument when those who got the goodies voted for his side. He bought the outcome, plain and simple, the same way a Mafia don might have bought the verdict of a jury.

Barack Obama backs Pelosi’s decision to take impeachment “off the table” for a slightly different reason (although we have to assume that Nancy’s reason carries a lot of weight with him). He is looking forward to his administration having massive problems to deal with in the wake of the worst presidency in American history. The last thing he wants to do is stir up partisan resentment that will make reforms more difficult (if not impossible) by alienating Republicans who might be disposed to work with him. One can certainly make a good argument that the modern conservative movement is so filled with heterodoxical extremists and unbending ideologues that any truly bi-partisan relationship is nothing but an unrealistic dream, but even if one accepts his position, there is a far deeper problem he’s ducking: the effect on the country.

This past June in The Nation, Corey Robin, in an essay on the way the Right has always followed and/or copied the Left, made the point that in the 1960′s Goldwater saw that conservatives, who were taking a beating as corrupt, mindless, corporate puppets had to prove that they had a “credo” of strict values that they lived by. To some extent, the late “values movement” came out of that perception.

Making privilege palatable to the democratic masses is a permanent project for conservatives, but each generation must tailor it to the contours of its times. In 1960, Goldwater’s challenge was set out in his book’s title: to show that conservatives had a conscience. Not a heart–he lambasted Eisenhower and Nixon for trying to prove that they were compassionate–or a brain, which liberals from John Stuart Mill to Lionel Trilling had doubted. Political movements often have to show that they can win, that their cause is just and their leaders are savvy, but rarely must they prove that theirs is a march of inner lights. Goldwater thought otherwise: to attract new voters and rally the faithful, conservatism had to establish its idealism and integrity, its absolute independence from the beck and call of wealth, from privilege and materialism–reality itself. If they were to change reality, conservatives would have to divorce themselves, at least in their self-understanding, from reality.

***

Goldwater learned from the New Deal. During the Gilded Age, conservatives had opposed unions and government regulation by invoking workers’ freedom to contract with their employer. Liberals countered that this freedom was illusory: workers lacked the means to contract as they wished; real freedom required material means. Goldwater agreed, only he turned that argument against the New Deal: high taxes robbed workers of their wages, rendering them less free and less able to be free. Channeling John Dewey, he asked, “How can a man be truly free if he is denied the means to exercise freedom?”

FDR claimed that conservatives cared more about money than men. Goldwater said the same about liberals. Focusing on welfare and wages, he charged, they “look only at the material side of man’s nature” and “subordinate all other considerations to man’s material well being.” Conservatives took in “the whole man,” making his “spiritual nature” the “primary concern” of politics and putting “material things in their proper place.”

This romantic howl against the economism of the New Deal–similar to that of the New Left–was not a protest against politics or government; Goldwater was no libertarian. It was an attempt to elevate politics and government, to direct public discussion toward ends more noble and glorious than the management of creature comforts and material well-being.

It was all a scam, of course, an illusion they were selling the country, but it worked. Goldwater used an imaginary victimhood of conservatives as the basis of a cry for justice and “balance” that struck a chord with Americans who thought of themselves, too, as victims. Modern conservatism began as a sort of Victims’ Support Group. Robin writes, “Conservatives have asked us not to obey them but to feel sorry for them–or to obey them because we feel sorry for them.”

Reformers and radicals must convince the subordinated and disenfranchised that they have rights and power. Conservatives are different. They are aggrieved and entitled–aggrieved because entitled–and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection.

But we need to understand why it took “aggrieved” conservatives 30 years to conceive of a solution to FDR, and 30 more years to put it into victorious operation. The answer is actually fairly simple. Roosevelt didn’t just rout the conservative movement of his time, he resolved all the issues of its enemies and absorbed them into his coalition, an alliance that lasted 60 years and could have lasted longer if the Democrats who followed him hadn’t become so lazy and complacent.

What Pelosi and Obama (and the rest of the DLC-style leadership) is proposing to do is skip over this step and leave the hatred, anger, resentment, and sense of massive injustices done by the Bush/Cheney Gang to fester inside the body politic for the indefinite future. They can say that they’re “moving on” but what they’re actually doing is moving past – with their eyes shut – hoping the whole thing will just go away.

Unfortunately, history shows us that as a policy of providing for future peace and stability, you couldn’t make a worse choice.

(to be cont’d)

The Associated Press says Kucinich’s Impeachment Articles will get a hearing. Oh, not to impeach Bush, of course. That’s “off the table” (Nancy Pelosi TM). No, this is about politics. It seems that when the DLC Democrats aren’t being Bush, they’re busy living up to the GOP’s unflattering characterizations of them as opportunistic scoundrels who care less about the country than their own re-elections.

This time, the panel will open hearings, possibly as soon as next week. But House Democratic leaders said the proceedings would not be about Bush’s impeachment, a first step in the Constitution’s process of a removing a president from office.

 

Instead, the panel will conduct an election-year review — possibly televised — of anything Democrats consider to be Bush’s abuse of power. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, is likely to testify. So will several scholars and administration critics, Democrats said.

 

 

(emphasis added)

This is…hard to describe. Pathetic? Absurd?

August 27, 1945

Dateline: Berlin

 

This week the Allied Forces decided not to try their prisoner, Adolf Hitler, because, as General Patton put it this morning, “He’s been through enough and anyway he’s lost the war. It’s time to move on. Enough of this crying and moaning. We need to look to the future, not the past.”

 

Instead, they are going to present a series of films about where Hitler went wrong and present testimony to prove to the world that he’s not a Nice Guy. “If we had been in charge of Germany,” said US Senator Jay Rockefeller, “we would have done a better job. We would have abused the German Constitution less than he did, for one thing. And we would have made it all legal retroactively. If he had done that, there wouldn’t even have been talk about a trial.”

 

The Committee in Charge of Whitewashing Dictators is expected to hear testimony from several German generals who will swear that none of this was Hitler’s fault, and a number of American businessmen (Preston Bush is one) who have complaints about non-payment by Hitler’s government for military supplies used against our soldiers.

 

“A deal is a deal,” Bush spokesman Chris Wallace said. “OK, the stuff was used against American troops but that’s not our fault. Who could have predicted an outcome like that? Nobody. We sold those armaments in good faith and we expect Adolf to keep his word and pony up.”

 

RCA Radio has already said it will refuse to carry the hearings live because “nobody cares any more. It’s old news. We need to think of the future and move on past all this quibbling. We have business to do with the Germans.”

Makes about as much sense, doesn’t it?

Concerned that the 35 articles of impeachment he introduced a month ago might be too much for members of the House Judiciary Committee to handle all at once, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) simplified things Thursday.

The former Democratic presidential candidate introduced a single article to impeach President Bush, accusing him of deceiving Congress to convince lawmakers to authorize his invasion of Iraq more than five years ago.

That wasn’t the best news, tho. The best news is that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated she might actually allow the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on it. This is either a distinct 180-degree turnaround or else she’s lying. Either is possible but the latter is more likely.

Still, ONE article isn’t too much for the average House member to handle? Is it?

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”

The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”

Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

None of which stopped Bush and Cheney. A former CIA op has filed suit in Federal court to release documents proving that he was fired by the Administration when he wouldn’t go along with their rationale for yet another pre-emptive war.

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.

***

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.

***

“On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,” Krieger said in an interview.
(emphasis added)

This is precisely the pattern the White House followed while it was attaemptingn to gin up an unnecessary war in Iraq. Below the radar, Cheney has been conducting a private war against Iran aimed apparently at getting them to retaliate so he’ll have an excuse to invade. Hersh reported that Fallon wasn’t asked to leave because he disagreed but because he insisted on being informed of what Cheney was doing in Fallon’s territory. You don’t demand accountability or information from the most secretive and arrogant VP of all time.

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility.

***

[T]he Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

The unnamed CIA op suffered the same fate if more ignominiously than Fallon.

In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to

sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program, Krieger said.

The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were “thwarted by CIA employees,” according to court papers. Later he was told to “remove himself from any further handling” of the informant, the documents say.

Most of this has flown by unnoticed while our media concentrated on Obama’s lapel pin and John Edwards’ hair. So, apparently, has this little tidbit, which hasn’t exactly been making the night news: there’s a bill encouraging the US to blockade Iran which newsrackblog‘s Thomas Nephew, who discovered this, likens to “waving a red cape in front of a bull in a china shop.”

True, the resolution affirms that nothing in it shall be construed as authorizing use of force against Iran, but (a) little details like that are not likely to bother Cheney or Bush, (b) a blockade — and that’s what it is — is an act of war. Note also that while allegedly thoughtful internationalist types like Van Hollen may think “international effort” means “U.N. approval,”, Bush et al are likely to claim some “coalition of the willing” including Albania and the Fiji Islands is close enough for government work.

There’s also that little matter of last fall’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which seems to have gone down the memory hole, or into the Beltway’s equivalent, a “la la la I can’t hear you la la la” hole. On this, H.Con 362 is nothing if not brazen, citing and essentially ignoring the finding in the same sentence; we’re back to preventive acts of war:

Whereas the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reported that Iran was secretly working on the design and manufacture of a nuclear warhead until at least 2003, but that Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon as soon as late 2009;

Well, what more do we need — anchors aweigh!

As if they had never been caught the first time, the Bush Administration is trying the same tricks that worked the last time in an attempt to key us up for another oil war – bogus intel, lies about what Iran is doing or not doing, horror stories, and a secret war waged by the goddamn vice president with the knowledge of so-called “Democrats”, the Bush Dog leaders in Congress.

Article I of Dennis Kucinich’s Articles for the Impeachment of President Bush concerns the work of the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, formed by Andy Card to sell the Iraq war to a reluctant US population.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has engaged in a years-long secret domestic propaganda campaign to promote the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This secret program was defended by the White House Press Secretary following its exposure. This program follows the pattern of crimes detailed in Article I, II, IV and VIII. The mission of this program placed it within the field controlled by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a White House task force formed in August 2002 to market an invasion of Iraq to the American people. The group included Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Stephen Hadley, Nicholas E. Calio, and James R. Wilkinson.

The WHIG produced white papers detailing so-called intelligence of Iraq’s nuclear threat that later proved to be false. This supposed intelligence included the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger as well as the claim that the high strength aluminum tubes Iraq purchased from China were to be used for the sole purpose of building centrifuges to enrich uranium. Unlike the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, the WHIG’s white papers provided “gripping images and stories” and used “literary license” with intelligence. The WHIG’s white papers were written at the same time and by the same people as speeches and talking points prepared for President Bush and some of his top officials.

 

 The Co-Operative History Commons notes that WHIG was charged with “pushing the [marketing] envelope” from the very beginning.

 

August 2002: Top Bush Officials Form Group To Sell Iraq War to the Public, Congress, and Allies

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. forms the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, which aims to “educate the public” about the alleged threat from Iraq. A senior official involved with the group later describes it as “an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities.” Members of the group include Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James R. Wilkinson, Nicholas E. Calio, and policy advisers led by Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, and I. Lewis Libby. They meet weekly in the White House Situation Room. A “strategic communications” task force under the WHIG is charged with planning speeches and writing white papers. [Washington Post, 8/10/2003] According to an intelligence source interviewed by the New York Daily News in October 2005, the group, on “a number of occasions,” will attempt “to push the envelope on things,”—“The [CIA] would say, ‘We just don’t have the intelligence to substantiate that.’” [New York Daily News, 10/19/2005] An important part of the WHIG strategy is to feed their messages to friendly reporters such as New York Times reporter Judith Miller. James Bamford, in his book A Pretext for War, writes: “First OSP [Office of Special Plans] supplies false or exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.” [Bamford, 2004, pp. 325]

 

The process described by Bamford is at the heart of Article 1. Under orders from the president, WHIG deliberately used bogus information, much of it provided by Ahmad Chalabi, an ace Iraqi con artist wanted for bank fraud in Syria. When George Tenet’s CIA – whose statements, particularly concerning Chalabi, were a good deal stronger than “we can’t substantiate that” – told Cheney and WHIG that Chalabi couldn’t be trusted and that he was a liar and a thief whose “information” could never be confirmed, Cheney ordered Doug Feith at the Office of Special Plans (OSP) to tell Dave Wurmser at C-TEG (Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group) to go through the CIA’s raw data (unconfirmed rumors, gossip, chatter on the part of friends and enemies) and come up with confirmation. Then Libby, a friend of ace conspiracy theorist Laurie Mylroie who was in turn a friend of ace con artist Chalabi, whipped up “Code Name Curveball”, a supposed Iraqi defector from Saddam’s Revolutionary Guard who has never been shown even to have existed, but if he does he was also handed to Libby (through Laurie) by Chalabi’s illusory Iraqi National Congress (INC), a supposed anti-Saddam guerrilla group whose members were all in their 50′s and 60′s, and none of whom had actually been in Iraq since late ’57.

If this is beginning to sound like a satirical film by Stanley Kubrick, you’re getting the idea. This is where the myth of Bush/Cheney incompetence started, but in fact, as we now know, the Administration was perfectly aware that everything Bush was saying – and WHIG was spreading – was a lie. They just didn’t care. The WaPo’s Walter Pincus first broke the story as early as Aug of ’03, giving specifics of a myriad of untruths.

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates — in public and behind the scenes — made allegations depicting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:

* Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq’s three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.

* The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq’s nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.

* Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government’s assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.

* In the weeks and months following Joe’s Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa’s Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, “81mm rocket.”

* The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term “mushroom cloud” into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to “educate the public” about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.

(emphasis added)

 

At this early stage, as you can see, Pincus was merely alleging that the evidence had been oversold, perhaps by accident. But now, after everything that’s been uncovered since, we know that Bush, Cheney and probably Rumsfeld knew that nearly all the so-called “evidence” they were ramping up to excuse a pre-emptive and almost certainly illegal invasion was either plain wrong or had been invented out of whole cloth. It didn’t matter. Cheney told WHIG to sell it and they sold it, the same way they would have sold a defective car seat or a poisonous tomato if they’d been working for corporations.

The WHIG also organized a media blitz in which, between September 7-8, 2002, President Bush and his top advisers appeared on numerous interviews and all provided similarly gripping images about the possibility of nuclear attack by Iraq. The timing was no coincidence, as Andrew Card explained in an interview regarding waiting until after Labor Day to try to sell the American people on military action against Iraq, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

September 7-8, 2002:

NBC’s “Meet the Press”: Vice President Cheney accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons over the past 14 months to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms.

CNN: Then-National Security Adviser Rice said, regarding the likelihood of Iraq obtaining a nuclear weapon, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

CBS: President Bush declared that Saddam was “six months away from developing a weapon,” and cited satellite photos of construction in Iraq where weapons inspectors once visited as evidence that Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms.

 

But the core of Article 1 may be the way the Administration involved the Pentagon in this selling spree. Not to put too fine a point on it, what Rumsfeld ordered the Pentagon to do was illegal.

The Pentagon military analyst propaganda program was revealed in an April 20, 2002, New York Times article. The program illegally involved “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recruited 75 retired military officers and gave them talking points to deliver on Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC, and according to the New York Times report, which has not been disputed by the Pentagon or the White House, “Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.”

According to the Pentagon’s own internal documents, the military analysts were considered “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who would deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.” In fact, they did deliver the themes and the messages but did not reveal that the Pentagon had provided them with their talking points. Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and Fox News military analyst described this as follows: “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”

Congress has restricted annual appropriations bills since 1951 with this language: “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

A March 21, 2005, report by the Congressional Research Service states that “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”

These concerns about “covert propaganda” were also the basis for the GAO’s standard for determining when government-funded video news releases are illegal:

“The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the viewing audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual — the essential fact of attribution is missing.”

 

 The only possible legal excuse for any of this - and it’s abhorrent to democracy – would be if the Addington/Yoo/Cheney doctrine of the “unitary executive” (a term Addington, who has been defending it and advocating for it for years, in an orgy of temporizing told Congress this week he wasn’t “familiar with”), a definition of presidential power in which there are no restrictions or limits, the constitution notwithstanding, was accepted as law.

It isn’t.

In fact, it is patently unConstitutional on its face. NO president can assume such powers under any conditions except internal anarchy or civil rebellion, and even then it would be subject to judicial and/or legislative review, both of which Addington/Yoo/Cheney rejects.

While this is not the strongest of the Articles, Kucinich is building a case and the illegal bare-faced lying as well as the illegal use of the Pentagon to spread those lies is a good, solid place to start.

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by retired Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes.

“The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.

Being accused by a general in your own army of committing war crimes, the same general who investigated the abuses to begin with? Is that news, Alex? Let’s see….

Nope. I guess it isn’t “new”. Since the accusations have been made for years, Alex can safely ignore it. As, in fact, he did.

Sometimes I think that if Bush/Cheney ever is impeached or goes on trial for what they’ve done, a good case could be made that the US press ought to be named accessories before, after, and during the fact. 

This report should be investigated by Congress, of course, and should lead to Bush’s impeachment if he’s found guilty. Neither will likely happen. Why not? Because politics trumps both justice and our national interest.

Some liberals in the blogosphere are complaining about the dearth of coverage of Kucinich’s resolution. I have to disagree — as I’ve pointed out before, when discussing complaints of liberal bias from the right, the media is in the business of covering news. This barely qualifies; if it deserves mention in the mainstream media at all, it certainly doesn’t deserve to be accorded the status of something big and breaking. I’m sorry, but the action of a lone congressman who’s widely considered something of a laughingstock, especially when it’s clear that action will never come to anything, just isn’t especially newsworthy.

Yup, that’s our vaunted national press. And this is in Salon, one nof the few outlets where progressives can expect to be able to read about things like this. But even Salon thinks “it’s not newsworthy” because Nancy Pelosi won’t allow the bill of impeachment to reach the floor of the House for purely political reasons. In any other country at any other time about any other president, the press would be all over this like a cheap suit whether Nancy agreed or not. Within moments of Koppelman’s posting of that first self-justification, his readers showed they understood more about what journalism is supposed to be about than Koppelman.

 

You’re right

The news here isn’t that Kucinich has formally accused Shrub of high crimes and misdemeanors but that Shrub has been committing high crimes and misdemeanors and everybody knows it and yet no one will call him to account for them.

– Jeffrey P. Harrison

A Right WIng Blog, hidden deep inside Salon, that’s NEWS!

The impeachment of President Clinton did the Republicans little good politically (They just won eight years in the White House with a subnormal candidate)

…and impeaching Bush now might very well diminish the substantial advantage Democrats currently have with voters.

(Don’t start counting that Democratic advantage too soon, there is a big split among women who think Hillary got the shaft)

Some liberals in the blogosphere are complaining about the dearth of coverage of Kucinich’s resolution.

I have to disagree — as I’ve pointed out before, when discussing complaints of liberal bias from the right, the media is in the business of covering news.

(I turned off NBC last night when they opened their program with weather,weather,weather. It’s summer time, and they don’t do substantive reporting during the summer, yada yada. Since when did the MSM ever do its job, since 2001?)

This barely qualifies; if it deserves mention in the mainstream media at all (judgemental, badly judgemental on your part)

but the action of a lone congressman who’s widely considered something of a laughingstock (He ran for President, and received consideration. Is Ron Paul a laughing stock, Ross Perot?? Prejudicial and judgemental.

Take a vacation Alex, you don’t do news during the summer. Everyone knows that.

– aveutter

you are probably right that it doesnt matter…

But the thing that seems so unfair is if there was a Democrat in the oval office, and a fringe far right republican was presenting articles of impeachment for even the most ridiculous reasons, it would be HUGE news!

– im on ur bord… reedn ur stupidnez

 

 Alex felt somewhat…misunderstood, if not abused, thus the “clarification”. But watch out! It doesn’t help.

First of all, I didn’t take a position on whether Bush deserves to be impeached, and I’m not doing so now either. I just took a position on whether Kucinich’s introduction of articles of impeachment was newsworthy. Second, other than the specific action, there was nothing new in what Kucinich did. “I don’t think there’s anything in there that hasn’t been previously disclosed,” he happily admitted to me. In fact, all of the information in the 35 articles of impeachment offered by Kucinich (with the possible exception, Kucinich said, of some legal theories about the application of international law) had been previously disclosed and widely discussed; in some case, the public disclosure dated back years. 

Oh. So Koppelman didn’t cover the Clinton impeachment because it was all old news that had been around for years, is that right? 

Well, Koppelman wasn’t around then but one doubts he would be all that reluctant because, you know, an impeachment that might happen is news but an impeachment that won’t happen isn’t even worth discussing the merits of.

The transparency of this bullshit is startling. There are only two possible explanations:

1. Either Koppelman is so lame he can’t think up anything better or, even scarier,
2. Koppelman really believes what he’s saying, that in order for an impeachment to be news there has to be something in it that people (read: Beltway pundits) don’t already know and therefore haven’t yet dismissed as “kooky”.

There’s basically no chance this will go anywhere. Kucinich offered a similar resolution against Vice President Cheney last year, and that is currently stuck in the House Judiciary Committee. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that impeachment is “off the table,” and with good reason. The impeachment of President Clinton did the Republicans little good politically, and impeaching Bush now might very well diminish the substantial advantage Democrats currently have with voters. Plus, Bush has little more than half a year remaining in his term.