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Editorial: Hugo Chavez's New World Vision
by Stephen Lendman
22 September 2006
After agreeing to supply discounted oil to the richest city in Europe - London - to help its low income residents use the city's buses at a reduced cost after earlier providing discounted heating oil for the poor in several northeastern US cities including its richest one - New York, Hugo Chavez is at it again. This time he offered to aid the US oil and cash-rich state of Alaska by providing an even greater benefit - free or subsidized heating oil. In the richest, most powerful country in the world, federal, state and local governments continue to provide fewer essential services to their citizens most in need like helping them stay warm in winter when they can't afford to do it on their own. The result is many of them don't and some die as a result.
Even without federal help, Alaska easily has enough resources and plenty of oil inside its borders to help its most needy if it chooses to. Currently the state has a Permanent Fund of $34 billion and a $2 billion budget reserve fund for a population of about 660,000 people. Still, each winter thousands of Alaskans can't afford to buy enough heating oil, especially since its price rose so dramatically in the past few years. Alaska has its own federally funded Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, but it's woefully underfunded and unable to provide enough help. So if the state and federal government won't do the job, Hugo Chavez said he would step in with financial aid through Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA's subsidiary CITGO Petroleum Corporation. The money will be donated to state Native non-profit organizations as part of a greater effort that will also help other communities in the state. It's also one part of CITGO's overall program to provide 5 - 10 million gallons of heating oil to help Native Americans nationwide. The goal is to help thousands of poor Alaskans and Native Americans in other states stay warm in the winter in cases where they're unable to get help any other way.
Think of it. Tiny Venezuela has a population of about 27 million people that's 1/12th the size of the US. And it had a 2005 Gross Domestic Product of about $160 billion that's less than 2% of the US GDP of $12.5 trillion last year and less than half of oil giant Exxon-Mobil's $371 billion 2005 sales volume. Still Hugo Chavez is willing to share his nation's oil and financial resources so those in need in the US can get some of the help its own government won't provide and help other nations as well that don't have enough ability to do it themselves. Don't ever expect Exxon-Mobil to offer aid as its game plan is to manipulate oil prices for maximum sales and profit growth with little or no regard for social responsibility that would only lower them.
The Vision of Chavez's Democratic Bolivarian Revolution Vs. Bush's Belligerent Imperialism
Look at the difference between how Hugo Chavez governs at home and shares with others abroad based on the principles of social equity and justice compared to the way George Bush does it. He and his hard-right Republican allies believe it's right to take from the poor and plunder other nations abroad to benefit the rich and powerful at home. To do it he's been waging illegal wars of aggression almost since he took office and just declared a permanent "long war" clash of civilizations against 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide to subjugate and exploit them for the corporate interests he represents.
Hugo Chavez will stand for re-election on December 3 this year. His approval rating is so high (compared to Bush's low one), no opposition candidate can defeat him in a free, fair and open election although the Bush administration is planning an unknown array of dirty tricks trying to do it. Compare that to the way elections are now run in the US where the only sure way George Bush and neocon Republicans can win is by rigging the outcomes. They have to because growing numbers of voters are fed up with them and reject their failed policies of endless war against enemies that don't exist, tax cuts for the rich combined with reduced social services for everyone else to pay for them, and a crackdown on civil liberties to quell dissent that always happens in the face of injustice.
A lot more people would reject them as well if they knew and took to heart Founding Father and President James Madison's belief about the dangers of war and how it extends "the discretionary power of the Executive." He wrote: "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." And Abraham Lincoln once wrote while he was still in the Congress that "kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending....that the good of the people was the object." Both these now revered men would shudder at how right they were if they knew how fast those freedoms and greater good for the people have been lost under the Bush administration, its policies of universal repression, and plan to turn the US into a nation of serfs and then do the same thing all over the world and make ordinary Americans have to pay the bills for it and end up poorer as a result.
Things aren't this way in Venezuela and shouldn't be anywhere. Under the letter and spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution, the country is governed under a system of real participatory democracy where the people get to vote and those they elect actually serve them. In the US what's called democracy is only for the privileged few. All others are left behind in a system morphing toward modern-day feudalism based on how an earlier failed 20th century tyrant ruled which he explained in his own words - "(by) a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligent nationalism." Sound familiar?
The tyrant was Benito Mussolini, and he called it fascism, although despite his claim, he didn't invent it. Nineteenth century born and early 20th century philosopher Giovanni Gentile did, and he's sometimes called the "philosopher of fascism." He explained it in the Encyclopia Italiana saying "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Like all good dictators finding an idea he liked, Mussolini replaced Gentile's name with his own and claimed credit for it. Now in the US under George Bush it's showing up again as a feudal corporatocracy heading straight toward a full-blown version of the Mussolini/Hitler model, US-style with many of the same trappings - a messianic mission and appeal to patriotism to fight an endless war on terrorism sacrificing constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties to do it and enriching corporations that profit from it. And all this falsely couched in the "land of the free and home of the brave" rhetoric and spirit from "The Star-Spangled Banner" anthem all children are taught at an early age to sing in school with hands over heart and never forget.
Hugo Chavez represents a different vision. Among world leaders, he's the best hope to give democracy meaning again throughout the Americas and beyond, and that's why the Bush administration is determined to oust him before he spreads much more of his good will. The Chavez way is gaining ground because it's a new paradigm based on global solidarity, equality and political, economic and social justice that opposes the failed Bush neoliberal imperial world model more people everywhere are fed up with and want no more of. It's shown up on the streets of Mexico for weeks and again on Sunday when hundreds of thousands of people packed the great Zocalo square in Mexico City in support of winning candidate Lopez Obrador denied by massive fraud the office of president he won in July. They stand with him in solidarity and his intention to set up a parallel government after he's sworn in as its "legitimate president" on November 20. Hugo Chavez stands with him as well, and on Saturday at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Havana accused Mexico's ruling party of stealing the election and destroying the chance for good relations with Venezuela.
There were more signs of discontent with the old order at the 16th annual NAM summit, attended by representatives from over 110 nations. At it, Hugo Chavez declared "American imperialism is in decline. A new bi-polar world is emerging. The non-aligned group has been relaunched to unite the South under its umbrella (in opposition)." At the summit's conclusion, a final document was drafted expressing support for Venezuela, its constitutional government and democratically elected President Hugo Chavez. It criticized US aggressive policies against Chavez and supported the right of the Venezuelan people to choose their own form of government, their leader and representatives, and their economic and political system free from foreign intervention. The document also expressed "firm support and solidarity for Bolivia" and Cuba including demanding the US end its economic, trade and financial blockade that violates the UN Charter and other international law.
It also acknowledged Iran's right to develop its commercial nuclear industry that's in full compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) based on known evidence about it. Further, it sharply criticized US foreign policy and its wars of illegal aggression as well as Israel's wars against Lebanon and Palestine and the US role in them. It also spoke out by implication against the unilateral US domination of the UN calling on this international body to do more to respect and better represent the needs and rights of smaller nations. The document affirmed the right of each nation's national sovereignty and was a strong rebuke of the US Bush administration and its imperial policies. In addition, it represented a strong statement of growing resistance to it from around the world that's likely to gain added resonance as long as Hugo Chavez is able to pursue his policies of putting the needs and rights of people ahead of those of wealth and power.
Other Unexpected Criticism
Chavez isn't alone as other critics are emerging in places as unexpected as the UK where British Labour Party 23-year veteran MP and former Cabinet Minister Clare Short just announced she's leaving New Labour because she's "profoundly ashamed" of the Government and Prime Minister Tony Blair's "craven" support for "US neoconservative foreign policy (that) has dishonoured the UK, undermined the UN and international law and helped to make the world a more dangerous place." She said she was "standing down (to) speak the truth and support the changes that are needed." She's not alone in the Blair government as growing numbers of other party "back-benchers" are joining her in a show of solidarity and disgust for a government allied shamelessly with Washington's corrupted notion of might makes right and the use of it in the pursuit of wealth and power as an end in itself.
Stay tuned for the coming chapters in this epic struggle for a new and better world vision and an end to the old one that doesn't work, never did or will, and that more people than ever are determined to free themselves from. It's what Abraham Lincoln meant when he once said: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, which we hope and believe is to liberate the world." It was the same message South America's great Liberator Simon Bolivar had when he once spoke of the imperial curse he sought to free his people from that "plague(d) Latin America with misery in the name of liberty." From the NAM summit in Havana, Hugo Chavez echoed similar thoughts in his address to the General Assembly on September 15. In it he said: "....let's unite in the South and we will have a future, we will have dignity, our people will have life....Let's unite to liberate ourselves, to exist, to self-construct the South."
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Editorial: Bush Rages: "I am not Beelzebub, Lord of Sulfur"
By Mike Whitney
ICH
The devil is right at home.... The devil himself is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came right here...And it still smells of sulfur today." Hugo Chavez; address to the UN General Assembly 9-20-06
My oh my, has Hugo Chavez caused a furor. Looking at the news reports filed in the last 24 hours, one would think that he snuck a dirty-bomb into the United Nations rather than gave a speech. In fact, the plucky Chavez may have delivered the finest 30 minute presentation that august assembly has ever heard. In that short span of time he publicly throttled the Global Emperor in front of 6 billion people and left his bruised and bloodied carcass splattered across the canvas like Roberto Duran in Round 9 of the middleweight championship match.....
"No mas, no mas no mas"...
And what about the performance? Is Chavez part of a theatre troupe or is he just earning his chops as a method actor?
Whatever it is; it seems to be working. After skewering Bush as "the devil" and sniffing around for sulfur (the traditional sign of Lucifer) Chavez performed his ablutions with a sign of the cross and an angelic expression worthy of Botticelli.
If you're a lefty, it just doesn't get any better than this.
Chavez should give lessons in public speaking. His appearance was like a clap of thunder; waving Chomsky with one hand and pummeling Bush with the other. He managed to heap more muck on "Guantanamo Nation" than anyone since Harold Pinter gave his blistering Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on 12-7-05. That's when Pinter said:
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have ever talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised quite a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It is a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
Chavez matched Pinter word for word, exposing the hypocrisy, lies and brutality of an administration that never stops lecturing about freedom and liberation even though it grinds out mountains of carnage everywhere it goes.
And where was Bush when Chavez delivered his broadside ....hiding behind Karen Hughes skirts, picking out a new eye-liner for his next televised harangue against Muslims, retrieving his Yale pom-poms from the dry-cleaners?
Our benighted leader always seems to disappear whenever the prospect of danger arises. He skedaddled when his number came up for the Alabama National Guard and he lit-out for the safety of a Nebraska cornfield when the planes hit the towers. He even vamoosed at a trade summit in Argentina when Chavez threatened "to sneak up behind him and give him a bear-hug." That really put a spring in old Bush's step as he quickly scuttled to the safety of Airforce One.
One thing is certain, whenever there's peril, President "gone-to-soon" will be speeding off in a trail of vapor.
In any case, Bush was not missed at the UN massacre yesterday. Chavez held-forth like a preacher at a brothel; scattering the bodies and kicking open the windows to let the sunlight in. He delivered one, ferocious roundhouse punch after another....
Boom, boom, boom...until the crowd rose in a thunderous 5 minute ovation. (which was carefully omitted from the TV coverage)
"What would the people of the world tell (Bush) if they were given the floor?" Chavez asked. "What would they have to say? I have some inkling of what they would say, what the oppressed people think. They would say, 'Yankee imperialist, go home."
"He spoke to the people of Lebanon," Chavez added. "Many of you have seen, he said, how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut were delivered with laser precision....This is imperialist (and) genocidal; the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon. That is what happened. And now we hear, 'We're suffering because we see homes destroyed.'"
Ouch; no wonder Bush "high-tailed it" out of the UN before the ensuing bloodbath.
Chavez is like a battering ram punching holes in the wall of silence which surrounds King George. Right after his speech I checked in at CNN and, as I expected, Bush-apologist Wolf Blitzer was spinning in his wingtips frantically trying to stitch together the tattered image of the Dear Leader. A quick peek at Google News confirms that the entire arsenal of corporate media is now engaged in the hopeless task of salvaging Bush's wretched presidency.
But the damage is done. Chavez played the match on Bush's home turf and beat him like a drum. Bush is probably still quivering under his desk.
"There are other ways of thinking," Chavez opined. "There are young people who think differently and this has happened in a mere decade. It has been shown that 'the end of history' was a false assumption, and the same is true of Pax Americana and the establishment of a 'capitalist neo-liberal world. The system has only generated more poverty. Who believes in it now?"
Yes, who believes it now? Who believes in a party which has only produced two ideas in its entire history; tax cuts and war? Who believes that endless bombardment and martial law can be passed off as democracy and liberation? Who believes that a rogue's gallery of liars, war-profiteers and gangsters can work in the public's interest?
"We want ideas to save our planet from the imperialist threat. And, hopefully in this very century, in not to long a time, we will see a new era, and for our children and grandchildren, a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations."
Yes, Hugo, we want peace with our neighbors, peace with our friends, and peace with our enemies. We're sick of war and the men who want war; and that includes every feckless politico in Congress, Democrat and Republican alike.
"The hegemonistic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very existence of the human species. We appeal to the people of the United States and of the world to halt this threat which is like a sword hanging over our heads."
There's no time to lose. We have to dump Bush NOW and get on with the pressing issues of global warming, peak oil, nuclear proliferation, poverty and AIDS.
Chavez is right; the present model for global rule is broken and corrupt. We need a change.
"Capitalism is savagery," Chavez boomed.
Viva Chavez.
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Editorial: Howard Zinn: What the left thinks
By Dennis Prager
Town Hall
Every so often, one hears the argument that "Left and Right" are outdated terms, or that there really aren't enormous differences in the ways the Left and Right view America, the world, men and women, and just about every other important aspect of life. I wish this were true. But the gaps between the Left and Right on almost every issue that matters -- including and especially issues of good and evil -- are in fact unbridgeable.
That is why, for many years, I have invited leading representatives of the intellectual Left onto my radio show. Not in order to debate them (though I would be happy to do so at any college), but in order to clarify for listeners exactly what the Left believes.
I recently dialogued with an icon of the Left, Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, author of "A People's History of the United States," lauded by The New York Times as "required reading" for all American students. And, as Wikipedia notes, it "has been adopted as required reading in high schools and colleges throughout the United States."
Dennis Prager: I think a good part of your view is summarized when you say, "If people knew history, they would scoff at that, they would laugh at that" -- the idea that the United States is a force for the betterment of humanity. I believe that we are the country that has done more good for humanity than any other in history. What would you say . . . we have done more bad than good, we're in the middle, or what?
Howard Zinn: Probably more bad than good. We've done some good, of course; there's no doubt about that. But we have done too many bad things in the world. You know, if you look at the way we have used our armed forces throughout our history: first destroying the Indian communities of this continent and annihilating Indian tribes, then going into the Caribbean in the Spanish-American War, going to the Philippines, taking over other countries, not establishing democracy but in many cases establishing dictatorship, holding up dictatorships in Latin America and giving them arms, and you know, Vietnam, killing several million people for no good reason at all, certainly not for democracy or liberty, and continuing down to the present day with the war in Iraq . . . .
DP: There is evil in the way we treated the Indians, there is no question about it. But there's also no question that the great majority died of disease and not deliberately inflicted disease.
HZ: That's true that the great majority of Indians died of disease in the 17th century when the Europeans first came here. But after that -- after the American Revolution -- when the colonists expanded from the thin band of colonies along the Atlantic and expanded westward, at that point we began to annihilate the Indian tribes. We committed massacres all over the country . . . .
DP: What percentage of the Indians do you believe we massacred, as opposed to diseases ravaged?
HZ: Oh, well it might have been 10 percent.
DP: But 10 percent is very different from the generalization of "we annihilated the Indians."
HZ: Oh, well 10 percent is a huge number of Indians, that is. So it's pointless I think to argue about whether disease . . . or deliberate attacks killed more Indians . . . .
DP: No, but 10 percent is very different from what the general statement of "annihilate" tends to indicate. That's all I am saying.
HZ: Okay.
DP: If, let's say, Europeans never came to North America and it was left in the hands of the American indigenous Indians, do you think the world would be a better place?
HZ: I'd have no way of knowing.
DP: So you're agnostic on that.
HZ: Absolutely. We have no way of knowing what would have happened.
DP: Well, we do have a way of knowing. If the Indians had never been intervened with, they would have continued in the life and the values of the societies that the American Indians made.
HZ: Well, I suppose we could presume that. And many of their societies were very peaceful and benign, and some of their societies were ferocious and warlike. But the point is that we very often sort of justify barging into other peoples' territories by the fact that we are sort of bringing civilization. But in the course of it, if in the course of bringing civilization we kill large numbers of people -- which we did in that case and which we have done in other cases -- then you're led to question whether what we did deserves to be praised or condemned.
DP: Well, you can do both. You can condemn the massacres and you can praise the civilization that we made here.
DP: I believe that we [Americans] fought in Korea in order to enable at least half of that benighted peninsula to live in relative freedom and prosperity; the half that we did not liberate is living in the nightmare, almost Nazi-like, condition of the North Korean government. Why don't you see that as a great good that Americans did?
HZ: I think that your description of the North Korean government is accurate. It's sort of a monstrous government. But when we went to war in Korea the result of that war was the deaths of several million people. And I question whether the deaths . . . were worth the result. . . .
DP: If America had never intervened, do we both agree that Kim Il-sung, the psychopathic dictator of North Korea, would have ruled over the entire Korean peninsula?
HZ: I think that's probably true.
DP: Do you believe that that would be a net moral or immoral result for the Korean people and the world?
HZ: That would have been an immoral result, but the result of the war itself was also immoral -- I'm talking about the killing of several million people. And what I'm suggesting is that the answer to . . . tyrannies like that is not war, which in our time always involves the massive killing of innocent people. . . . I think we have to find ways other than war to get rid of dictatorships and tyrannies.
DP: I would love that. But this is where we often consider people on the Left, at best, to be naive. . . . Let's talk about that naivete. You believe that there would have been another way to get rid of the Korean communists -- whom we both agree are monstrous -- as opposed to the Korean War. . . . This is the naivete of the Left, that ugly things can be gotten rid of in sweet ways.
HZ: Not sweet ways. I wouldn't say that. And I wouldn't say either in totally peaceful ways . . . by struggle and resistance but not by war. We have historical examples of what I'm talking about. The Soviet Union, Stalinism, was not overthrown by war. . . . Stalinism was really replaced, in time, by the Russian people themselves. . . . What I'm suggesting is that there are a number of places in the world where we have had tyrannies that have been overthrown without war. . . .
DP: Yes, there are. No one would deny that. And there are historical examples of where war is the only way to achieve a moral end.
HZ: Well, I'm not sure that's the only way.
DP: Was there another way to have gotten rid of Hitler?
HZ: In the case of WWII, I don't know what it would have taken to get rid of Hitler. We certainly had to resist him, we certainly had to get rid of him. . . . What bothers me most today is that people use WWII as an example for what we should do today. It's a very different situation.
DP: No, we use it as an example of where war is the moral choice. Are you prepared to say that war is ever the best moral choice?
HZ: No.
DP: Never. Not even against Hitler?
HZ: Well, I'm not sure about WWII.
DP: Wow . . .
HZ: War has reached the point where when you wage war . . . there's always a war against innocent people. . . . Let's be very specific about today. Take the situation in Iraq. War is not a way to bring democracy to Iraq. We are not succeeding at it . . . we're killing large numbers of people.
DP: Why are we not succeeding?
HZ: Because there is so much resistance in Iraq to the presence of a foreign invader.
DP: No, there's so much resistance in Iraq to the presence of democracy. That's where you and I have a different read on the resistance. . . . You feel that they are resisting the United States, and I feel that they are resisting democracy by blowing up their fellow citizens and hoping for moral chaos and civil war.
HZ: Well there certainly is civil war in Iraq. And we have brought it to Iraq.
We have brought it by the occupation of our troops. . . . Iraq is in chaos. Iraq is in violence. And the United States military presence has done nothing to stop that. It's only aggravated it and provoked it. And the best thing we can do for Iraq right now is to get out of the place, and save the lives of our young people.
DP: What would happen if we did get out? Do you think that there would be fewer people dead or more?
HZ: I would hope that there would be fewer people dead.
DP: I believe if we left, the bloodbath would make what is happening now look like a very sad episode but not a bloodbath.
HZ: . . . The point is that war is the worst possible solution.
DP: That's where we differ. It isn't the worst possible. There are worse things than war. More people have died in North Korea . . . than died in the war that you thought we shouldn't have waged. . . . So it isn't the worst possible. It wasn't the worst possible versus the Japanese. It wasn't the worst possible versus the Nazis. Is it the worst possible in Afghanistan? Are we wrong there too?
HZ: It is the worst. In Afghanistan it was not a good idea to wage war on Afghanistan. Because the fact is that Bush did not know where Osama bin Laden was except that he was in the country. So what does he do? He bombs the country, kills 3,000 at least ordinary Afghans. That's as many as died in the Twin Towers. And today after these years of bombing Afghanistan, driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. What have we accomplished in Afghanistan? The Taliban is back.
DP: No, it's not back.
HZ: The Taliban now controls much of the country.
DP: But it doesn't control Kabul. It doesn't control the major cities. And women are now free to step out of their homes. Doesn't that matter to you? HZ: It matters a lot to me. But I don't think that liberation of women matters a lot to the Bush administration. . . .
DP: Whatever your view [about the war in Iraq] . . . would you say that by and large the people that we are fighting, the so-called insurgents, the people who blow up marketplaces and try to create civil war, are bad or evil people? Or would you not make a moral judgment?
HZ: I would certainly make a moral judgment about people who blow up things, who kill innocent people. And I would make a moral judgment on ourselves because we are killing innocent people in Iraq.
DP: So do you feel that, by and large, the Zarqawi-world and the Bush-world are moral equivalents?
HZ: I do. I would put Bush on trial along with Saddam Hussein, because I think both of them are responsible for the deaths of many, many people in Iraq, and so, yes, I think that. Killing innocent people is immoral when Iraqis do it, and when we do it, it is the same thing.
DP: Although we don't target them, but I won't get into that debate. I am just fleshing out your views.
HZ: Actually we should get into that. You know, as a former Air Force volunteer I can tell you, it is not necessary to target civilians. You just inevitably kill them. And the result is the same as if you targeted them.
DP: But we have a different punishment for premeditated murder and for accidental murder.
HZ: Yeah, but when you accidentally kill 100 times as many people as the other side kills in a premeditated way . . .
DP: But we haven't done that . . .
HZ: But we have.
DP: Not in Iraq we certainly haven't.
HZ: No, in Vietnam . . .
DP: Don't go to Vietnam every time I ask an Iraq question.
HZ: OK.
DP: Next, Israel and its enemies. Would you say that Israel and Hezbollah are also moral equivalents?
HZ: Well, first of all, I certainly oppose Hezbollah's firing rockets into Israel, and I think Israel reacted with absolutely unjustified immoral indiscriminate force. I mean, you look at the casualties on both sides, and the casualties among civilians in Lebanon is 10 times the casualties . . .
DP: Well, the casualties in Germany were 10 times those of the casualties in Britain. So are Britain and Hitler morally equivalent? You are making the assessment of morality on the basis of numbers killed.
HZ: No. I think regardless of the numbers, when you kill innocent people there is immorality. So there is immorality on both sides, but I think there is a case in the case of Israel where you have to get back to fundamental causes.
The fundamental cause of the violence on both sides is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and so long as that occupation continues . . .
DP: But they got out of Gaza. And according to President Clinton, the Palestinians were offered a Palestinian state with 97 percent of their land and 3 percent more from Israel.
HZ: Well that's according to President Clinton. But not according to a lot of people who have been studying the Middle East . . .
DP: A lot of people on the Left, but not a lot of people studying it.
DP: Professor Zinn, I thank you so much for your time.
HZ: Thanks.
Copyright 2006 Salem Web Network
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"Special Prosecutor", Indeed
Fitzgerald given way out of Libby CIA leak case - Judge says he can dismiss case if classified secrets will be revealed
By Joel Seidman
NBC News
Sept. 21, 2006
WASHINGTON - The judge in the CIA leak case ruled Thursday that if Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald feels that admitting certain classified documents at the upcoming trial of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby can jeopardize national security, Fitzgerald can then move to dismiss the perjury charges against Libby.
Judge Reggie Walton cannot automatically allow classified materials to be admitted at trial. He first must go through a series of closed hearings under CIPA regulations. CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act, protects and restricts the discovery of classified information in a way that does not impair the defendant's right to a fair trial. It also allows the government to propose a redacted version of a classified document as a substitution for the original, having deleted only non-relevant classified information.
In his ruling this morning, the Judge Walton, has given a technical legal victory to Libby's attorneys concerning the admissibility of classified materials they want to present at trial for their defense.
Three-part test
The issue concerns determining a standard for which the judge will review these secret documents, in a series of closed hearings later this month, to determine the use, relevance, or admissibility of classified information.
Fitzgerald argues that because of the sensitive national security value of the classified materials, a special three part test must apply before determining if a document can be admitted at trial.
That test, according to Fitzgerald, must include: (1) that the document is relevant; (2) that the document is "helpful to the defense," and (3) that the defendant's interest in disclosure of the document outweighs the government's need to protect the classified information.
Victory for Libby
Walton disagreed with Fitzgerald and favored Libby's attorney's argument that in reviewing the classified material to be presented at the hearing, he must simply apply the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Walton also suggested that, "if the government is still not satisfied that the classified information is adequately protected at the conclusion of these hearings, the government has the power to preclude entirely the introduction at trial of the classified information. While invocation of this option may require dismissal of this case."
Walton argues against adopting the balancing test proposed by the government, because it, "could infringe on the defendant's constitutional right to put on a defense by preventing him from introducing relevant and otherwise admissible evidence at his trial because the government's interest in nondisclosure was considered of greater significance."
Crush of national security work
While is it not publicly known which classified materials are at issue, Libby's attorneys have requested and have been given in recent months two batches of summaries and redacted versions of classified morning intelligence briefings which Libby attended with Vice President Cheney in 2003.
Libby's attorneys wish to present at trial a picture of their client as being overwhelmed by the crush of critical national security work at the White House - a client who may have misremembered, what they wish to portray as insignificant, the identity of former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame who was a CIA employee at the time. Using certain classified documents at trial his lawyers could underscore that Libby was involved with important work at the time of the Plame leak.
Crux of the case
Fitzgerald's case rests on the premise that Libby lied to the FBI and to a grand jury about his own conversations with reporters confirming that Plame worked for the CIA and was somehow responsible for her husband's fact finding trips to Africa in search of proof about Iraq's alleged quest for fissile materials. Wilson wrote in a New York Times op-ed, in July 2003, that that quest did not exist, and that the administration was "twisting" the facts about Iraq's determination to procure Niger's yellowcake.
Fitzgerald has said in court filings that the Plame leak from Libby was orchestrated specifically to undermine the credibility of Wilson's public pronouncements - which Fitzgerald says consumed the vice president's office for several weeks in the summer of 2002.
Libby was charged in October, 2005 with lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame and when he subsequently told three reporters about her. He faces five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice. Libby's trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 17, 2007.
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Comment: Did SOTT not predict last year that this whole thing was just a scam and would lead nowhere?
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Flashback: First the Lying, Then the Pardons
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counterpunch.org
Fitzgerald Should Counter Any Pre-trial Talk of a Pardon for Libby with an Obstruction of Justice Charge
When he announced the indictment of Scooter Libby, vice president Cheney's chief of staff, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald included a homily on the importance of truth. And in truth it sounded a bit quaint, like someone trying to recite the Sermon on the Mount on the floor of the New York stock exchange. But of course Fitzgerald was right. When lying becomes the accepted currency, you haven't got the rule of law but a criminal conspiracy.
All governments lie, but Reagan and his crew truly raised the bar. From about 1978 on, when the drive to put Reagan in the White House gathered speed, lying was the standard mode for Reagan, his handlers and a press quite happy to retail all the bilge, from the Soviet Union's supposed military superiority to the millionaire welfare queens on the South Side of Chicago.
The press went along with it. Year after year, on the campaign trail and then in the White House, the press corps reported Reagan's news conferences without remarking that the commander in chief dwelt mostly in a twilit world of comic-book fables and old movie clips. They were still maintaining this fiction even when Reagan's staff was discussing whether to invoke the 25th amendment and have the old dotard hauled off to the nursing home.
Lying about Reagan's frail grip on reality was only part of the journalistic surrender. For those who see Judith Miller's complicity in the lying sprees of the Neocons as a signal of the decline of the New York Times from some previous plateau of objectivity and competence I suggest a review of its sometime defense correspondent Richard Burt in the late Carter years, as Al Haig's agent in place. Burt relayed truckloads of threat-inflating nonsense about the military balance in the Cold War, particularly in the European theater, most of them on a level of fantasy matching the lies Miller got from Chalabi's disinformers and trundled in print.
When the Reaganites seized power in 1981, Burt promptly threw down his press badge and went to work
In the State Department as Director of Politico-Military Affairs a post previously held by another former Times man, Leslie Gelb, no garden rose but not a two-timer on the order of Burt. At least Miller didn't go and officially work for Cheney.
Many of the associates of Libby and of his boss, now threatened by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, are veterans of that Reagan culture and hardened survivors of the crisis that ultimately threatened several of them with legal sanction and lengthy terms in prison. That crisis was the Iran-contra affair which burst upon the nation on October 6, 1986, the day Eugene Hasenfus successfully parachuted from a CIA-piloted plane illegally shuttling arms to the contras.
Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a former US prosecutor and judge from Oklahoma City, a life-long Republican, began his investigation. In the probe that stretched through the rest of Reagan-time and the entire presidency of G.H.W Bush,
Walsh made his most effective headway by bringing charges for lying to Congress. This is how he nailed Elliott Abrams, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George and Robert McFarlane . They all either pleaded guilty to what Libby was just indicted for, obstruction of justice and making false statements, or were convicted of same or, in the cases of Weinberger and Clarridge, were awaiting trial.
As Walsh plowed forward, those trying to protect Reagan and Bush included Stephen Hadley, a long-time Cheney sidekick now possibly in Fitzgerald's line of fire as the current president's national security advisor. In the Iran contra era Hadley was Counsel to the Special Review Board, known as the Tower Commission, established by President Reagan to enquire into U.S. arms sales to Iran, which headed off any unwelcome focus on Reagan or Bush's complicity in the scandal. Meanwhile in the House, Rep Richard Cheney was the ranking Republican on a House committee also investigating Iran-contra. He played a major role in stopping the probe from staining Bush or Reagan. (Libby himself had been working in the Pentagon ifrom 1982-85 as director of Special Projects.)
By the fall of 1992 Walsh was finally closing in on Bush for his role in contra-gate as Reagan's vice president. Days before the 1992 election Walsh reindicted Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's defense secretary, for lying to Congress. The trial was scheduled for January of 1993. Walsh was expected to grill Weinberger about notes that implicated Bush. In the line of fire here too was Colin Powell, who had been Weinberger's assistant in the crucial year of 1985. Walsh was also planning to question Bush his failure to turn over a diary he'd kept in the mid-1980s. We could have seen a former president indicted for obstruction of justice and making false statements.
The press was mostly against Walsh. There were plenty of nasty articles about the cost and duration of his probe. Bush felt politically safe covering his own ass and that of his co-conspirators by issuing pardons, which he duly did, on Christmas Eve, 1992. Off Walsh's hook slipped Weinberger, Abrams, Clarridge, St George, Fiers, and McFarlane. Walsh said furiously that "the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."
Will history come close to repeating itself? John Dean, White House counsel in Nixon time and knowledgeable about executive cover-ups, argues that Fitzgerald has Cheney in his sights, and may b ed planning to charging him under the Espionage Act for revealing Plame's name. Cheney's survival depends on Libby keeping his mouth shut, and of taking the fall until Christmas Eve, 2008, when Bush Jr.issues the necessary pardon or pardons.
Already in the wake of Libby's indictment the air has been thick with talk of pardons, as though it's now become a predictable ritual for incumbent presidents to clear their subordinates of indictments or convictions for crimes committed during government service. Fitzgerald should say that anyone seriously urging pardons may risk indictment for conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Such pardons go hand in hand with the lying which Fitzgerald denounced. If officials violating the law and then lying about it knows with certainty that they are going to escape legal sanction, then we no longer have a government. We have a sequence of criminal conspiracies. There have been scandalous pardons down the decades, but as with lying the Reagan years raised the bar.. It should become a major political issue. A model here could be Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in 1987 for spying for Israel. Bush Sr and Clinton were under huge pressure to pardon him but declined to buckle because the Armed Services simply said No, we won't stand for it. To the prospect of any pardon for Libby and others the popular message should be the same. Otherwise Fitzgerald will be wasting his time and the people's money.
Judy Miller Hits the Road
Her lawyers cut a deal with the New York Times and now Miller is set for freelancing, and a memoir on her years at the New York Times and her days in prison. I saw her on Larry King on Thursday night and she did well, declining all opportunities to kick sand in Maureen Dowd's face. It was the right choice. I have to speak in a whisper here because my coeditor is a Dowd fan whereas I've always thought there's something tinny about Dowd's columns.
In retrospect the Beat Up on Judy day at the New York Times when Dowd's nasty column followed on the heels of Keller's "internal memo" looks like a carefully calculated one-two. (I seem to remember reading that Keller and Dowd were an item, though maybe it was Dowd and Howell Raines. Dowd's and Miller's in-house love lives blend in my memory like a daquiri left out in the sun.) At the time I wrote here that Keller's memo was disgusting and now he's confirmed my initial judgment, apologizing for having insinuated in his chickenshit memo that Miller and Libby were "entangled" in all the paroxysms that that word implies, also that she had "misled" her editor, Philip Taubman. Keller now concedes that Taubman had never complained of being misled by Miller.
I hold no brief for Miller who wrote terrible stories for many years, but the people at the New York Times who should get the axe are publisher, Sulzberger, and Editor Keller. They've made a terrible hash of things and the Board should make them walk the plank.
Larry King asked Miller if she'd be listening to Chalabi's lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and she said she'd be giving her own talk in DC. Chalabi's popping up everywhere. Kris Lofgren attended Ahmed Chalabi's lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in midweek, and reports a starry-eyed Hitchens claiming on the way out after the lecture that Chalabi could have broken American intelligence codes himself, because "he is a mathematical genius" and "his expertise is cryptology". This is silly says CounterPuncher Assaf Kfoury who got a PhD from MIT, 1972, and overlapped with Chalabi's years there. "Chalabi was not a mathematical genius. Basically MIT, which awarded him a Master's degree, didn't want to keep him for a PhD. And Chalabi didn't do his thesis in anything remotely connected to cryptology. His at the University of Chicago was on the theory of knots."
He certainly tied up Judy.
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Flashback: Worse than Watergate?
By Judith Coburn
November 22, 2005
America is facing the mother of all Constitutional crises -- and the media remains silent.
Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience. A Republican-dominated Congress impeached President Bill Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex with a White House intern, while President Bush remains free even from hearings, let alone legal action, on his administration's many Watergate-like excesses. Now that's politics!
On July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Richard Nixon. One of the grounds for indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the President. To Drinan, this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals which had already come to be known as "Watergate." The fourteen months of massive B-52 "carpet bombings," which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also kept completely secret from Congress and the public (until exposed by New York Times reporter William Beecher). In recently released transcripts of telephone conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the President ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves." (The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like [General Alexander] Haig laughing.")
The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.
There are many myths about Watergate -- among them that Woodward and Bernstein rode into Dodge and rescued the republic all by themselves, that the impeachment of Richard Nixon saved American constitutional democracy from destruction, and that the grounds on which Nixon was impeached were a fair reflection of what he and "all the President's men" had actually done. In American mythology, "the system worked."
To most Americans, the slaughter of millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Lao, as well as the destruction of their countries, seem unrelated to "Watergate." Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the secret bombing of Cambodia, who had ordered his own dissenting staffers and several journalists illegally wiretapped to stop leaks, escaped indictment and would soon be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Few now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex that really set Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of Presidential conduct which seems eerily familiar today. In his 1974 book, Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell wrote of "the 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." He concluded that three presidents "consistently sacrificed the welfare of the nation at home to what they saw as the demands of foreign affairs."
To recast an infamous Vietnam slogan: They had to destroy American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy.
Saving the System in the Name of National Security
It would seem little has changed. Rather than "saving the system," Watergate only slowed for a brief period the increasing concentration of power in the White House and the Pentagon, not to speak of its abuse after Ronald Reagan came to power in the name of national security. The now nearly forgotten Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's reign revealed in a stark way the illegal lengths to which that administration's anti-communist ideologues were willing to go to defy Congress. Using every stealth method at their command, top Reagan officials defied and effectively nullified a Congressional ban on aid to the "Contras," right-wing Nicaraguans who were determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas then in power in their country. White House, CIA, State Department, and Pentagon officials schemed to pass along to the Contras profits from the illegal sale of high-tech arms to the fundamentalist Muslim regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. (Iran was in a desperate war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then officially supported by the Reagan Administration.)
Now, once again, ideologues -- this time formerly anti-communist neoconservatives -- have taken America into another foreign war, whose pretext was as flimsy as the fabricated North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that led to Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. This latest war is being run by an administration at least as isolated, enraged, obsessed with secrecy, and abusive of power as Richard Nixon's. Americans are as obsessed by the relatively minuscule number of American casualties in Iraq as they were by the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam and just as blind to the suffering of Iraqis as they were to the millions of Indochinese who died.
Just as during Watergate and Iran-Contragate, the machinations of Beltway leakers -- in this case in the Plame affair -- carry more weight politically than life-and-death issues like the legalization of torture, the creation of secret, offshore CIA "black" prisons, the administration's campaign to suspend the constitutional rights of defendants and the protections of the Geneva Conventions, not to speak of the administration's drive to create a presidency of unfettered power. Revelations of war crimes by American GIs and CIA operatives have been quickly dismissed by picking a few low-ranking scapegoats like Lyndie England while higher ups go unpunished, just as the chain of responsibility for the My Lai massacres in Vietnam stopped with Lt. William Calley. Secret agent Valerie Plame in her Jackie O shades, posing for Vanity Fair with her whistleblowing husband Joe Wilson, becomes the celebrity du jour standing in for Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam war, who was photographed by the radically chic Richard Avedon.
The Genuine Articles
But are things simply the same as in the 1970s (and again the Reagan era) or is our present situation actually "worse than Watergate," as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, who turned on the President and his comrades to save himself, argued in his prescient 2004 book of that title?
The articles of impeachment Congress eventually framed to indict Richard Nixon make interesting reading these days. The first article had at its heart the Watergate break-in and the elaborate cover-up that followed, including "making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States," "endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States," and "making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a through and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the executive branch of the United States..."
Article 2 was a catch-all indictment of all the violations of Americans' rights ordered by the White House, including the political use of the IRS, CIA, Secret Service, Justice Department, and FBI as well as wiretapping, surveillance, and burglaries against those on President Nixon's notorious "enemies list." In all such acts, "national security" was the justification given.
The facts may be different, but do the charges themselves sound familiar?
Article 3 concerned the White House's refusal to honor Congressional subpoenas for the infamous tapes secretly recorded by the President and various papers relevant to the Watergate investigation. "In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the...House of Representatives."
No one would expect history simply to repeat itself, especially since memories of Watergate (and myths about it) have affected presidential actions ever since. Ronald Reagan and his handlers, faced with Iran/Contragate, certainly remembered how Nixon's cover-up came to seem more egregious than the actions it sought to conceal. Reagan immediately fired Oliver North, the National Security Council staffer who masterminded the scheme, and sent his National Security Adviser Admiral John M. Poindexter packing (if only for a trip back to the Navy). He then appointed the Tower Commission and a special prosecutor to investigate, appearing to cooperate with Congressional investigations even while undermining them. In his comprehensive and fascinating book, The Wars of Watergate, historian Stanley I. Kutler points out how much cleverer the Reaganites were than Nixon's men in leaving no documents or tapes to be seized.
George W. Bush and his associates must have remarkably short memories. While he has been careful to mouth words of cooperation in the Plamegate case, he has depended on the Republican control of Congress to stonewall on just about every egregious misdeed that has seen the light of day, blocking public hearings into Abu Ghraib, the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the CIA secret prison system, faux intelligence on Iraq, and Plamegate itself.
That felicitous Watergate phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" and the word "impeachment" are now heard in circles on the left, with the legal grounds for impeachment being explored by lawyers like Elizabeth de la Vega in the Nation magazine and at Tomdispatch. But what special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald may still lack to crack open the case for a White House-led conspiracy to manipulate intelligence, destroy the Wilsons, and get back at the CIA is a whistleblower like John ("there's a cancer on the Presidency") Dean or even Jeb Magruder, the top Republican campaign aide who helped plan the Watergate break-in and cover-up, only to finally cop a plea. Now that I. Lewis Libby and New York Times reporter Judy Miller, thick as thieves -- "entanglement" was the word that paper's Executive Editor Bill Keller used -- before the vice-presidential chief of staff's indictment, have been designated the fall folks in Plamegate and the administration's rush to war in Iraq, the question is: Could resentment for shouldering the blame alone (so far) lead Libby to disloyal testimony against his higher-ups as happened in Watergate?
Unlike in the Watergate years, however, most of the legal action that might just dent the Bush administration's imperial armor is happening abroad. Just as the most revelatory reports about American abuses of power and war-making -- from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica's three-part series on the yellowcake forgery to the recent Italian TV film on the American use of white phosphorus against civilians in Falluja -- have surfaced abroad, so the only real court actions against American abuses of power are taking place in Europe. There, an Italian court has indicted CIA agents for "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping operations on the streets of Milan. Spanish courts -- which sought to try Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for torture -- are now pursuing American violations of national sovereignty because CIA planes ferrying detainees to secret "black sites" used airports in the Azores and the Canary Islands. Both the United Nations and the European Union are investigating the CIA use of secret European prisons and airfields in their "rendition" operations. If Congress won't act to punish Bush Administration officials who enacted a torture policy, perhaps the Europeans will.
Plamegate, after all, is no more just an odious but simple case of Beltway character assassination than the plumbers' break-in at Democratic Party headquarters was just a burglary. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues that just as the Watergate break-in was the key that opened a strongbox of ugly facts about the Nixon Administration's unbridled abuse of power, so might the Plame affair break open the Bush Administration's imperial modus operandi.
The Politics of Impeachment and the One-Party State
Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience. A Republican-dominated Congress impeached President Bill Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex with a White House intern, while President Bush remains free even from hearings, let alone legal action, on his administration's many Watergate-like excesses. Now that's politics!
What makes the Plame affair so odd, however, is this: Unlike Watergate or the Iran-Contra revelations, it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know (or at least that we couldn't have known) before the Iraq War was launched. The neoconservatives' long-standing plans to invade Iraq, the administration's blanket policy of secrecy and the lies it told Congress and the public, the political manipulation of the intelligence community including the CIA, FBI, and the military -- all rivaling in scope any similar Nixonian schemes-- were in plain sight for those who cared to look during the run-up to the war. Even the Downing Street memo, the now infamous secret minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, describing the White House's commitment to invade Iraq at a time when it was telling Americans it had no plans to do so, had little, if anything, new in it. (At least, its exposure in the British press, like the latest reporting on Plame affair revelations, helped chip away at what had once been a well-armored administration.)
In fact, one of the most revelatory pieces of reporting on the whole pre- and post-invasion period could be found not in the American press but in an extraordinary three-part series in the leftist Italian newspaper La Repubblica, articles which have received only a few skeptical references buried in the back pages of our major papers (while being headline news in the on-line world of political websites and blogs). The Italian investigative reporters do tell us something new -- exactly how two of the key administration arguments for war in Iraq were concocted and known to be bogus by Italian intelligence and discredited by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department officials until Vice President Cheney pounded CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell into submission.
According to La Repubblica, the yellowcake story and the forged documents that were its source were cooked up by a bottom-feeding double agent who needed the money. (He's Plamegate's most colorful character, rivaling G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate's handlebar-mustachioed, gun-loving CIA operative.) And Italian intelligence knew that the infamous aluminum tubes purchased by Saddam Hussein's regime were for rockets, not centrifuges in a nuclear-weapons program, because the Italian military had once equipped the Iraqis with that make of rocket.
High-level Italian spies are quoted in the piece as being well aware that they needed to hook up with the rogue Cheney/ Rumsfeld back-channel intelligence operation -- running counter to CIA analysis -- in order to keep their hand in with the White House. (Where is this era's James McCord, the Watergate burglar and CIA loyalist who told all because he feared the White House sought political control over the CIA?) Pre-war, the aluminum tubes were also roundly dismissed as evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by the UN's nuclear-weapons inspectors as well as recent Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ex-Ambassador Wilson was only the last in a long line to discredit Cheney's zealotry about Saddam's nonexistent nuclear program.
As for the Bush Administration's insistence that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, last week the Los Angeles Times, in a stunning exposé, documented how German intelligence had repeatedly warned the CIA that an Iraqi defector dubbed "Curveball," who was the sole source for these claims, was a con artist who cooked up his story to get a German visa. But the CIA went right ahead, funneling "Curveball's" phony info into Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN rush-to-war speech and other presidential and vice-presidential saber-rattlings.
Even the weak-kneed Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed how analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA among others, discredited the administration's assertions that al-Qaeda operatives were in league with the Iraqis and gave the infamous Chalabi network of defectors (the main source for Judy Miller's "scoops") zero marks for credibility.
It's often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was reelected. (The two reporters had not then traced Liddy, McCord, and the other Nixon "plumbers" back to the Committee to Reelect the President and the White House). Three decades later, much more was known about the Bush administration's excesses before the 2004 election. But times are very different. The young investigative reporter of Watergate morphed over those three decades into insider icon Bob Woodward, the "stenographer for the White House" who managed not to report on, no less mention to his editors, his all-too-close relationship to the Plame affair, while publicly disparaging its importance.
In the early seventies, however skeptical Americans were about Washington after more than eight years of the war in Vietnam under both Democratic and Republican war-makers, some hope of political change still smoldered. Cold War paranoia was ebbing, the horrors of 9/11 yet unimagined. Government was still a bipartisan concept; corporate money had yet to completely dominate elections; the media was still diverse, independent of the Republican attack machine, and skeptical of the powers-that-be. It was still imaginable that classic American checks and balances might right the ship of state.
Now, when the President waves the 9/ll voodoo doll, Congress, the media, and the public flinch. With both houses of Congress under Republican domination and both parties beholden to corporate America but not voting citizens, there have been no Watergate-style hearings, no impeachment hearings, no public investigations at all of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture and secret prisons, war profiteering, or the lies told in the rush to war. The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives unblinkingly willing to put into the presidency a man whose party may well have stolen elections in Florida and Ohio.
We have no Sen. Sam Ervin, the avuncular constitutionalist and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee whose Watergate hearings educated Americans about the uses and abuses of government; no Rep. Peter Rodino, who ably and calmly chaired the House impeachment inquiry; not even a Republican like Sen. Howard Baker, who began by defending the White House and came to understand during the Watergate hearings that loyalty to country was more important than the survival of a corrupt president. Congressional critics have no forum like the Watergate hearings and are dependent on the jaded Beltway media to get the word out. But in recent weeks, moderate Republicans and John McCain, one of the few politicians still willing to fight for those quaint, old-fashioned things called "principles," are gaining traction. And liberal Democrats have new allies in the antiwar fight, most notably conservative Vietnam veteran Rep. John P. Murtha, who recently leapt over gutless wonders like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to demand the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
White House attempts to tar critics with treason have met their match in retired colonel Murtha who sarcastically said he "liked guys who got five deferments and [have] never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." (During Vietnam, Vice President Cheney received five deferments and never served in the military.)
We now have something close to one-party government in this country, an idea still so fantastic to Americans and their media that the most serious, in depth, and credible exploration of the 2000 and 2004 election fraud by any journalist -- the book Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America -- has been done by an Englishman, Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. He's now been joined by American professor Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and Why They May Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) digs into the subject as well.
And instead of the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller (and the reborn Bob Woodward). Only a tiny handful of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking circulations), 60 Minutes and almost uniquely the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the kind of serious, in-depth investigative journalism that was done by many in the Watergate era. On-line reporters, able to circulate a single story at lightening speed around the world, are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as their age of Watergate print compatriots but have radically less money to support investigations of any sort. As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in Vanity Fair, the Bush administration, like Nixon's, has succeeded only too well "in making the conduct of the press the issue -- again in wartime with false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national security." If only the media of our era had actually justified such attacks.
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.
Journalist Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East for the Village Voice, Pacifica Radio, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She co-anchored (with David Gelber) Pacifica Radio's live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings.
Copyright 2005 Judith Coburn
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.com
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Flashback: Republicans sinking in sleaze
By Tim Reid
10 Dec 2005
UK Times
A DECADE ago Newt Gingrich's Republican revolutionaries seized control of Congress after 40 years of Democrat rule by promising to end the culture of graft and corruption on Capitol Hill.
Today, after a string of indictments, scandals and a criminal investigation that threatens to implicate dozens of politicians next year, the tables have turned full circle. It is now President Bush's Republicans who are seen as the party of sleaze.
Polls suggest that two thirds of Americans believe that corruption is a serious political problem. That, allied with the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq, is raising fears in the White House of a voter backlash in next year's mid-term congressional elections.
Since the summer, leading Republicans have been hit by a steady stream of scandals.
In September Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful politicians in America, had to step down as leader of the House of Representatives after being indicted for violating election finance laws. He is vigorously contesting the charges.
Bill Frist, the Republican leader of the Senate, is also under investigation over insider trading allegations involving the sale of his stock in a healthcare company. Mr Frist has denied any wrongdoing.
How the Bush Administration led the country into the Iraq war, and Democrat accusations that the White House manipulated prewar intelligence, then dominated much of October and November after the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, for his role in the Valerie Plame CIA-leak affair. Mr Libby was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, and he too has pleaded not guilty.
This week Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor leading the CIA-leak investigation, convened a new grand jury to investigate further the role of Karl Rove, Mr Bush's chief political adviser, in the Plame affair. The move suggests that Mr Fitzgerald may yet bring charges against Mr Rove.
Meanwhile, Randy "Duke" Cunningham resigned from the House of Representatives two weeks ago in one of the most spectacular cases of political corruption in recent years.
Mr Cunningham, a Republican congressman since 1991 and member of the House Defence Appropriations committee, admitted accepting $2.4 million (£1.4 million) in bribes from defence contractors, including a Rolls-Royce and a $7,200 antique Louis-Philippe commode.
But of greatest concern to White House strategists is a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice into a Republican lobbyist named Jack Abramoff that could lead to the indictment of several politicians — mostly Republican — next year.
Over the past two years other investigations have exposed an intricate web of contacts between Mr Abramoff, one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington, and senior politicians.
Mr Abramoff allegedly gave them millions of dollars in donations as well as gifts, meals at top restaurants and lavish overseas trips, including golfing holidays at St Andrews. In return he sought legislative favours on behalf of his clients.
Last week Michael Scanlon, an Abramoff business partner and former aide to Mr DeLay, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials and defraud several Native American tribes. The tribes had hired Mr Abramoff to lobby politicians to get legislation favouring their gambling interests.
Scanlon is thought to have agreed to provide prosecutors with evidence that politicians took money in direct exchange for favourable votes.
One of the congressmen Scanlon is accused of bribing has been identified as Bob Ney, a Republican from Ohio. Mr Ney has been subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating Mr Abramoff, and denies wrongdoing.
It is alleged that, in addition to $14,000 in campaign contributions, Mr Ney received from Mr Abramoff's Native American clients, he also got a golfing trip to St Andrews.
Among others who went on a St Andrews trip was Mr DeLay, who once described Mr Abramoff as my "dear friend". The cost of Mr DeLay's trip went on the lobbyist's credit card.
Another Abramoff friend and former associate who went to St Andrews was David Safavian. He was forced to resign as the White House's chief procurement officer in September after being charged with obstructing the Government's investigation into his dealings with Mr Abramoff.
More than 30 members of Congress have been revealed to have taken legislative action favourable to Mr Abramoff's Native American gambling clients after receiving money from the lobbyist or the tribes. Most are Republican, but they include Harry Reid, the Democrats' Senate leader, and another Democrat senator, Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota.
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Flashback: Who Are the War Criminals? Naming Names
by Justin Raimondo
Naming Names:Behind every war criminal is a criminal idea
Editorial note: What follows is the text of a speech delivered on Dec. 16, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the 2005 Perdana Peace Forum.
The theme for this part of the program is "Crimes Against Peace, Crimes Against Humanity." We are discussing here the question of defining and dealing with war crimes. In any such discussion, however, we must start out by identifying who are the war criminals. We must, in short, name names.
I would remind you that only governments make war. Only governments have the resources to commit mass murder. Government is, by its very nature, a weapon of mass destruction. Governments from A to Z - from America to Zimbabwe - are potential instruments of brutal repression.
Last night, as I surfed the Internet, I saw an aerial photo of a village that looked like the bombed-out remnants of a target in Iraq – it was, however, a photo of a village in Zimbabwe that had been bulldozed by the government that has displaced over 300,000 people. Let's be clear: we are talking about government officials as the prime war criminals. So let's start naming names.
Of course, everyone knows the name of the man most responsible for the invasion and conquest of Iraq, because he is the most powerful – and the most dangerous – man on earth. He is George W. Bush, commander in chief of America's military forces, the man who is even now declaring his defiance of the American public and growing congressional opposition to the war by declaring that we won't get out until "victory" – and I put that term in ironic quotes – is achieved.
Less known, but no less culpable, are the people who planned and agitated for this war over the course of a decade. In America, we have a name for these people: we call them neoconservatives. "Neocons" for short. This is to distinguish them from ordinary, run-of-the-mill conservatives – or libertarians, such as myself – who advocate limited government and are generally suspicious of if not downright opposed to such grandiose social-engineering projects as "nation-building." After the end of the Cold War, most conservatives moved to a position of opposing foreign meddling in most cases. It was the liberals who then became the big advocates of America pushing its weight around in the world, with the interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the bombing of Iraq, which continued throughout President Bill Clinton's reign.
When the Soviet empire imploded, most conservatives gave up the idea of America as the world's policeman – but not the neoconservatives. They had originally come from the Left, and, having acquired the most authoritarian and elitist tendencies of the Right, the neocons retained the worst of the socialist movement's messianic pretensions, especially in the realm of foreign policy. As for their extraordinary bloodthirstiness, a brief look at their history shows us it was always there. After all, the earliest of these refugees from the anti-Stalinist Left had huddled around the ruthless figure of Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, later becoming the most relentless and militant opponents of the Kremlin. After some years, the second generation eventually found their way into the Democratic Party, where a good number of them – Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams – became aides to Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, Democrat of Washington state. In Washington, D.C., these guys were known as the most radical advocates of a massive arms buildup and a strategy of rollback against the Soviet Union.
The war in Vietnam was their Thermopylae, in which they tried to hold off the gathered legions of the burgeoning antiwar movement – but without success. Outnumbered, and defeated at the polls, the neocons left the Democratic Party when George McGovern and his antiwar followers took the helm. They soon found a new home in the Republican Party, however, where they continued their long march to power.
Neoconservatism, which has been called a "persuasion" and not an ideology by Irving Kristol – one of the chief architects of the movement – has always stood for two major principles, and that is the rule by elites at home, and a foreign policy of perpetual intervention and conflict abroad. Over time, this "persuasion" – which started out as a primitive anti-Stalinism – became more elaborate, taking on the elitism and philosophical nihilism of the philosopher Leo Strauss – the philosopher of the so-called noble lie – as well as an enthusiasm for the state of Israel, and the U.S.-Israeli alliance, that often borders on the very edge of propriety, and sometimes crosses the line.
For example, in 1978, according to Stephen Green, a researcher very familiar with this subject, Wolfowitz was investigated for passing a classified document – on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government – to an official of the Israeli government. This was done through an intermediary who worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. The investigation into the matter was eventually dropped, however, and Wolfowitz continued to work at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency – where he opposed every effort at arms control and disarmament. Perle and Feith ran into similar problems, with similarly inconclusive results, and the neocons continued their quest for upward mobility in Washington's corridors of power.
This kind of activity continues to characterize the behavior of the neocons in government right up to the present day, with one difference: this time, the investigation was not dropped, as in the case of Larry Franklin, the top Iran specialist in the Pentagon, who was recently indicted for spying on behalf of Israel. He was caught red-handed turning over sensitive documents and other classified information to two officials of AIPAC, who then passed it on to the Israelis. Franklin and his co-conspirators are scheduled to stand trial in 2006.
With this exotic mix of ideological positions – pro-war, pro-Israel, and dedicated to the tradition of Strauss and Machiavelli, which holds that only a few men of unscrupulous methods and natural genius have the natural right to rule – the neocons worked their way into the Republican Party, infiltrated the U.S. government, and finally penetrated the top echelons of the foreign-policy establishment during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when they captured the National Endowment for Democracy and the mid-to-lower reaches of the national security bureaucracy. By the time Reagan's second term rolled around, they had already established a significant beachhead – and assured themselves of a semi-permanent foothold in official Washington.
When the Cold War ended and their influence in government waned, they didn't disappear, but instead retrenched, setting up a network of think tanks, magazines, foundations, and political front groups, seizing effective control of the conservative movement in America. This was done by exercising a decisive influence over how that movement was funded – the big conservative foundations, which funded various projects, funneled many millions of dollars into their ventures, subsidized their followers, and pushed their ideas relentlessly, freezing out all opponents in the process. The result was a movement transformed, one that soon threw over its guiding principles – limited government, economic and personal liberty, and a foreign policy that puts America first – in favor of the neoconservative credo of big government at home and unrestrained militarism around the world.
They started so many magazines that whole forests of trees are now regularly sacrificed so that the Weekly Standard, the National Interest, First Things, National Review, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary magazine, and the Murdoch chain of newspapers can agitate for war, a policy of relentless American expansionism, and "regime change" from sea to shining sea. The number of neocon thinktanks is staggering: the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and at least half a dozen or so with the word "Democracy" figuring prominently in their names: the list goes on and on. Together they employ a veritable army of policy analysts, publicists, and propagandists who churn out a steady stream of arguments for increased arms expenditures and endless war – especially directed against Arab and Muslim peoples.
The neoconservatives languished during the post-Cold War era, all but running out of steam: in America, the appetite for foreign intervention was practically nil, and the Republicans, the neocons' chosen host of the moment, were reverting back to their traditional stance of a skeptical attitude toward foreign intervention. The neocons made limited headway during this period, at least on the surface: they did, however, begin to agitate for U.S. military action against Iraq, and in 1997 set up the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), headed by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, which announced its goal to be the promotion of "American global leadership." In 1998, a letter sponsored by PNAC and signed by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, among others, called on then-President Bill Clinton to attack Iraq.
A series of similar letters, newspaper advertisements, and public statements followed, all in the same vein: the U.S., they demanded, must invade Iraq. The neocons also called, from the beginning, for a major U.S. military buildup, what they termed a "transformation" of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, effectively doubling present expenditures. As they sadly noted in a September 2000, policy paper, however, that probably wasn't going to happen quickly enough to suit them, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
A year later, they had their "catalyzing event" – and the neoconservatives were suddenly at the pinnacle of a wave that has begun to crest only recently. Their war agenda was ready and waiting for the panic, the irrationality, the blind anger that infused the American public in the wake of the biggest terrorist attack in our history – and the neocons moved quickly to take full advantage of their golden opportunity.
They had argued long and hard that the Middle East had to be transformed into a series of pliable "democracies," all essentially run from the U.S., in order to make life easier for Israel. Indeed, a group of neoconservatives, including Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser, among others, authored a policy paper in 1996 for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which called for regime change in Iraq as a way to humble the frontline state of Syria. The "democratic" transformation of the region was seen by these writers as a way for Israel to get out of its predicament and break through to becoming the dominant power in the region, free from any military or demographic threat.
In short, the plan to invade and conquer Iraq was already in place. After 9/11, the authors of this plan were free to start implementing it – and the neocons were well-placed to do it. Dick Cheney, a PNAC alumni, was vice president. His chief of staff was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, another signer of the 1998 PNAC letter. Wolfowitz was installed at the Department of Defense, along with Feith. Wurmser was in government, ending up in the office of the vice president. John R. Bolton, now our ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, currently the U.S. ambassador to Iraq: the list of strategically -placed members of PNAC holding high positions in the Bush administration is impressive.
What has happened to America since 9/11? This question is now being asked by the world's peoples, who fear the spectacle of the American giant going on an international rampage. A pretty good answer was given by the journalist Seymour Hersh, speaking at a conference of the American Civil Liberties Union, held on July 7 of this year:
"Okay, so here's what happens: a bunch of guys, eight or nine neoconservatives, cultists – not Charles Manson cultists, but cultists – get in.
"And it's not, with all due respect to Michael Moore, (his movie's fine) but it's not about oil, it's even not about Israel, it's about a utopia they have. It's about an idea they have. Not only about that democracy can be spread. In a sense I would say Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our times. He believes in permanent revolution. And in the Middle East, to begin with, needless to say.
"And so you have a bunch of people who have been, for 10 or 12 years, fantasizing, since the 1991 Gulf war, on the way to resolve problems. And of course there'll be beneficiaries, Israel would be a beneficiary, etc., etc., but the world in their eyes, this is a utopia.
"And so they got together this small group of cultists. And how did they do it? They did do it. They've taken the government over.
"And what's amazing to me – and what really is troubling – is how fragile our democracy is. Look what happened to us… They took the edge off the press, they also muzzled the bureaucracy, they muzzled the military, they muzzled the Congress. And it's an amazing feat. We're supposed to be a democratic society. And all those areas of our democracy bowed and scraped to this group of neocons."
Hersh is right: after 9/11, the neocons pulled off what was, in effect, a coup d'etat. Already implanted deep inside the U.S. government, they emerged, at this crucial moment, like the pod people in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and took over their host, commandeering American foreign policy and bypassing the traditional safeguards built into the system. They bypassed the generals, they bypassed the intelligence community, they lied to Congress, and they ginned up a war that had been in the making for a decade.
But Hersh is wrong about the supposed fragility of the American system of constitutional government: it isn't all that fragile, as it turns out. It's just very flexible. It has been bent very far in one direction, and is now in the process of returning to its original position. Today, the war is very obviously a gigantic and quite embarrassing failure. The neocons are in retreat. And not only are they in retreat, but they – or at least some of them – will likely wind up in jail.
On Oct. 28 of this year, Patrick J. Fitzgerald. the special counsel appointed by the U.S. Justice Department, announced the indictment of I. Lewis Libby on five charges: one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of making false statements. I won't go into all the specifics of the case here: suffice to say that the vice president's chief of staff faces as much as 30 years in jail. The cabal that lied America into war is facing not only exposure, but also legal prosecution, because they broke several laws in the process of luring us into the Iraqi quagmire – not the least of which was planting bogus "intelligence" about alleged "weapons of mass destruction," then retaliating against anyone in the government who dared dispute their dubious assertions.
If we look at the neoconservatives as a parasitic infestation, we can see that the American body politic is reacting as any healthy organism would: it is rejecting the invaders and expelling them. The American people now realize the war against Iraq was started under false pretenses, and they are wondering when we are going to get out. The president and his cronies have launched a propaganda counteroffensive, trying to convince people that all is well and that we ought to "stay the course" – to no effect. Americans have made up their minds, and the question now isn't will we withdraw, it is how and when we do it.
The war criminals have committed crimes against the Iraqi people and against other peoples of the Middle East, but they have also committed crimes against Americans – and that is what tripped them up in the end. The indictment of Libby is only the beginning: prosecutor Fitzgerald is already looking into other crimes committed by other top Bush administration officials. There are even rumors that Vice President Dick Cheney is in Fitzgerald's sights.
Crime, as a popular American saying goes, does not pay. The criminals are eventually caught, exposed – and made to pay the price. The only question is how much damage they can do in the interim.
The damage to Iraq, and to the volatile situation in the Middle East, is considerable. We won't know for many years how many Iraqis died – the United States military, while it keeps a count of its own war dead, doesn't bother counting dead Iraqis. We don't know the extent of the bombing – except that it is being kept a secret. In Vietnam, they used to announce the number of bombing sorties every day: in Iraq, they don't talk about these bombing raids. As Seymour Hersh has reported, however, the air war is going to be increased in intensity, as American troops retreat to safer ground: that will increase the number of Iraqi casualties exponentially. We can count on two, three, many Fallujahs.
What we are facing is a conspiracy against humanity, a cabal motivated by an idea that is criminal in itself, and which consists of the assertion that the United States must run the world – for "our own good," of course. But that is what every tyrant and would-be conqueror has asserted in the past: that they and only they have the answer to the world's problems. The Soviets believed that, and so did the British, the Germans, and the French – from Napoleon to Paul Wolfowitz, the rationale is always the same. And it always ends in disaster.
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Flashback: Is 2005 the Year Republicans and Bush Were Finally Seen as the Corrupt Destroyers of America they truly are? Or is 2005 the year the Republicans and Bush Cast the Straw That Broke America's Back?
by Rob Kall
31 Dec 2005
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. Justice William O. Douglas
The horrific fall of the most basic rights and strengths of America-- democracy, privacy, truth and trust in government, transparency-- did not happen at once. But 2005 was the year when we the people, and the rest of the world were finally able to see clearly that the Bush Administration and its rubber stamp republican sycophants were not just a little, but outrageously, historically corrupt, brazenly breaking laws and flaunting their criminal actions.
2005 was the year when Bush decided he could declare his illegal actions. Perhaps he's appointed enough judges to make him feel safe that they will rule in his favor.
2005 was the year that the truth came out that the job of the Justice department to prevent bad laws from being implemented at the state level was blocked by political appointees who over-ruled career appointees who said laws allowing gerrymandering in Texas and pricey voter ID cards in Georgia should be illegal. This will forever cast a negative light on Attorney's General Gonzalez and Ashcroft. These two are running an agency that should be investigating and incarcerating them.
2005 was the year when Tom DeLay was censured for the third time by the congress, indicted in Texas, yet the president still supported this filthy, verminous miscreant who should be rotting in prison.
2005 was the year we learned that the military has been lying to us about the number of GIs who have died because of the Iraq insanity-- that when they say 2100+ died in Iraq, they didn't count those who died in Helicopters over Iraq or in hospitals outside Iraq, from wounds produced IN Iraq. The real numbers are closer to 8,000 dead.
2005 was the year that Bush casually acknowledged that over 30,000 innocent Iraqis had been killed by American actions.
2005 was the year that the idiotic Medicare drug plan went into effect-- the one that congress passed the legislation for based upon lies told by Bush appointees, the one that will, by summer of 2006, stop paying for drug costs, inevitably leading many seniors to stop buying medications which are keeping them alive. Some of those seniors will die.
2005 was the year we saw the massive incompetence of Bush appointee Michael Brown, head of FEMA, and when it started dawning on the mass of Americans that his idiocy was just the tip of the Bush appointee iceberg. Or perhaps the rotting from the head down metaphor works better than the iceberg metaphor.
2005 was the year DLC republicrat insiders "annointed" an anti choice, anti-abortion, anti embryonic stem cell candidate to run against Major league Republican "man-on-dog" Rick Santorum. They say Bob Casey jr. is the best choice. This is the same guy who, just weeks before a gubernatorial race primary had a 17 point lead and lost. Casey is the same guy who has been unable to marshall enough grass roots support to win a single on-line poll. My pick for Santorum's opposition is Chuck Pennacchio, who's made over 170 stump speeches across the state and built a grassroots support network of over 5000.
2005 was the year that Dick Cheney and George Bush shamefully opposed a congressional ban against torturing prisoners.
2005 was the year desperate fool Bill O'Reilly tried to build his media stock by selling a war against Christmas. What he did was prove just how un-Christian he and his theo-fascist fundamentalist supporters really are.
2005 was the year that South America showed that they had a better idea of democracy than the republicans and Bush do.
2005 was the year the 9/11 commission reported what a terrible job the Bush administration has done protecting America from terrorism.
2005 was the year the major precendent was set that corporations could screw pensioners and workers, using money that was supposed to be put aside for pensions to bail out bad management.
2005 was the year that it became clear the Bush administration's appointees at the VA were there to screw, not support veterans who have faithfully served their country.
2005 was the year George Bush used the Katrina disaster to erase laws protecting blue collar workers. Bush cravenly returned the laws when he was about to be beaten on this game in congress by Democrats and enough republicans who'd been shamed into protecting their abused constituents.
2005 was the year Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby-- the first step in cleaning up a corrupt White House that exposed an undercover CIA agent for spite, because the agent, Valerie Plame's husband, Joe Wilson told the world about Bush's yellowcake Uranium lies.
2005 was the year the the GAO confirmed that Bush stole the 2004 election.
2005 was the year the right wing and some sell-out DLC republicrats passed the consumer betraying bankruptcy laws.
2005 was the year when Bush's poll numbers hit the road, when middle Americans started to wake up. It seems there's always about 25-29% of the American populations who are just so stupid, brainwashed or greedy to wake up. I'm at the point where I feel like wearing a tee-shirt that reads "still Republican? You must be a total moron. And by the way the capital letter "W" is really an "M" turned upside down, and stands for moron.
2005 was the year America started waking up. Is it too late, or will she shrug off and recover from this vile Bush Republican infestation of maggots?
2005 was the year Michael Jackson moved to Bahrain, probably to avoid further prosecution and litigation. Now there's an idea. Why not cut a deal with Dubya-- let him move to Bahrain in exchange for quitting immediately and giving the USA back to the people, before he totally destroys it.
God Bless these United States. I wish America a happy and healthy new year.
Did I leave out any Bush/Republican horrors. Drop me a note with your items to add to this litany. rob@opednews.com
Rob Kall is editor of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology.
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Flashback: A Gestapo Administration: Bush's Witchhunt Against Truth-Tellers
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
2 Jan 2006
Caught in gratuitous and illegal spying on American citizens, the Bush administration has defended its illegal activity and set the Justice (sic) Department on the trail of the person or persons who informed the New York Times of Bush's violation of law.
Note the astounding paradox: The Bush administration is caught red-handed in blatant illegality and responds by trying to arrest the patriots who exposed the administration's illegal behavior.
Bush has actually declared it treasonous to reveal his illegal behavior! His propagandists, who masquerade as news organizations, have taken up the line: To reveal wrong-doing by the Bush administration is to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Compared to Spygate, Watergate was a kindergarden picnic. The Bush administration's lies, felonies, and illegalities have revealed it to be a criminal administration with a police state mentality and police state methods. Now Bush and his attorney general have gone the final step and declared Bush to be above the law. Bush aggressively mimics Hitler's claim that defense of the realm entitles him to ignore the rule of law.
Bush's acts of illegal domestic spying are gratuitous because there are no valid reasons for Bush to illegally spy. The Foreign Intelligence Services Act gives Bush all the power he needs to spy on terrorist suspects. All the administration is required to do is to apply to a secret FISA court for warrants. The Act permits the administration to spy first and then apply for a warrant, should time be of the essence. The problem is that Bush has totally ignored the law and the court.
Why would President Bush ignore the law and the FISA court? It is certainly not because the court in its three decades of existence was uncooperative. According to attorney Martin Garbus (New York Observer, 12-28-05), the secret court has issued more warrants than all federal district judges combined, only once denying a warrant.
Why, then, has the administration created another scandal for itself on top of the WMD, torture, hurricane, and illegal detention scandals?
There are two possible reasons.
One reason is that the Bush administration is being used to concentrate power in the executive. The old conservative movement, which honors the separation of powers, has been swept away. Its place has been taken by a neoconservative movement that worships executive power.
The other reason is that the Bush administration could not go to the FISA secret court for warrants because it was not spying for legitimate reasons and, therefore, had to keep the court in the dark about its activities.
What might these illegitimate reasons be? Could it be that the Bush administration used the spy apparatus of the US government in order to influence the outcome of the presidential election?
Could we attribute the feebleness of the Democrats as an opposition party to information obtained through illegal spying that would subject them to blackmail?
These possible reasons for bypassing the law and the court need to be fully investigated and debated. No administration in my lifetime has given so many strong reasons to oppose and condemn it as has the Bush administration. Nixon was driven from office because of a minor burglary of no consequence in itself. Clinton was impeached because he did not want the embarrassment of publicly acknowledging that he engaged in adulterous sex acts in the Oval Office. In contrast, Bush has deceived the public and Congress in order to invade Iraq, illegally detained Americans, illegally tortured detainees, and illegally spied on Americans. Bush has upheld neither the Constitution nor the law of the land. A majority of Americans disapprove of what Bush has done; yet, the Democratic Party remains a muted spectator.
Why is the Justice (sic) Department investigating the leak of Bush's illegal activity instead of the illegal activity committed by Bush? Is the purpose to stonewall Congress' investigation of Bush's illegal spying? By announcing a Justice (sic) Department investigation, the Bush administration positions itself to decline to respond to Congress on the grounds that it would compromise its own investigation into national security matters.
What will the federal courts do? When Hitler challenged the German judicial system, it collapsed and accepted that Hitler was the law. Hitler's claims were based on nothing but his claims, just as the claim for extra-legal power for Bush is based on nothing but memos written by his political appointees.
The Bush administration, backed by the neoconservative Federalist Society, has brought the separation of powers, the foundation of our political system, to crisis. The Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers, favors more "energy in the executive." Distrustful of Congress and the American people, the Federalist Society never fails to support rulings that concentrate power in the executive branch of government. It is a paradox that conservative foundations and individuals have poured money for 23 years into an organization that is inimical to the separation of powers, the foundation of our constitutional system.
September 11, 2001, played into neoconservative hands exactly as the 1933 Reichstag fire played into Hitler's hands. Fear, hysteria, and national emergency are proven tools of political power grabs. Now that the federal courts are beginning to show some resistance to Bush's claims of power, will another terrorist attack allow the Bush administration to complete its coup?
Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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Flashback: Fitzgerald Maintains Focus on Rove
by Jason Leopold
www.truthout.org
January 10, 2006
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is said to have spent the past month preparing evidence he will present to a grand jury alleging that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove knowingly made false statements to FBI and Justice Department investigators and lied under oath while he was being questioned about his role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity more than two years ago, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe.
Although there have not been rumblings regarding Fitzgerald's probe into the Plame leak since he met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the case more than a month ago, the sources said that Fitzgerald has been quietly building his case against Rove and has been interviewing witnesses, in some cases for the second and third time, who have provided him with information related to Rove's role in the leak. It is unclear when Fitzgerald is expected to meet with the grand jury again.
Fitzgerald has been investigating whether officials in the Bush administration broke the law and blew Plame's cover as a way to retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a staunch critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.
According to sources, Fitzgerald had planned to meet with the grand jury several times last month, hoping to wrap up the case specifically as it relates to Rove's involvement. But the prosecutor, who empanelled a second grand jury in November and whose term expires in 18 months, had his hands full dealing with another high-profile criminal case he is prosecuting involving Lord Conrad Black, owner of several major metropolitan newspapers, who was indicted on charges including racketeering.
Moreover, several members of the grand jury had questions involving Rove's prior testimony before the previous grand jury on four separate occasions and had requested additional information about the testimony and about the overall case, these sources said, leading to a delay in the proceedings so Fitzgerald could provide that information.
Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, said in a brief interview Monday that he has not heard anything about the grand jury requesting additional information about Rove and is unaware that Fitzgerald has been building a case against his client.
Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Fitzgerald, said he could not comment on grand jury proceedings because they are secret. However, Luskin said that Rove's status has not changed since the indictment against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, was indicted in late October on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements related to his role in the Plame leak.
"I think it's fair to say that there is no change in [Rove's] status. He is not a target of the investigation, but there remains an open investigation," Luskin said.
But sources knowledgeable about the case against Rove say that he was offered a plea deal in December and that Luskin had twice met with Fitzgerald during that time to discuss Rove's legal status. Rove turned down the plea deal, which would likely have required him to provide Fitzgerald with information against other officials who were involved in Plame's outing as well as testifying against those people, the sources said.
Luskin would neither confirm nor deny that a meeting with Fitzgerald took place last month. "I am simply not going to comment on whether I was or wasn't talking to Mr. Fitzgerald," Luskin said. "I am not acknowledging that it did or didn't happen, I am just saying that I have never commented about that before and I am not going to start doing that now."
Rove has remained under intense scrutiny by Fitzgerald's office for several months. During that time Fitzgerald, according to sources, has acquired evidence suggesting that Rove tried to cover up his role in the leak by withholding crucial facts from investigators and the grand jury, during his three previous appearances beginning in October 2003, about a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.
Rove's conversation with Cooper took place a week or so before Plame Wilson's identity was first revealed in a July 14, 2003, column published by conservative journalist Robert Novak. Cooper had written his own story about Plame Wilson a few days later.
During previous testimony before the grand jury in 2003, Rove said he first learned Plame Wilson's name from reporters - specifically, from Novak's column - and that only after her name was published did he discuss Plame Wilson's CIA status with other journalists. That sequence of events, however, has turned out not to be true, and Rove's reasons for not being forthcoming have not convinced Fitzgerald that Rove had a momentary lapse, according to sources - particularly because Rove was a primary source for Novak and Cooper and failed to disclose this fact when he was first questioned by FBI and Justice Department investigators just three months after Plame's identity was leaked.
Luskin maintains that his client has not intentionally withheld facts from the prosecutor or the grand jury but had simply forgotten about his conversations with Cooper.
Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.
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Flashback: More Allegations of Libby Lies Revealed
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post
4 Feb 06
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case alleged that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff was engaged in a broader web of deception than was previously known and repeatedly lied to conceal that he had been a key source for reporters about undercover operative Valerie Plame, according to court records released yesterday.
The records also show that by August 2004, early in his investigation of the disclosure of Plame's identity, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald had concluded that he did not have much of a case against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for illegally leaking classified information. Instead, Fitzgerald was focused on charging Cheney's top aide with perjury and making false statements, and knew he needed to question reporters to prove it.
The court records show that Libby denied to a grand jury that he ever mentioned Plame or her CIA job to then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer or then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller in separate conversations he had with each of them in early July 2003. The records also suggest that Libby did not disclose to investigators that he first spoke to Miller about Plame in June 2003, and that prosecutors learned of the nature of the conversation only when Miller finally testified late in the fall of 2005.
All three specific allegations are contained in previously redacted sections of a U.S. Court of Appeals opinion that were released yesterday. The opinion analyzed Fitzgerald's secret evidence to determine whether his case warranted ordering reporters to testify about their confidential conversations with sources.
Fitzgerald revealed none of these specifics when he publicly announced Libby's indictment in October on charges of making false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice.
The once-sealed portions of the federal court opinion were written in February 2005 by U.S. Circuit Judge David S. Tatel, who was a member of a three-judge panel that agreed with Fitzgerald that the testimony of two reporters, Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, was crucial to his investigation.
Yesterday, the same panel concluded that because Libby was indicted and now faced public charges, the court no longer had to keep secret many of the details of the grand jury investigation that Tatel analyzed. Dow Jones Inc., parent company of the Wall Street Journal, had petitioned the court to release the eight-page Tatel opinion. Three of the pages were redacted.
Attorneys for Libby and Fleischer and a spokesman for Fitzgerald declined to comment yesterday.
Since January 2004, Fitzgerald has been investigating whether senior Bush administration officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity to discredit allegations made by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Plame's name and her CIA role were first mentioned publicly in a column by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003, eight days after Wilson publicly accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify a war with Iraq.
According to Tatel's summary of the evidence that Fitzgerald presented in the court's chambers in August 2004, the prosecutor had at least a good circumstantial case on perjury but charging Libby with intentionally leaking classified information was "currently off the table," though it could be "viable" if he gained new evidence.
Tatel wrote that interviewing Miller would be crucial to making that decision, because Libby might have mentioned to her that he knew Plame's status was covert. He concluded that simply lying about a national security matter was serious enough to warrant ordering the reporters to testify about their conversations with Libby.
"While it is true that on the current record the special counsel's strongest charges are for perjury and false statements rather than security-related crimes ... perjury in this context is itself a crime with national security implications," he wrote.
The information gives a fuller picture of the case that Fitzgerald will likely put on against Libby. Yesterday, a federal judge scheduled his trial to start on Jan. 8, 2007.
In public remarks about the indictment, Fitzgerald has accused Libby of lying when he said that he believed he first learned of Plame from NBC reporter Tim Russert and passed along that information strictly as unverified gossip to Miller and Cooper.
Tatel's opinion also includes previously unknown details about testimony by Libby and other officials. For example, Libby acknowledged to investigators that Cheney told him in mid-June 2003 about Plame's CIA role and said she helped send her husband on a mission to Niger to determine whether Iraq was seeking nuclear material from the African nation.
That was soon after a Washington Post article on Wilson's Niger trip appeared. Libby emphasized in his testimony that Cheney only said it "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion."
Fitzgerald also contended that Libby lied to the grand jury when he said he never mentioned Plame or her CIA job to Fleischer when they had lunch on July 7. Fleischer recalled before the grand jury that Libby did mention Plame and said she worked in the "counterproliferation area of the CIA." Fleischer said Libby stressed that "the vice president did not send Ambassador Wilson to Niger . . . the CIA sent Ambassador Wilson to Niger . . . he was sent by his wife."
Fleischer added that he thought the lunch was "kind of weird" because the normally "closed-lip" Libby was sharing confidences and remarking that the information was "hush-hush" and "on the q.t."
Libby was also asked about two July conversations he had with Miller. He said he never mentioned Wilson's wife to Miller in the first conversation but passed along some information another reporter told him about Plame in the second, according to the documents.
Miller testified last year, however, that she thought Libby was the first government official to mention Wilson's wife to her and that he did so in three conversations: on June 23, when she visited his office in the Executive Office Building, and on July 8 and 12.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Flashback: Plamegate: A Credibility 'Gap'
By Steve Benen
AlterNet.
February 6, 2006.
Bush critics worry that the White House may have deleted Plame-related emails during a 12-hour head start in the CIA leak probe. The delay is worse than they think.
On the evening of Monday, Sept. 29, 2003, then-White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales had a choice. He had just received formal notice from the Department of Justice that t