Just in case you're still wondering how to vote on Tuesday - this great piece comes from my good friend Mal Karman.
From me - vote Dem straight across the ticket. Vote for Dems you don't like, vote for Dems you don't agree with, but vote Dem and once they're in office we can keep on their asses and make sure they do their jobs. But, for now, put George Bush and his friends on the unemployment line - at this point, our lives as free Americans depend on it.
Now, fram Mal -
Campaign 2006
Here are the “family values” and high morality followed by George Bush, his rank and file, his rubber stamp Congress and his good ol’ boy network:
Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to federal charges of fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion. (1/06) Sentenced to 70 months in prison. (3/29/06)
Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Del Mar, pleads guilty to bribery charges involving defense contractors. (11/28/05)
Republican David Safavian, Bush’s chief of staff of the General Services Administration, sentenced to 18 months in prison on four counts of obstruction and concealment charges for lying to investigators about his relationship with corrupt Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (6/21/06)
Republican Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, agrees to plead guilty to federal criminal charges related to his dealings with the corrupt Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Including fraud, improperly accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of trips, sports tickets and casino chips. (9/06)
Resigns from office in disgrace. (11/3/06)
Republican Tony Rudy, lobbyist and onetime aide to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, pleads guilty (3/06) to conspiring with Abramoff to buy off members of Congress.
Republican Michael Scanlon, a former Abramoff business partner and DeLay aide, pleads guilty (11/05) to conspiring to bribe public officials in connection with lobbying work on behalf of Indian tribes and casino issues.
Republican Neil Volz, an Abramoff partner, pleads guilty (5/06) to conspiring to corrupt his former boss, Ney, and others with trips and other aid.
Republican Roger Stillwell, a former Interior Department official, pleads guilty (8/06) to a misdemeanor charge for not reporting tickets he received from Abramoff.
Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay indicted on charges of laundering illegal corporate campaign donations, allegations he claims are politically motivated. DeLay resigns (6/06) amid a series of investigations of his fundraising activities.
Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., receives about $150,000 in donations from Jack Abramoff, his clients and his associates; amid a growing scandal, he subsequently returns the money.
Republican Rep. John Doolittle, R-Rocklin (Placer County), accepts campaign money from Jack Abramoff and uses the lobbyist's luxury sports box for a fundraiser without reporting it.
Republican Steven Griles, a former deputy interior secretary, gives preferential treatment to Jack Abramoff and his Indian tribe clients seeking approval for casinos, according to congressional investigators.
Republican Italia Federici, former Interior Secretary Gale Norton's political fundraiser and founder, with Norton, of the nonprofit conservative Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, receives large contributions from Jack Abramoff clients because Abramoff believed Federici would help him influence tribal issues.
Republican Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, claims he did not have a State Department official fired at the request of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, despite e-mails that reportedly show otherwise. (10/16/06)
Republican Lester Crawford, former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner and another Bush appointee, is charged with criminal violations stemming from his failure to tell government ethics officers that he owned stock in companies regulated by the agency. (10/17/06)
Republican Rep. Curt Weldon, who is suspected of using his office to help his lobbyist daughter win lucrative contracts, faces an investigation by the Justice Department. (10/17/06)
Republican Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, receives contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff but denies any link to him, despite the fact that Abramoff’s own billing records show he lobbied Pombo and his staff numerous times. Pombo also proposed the U.S. sell off 15 national parks, then after being roundly criticized for it, claims he never intended the idea to be taken seriously.
Republican Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., 52, the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, quits after revelations about sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages he had sent to underage House pages. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who knew of the messages a year before it became public, blames Democrats for letting the story get out to the press. Two key congressional figures testify before a House ethics panel about the Foley scandal, indicating that Hastert, R-Ill., and his top aides were alerted about the disgraced Florida lawmaker's behavior toward teenage pages before it became public. Hastert did nothing to intervene. Several congressmen demand that Hastert quit his post, but Bush backs Hastert. (10/06)
Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., in the wake of the disaster levied on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, suggests that New Orleans should not be rebuilt. (9/05)
Republican Michael Brown, Federal Emergency Management Agency director, is fired more than a year after it was revealed he had no emergency response plan in place to aid Gulf Coast residents in the path of Hurricane Katrina. Brown, a horse judge, had no disaster-relief management experience before Bush appointed him to lead FEMA. In the midst of the pandemonium and devastation in New Orleans, Bush phoned to compliment him by saying, “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie.”
Republican state attorney general of New York Jeanine Pirro under federal investigation for illegal eavesdropping. (10/16/06)
Republican Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage confesses to the FBI three years ago that he was the government official who first revealed the identity to the media of covert CIA officer Valerie Wilson, purportedly to punish her husband for criticizing Bush about the Iraqi invasion.
Republican Kenneth Tomlinson, a Bush appointee who chairs the Broadcasting Board of Governors and double-billed the board for his own work, directed staff to do personal work and used government resources for his private racehorse operation, State Department investigators conclude in a new report. Tomlinson also became the focus of unwelcome publicity last year amid allegations that he broke federal law, along with internal rules and ethics codes, in his efforts to bring more conservatives into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He resigned as chairman of the CPB ahead of an internal investigation that showed he worked with the Bush administration officials including Karl Rove, to find a president for the agency, which is supposed to act as a buffer between Congress and public broadcasting stations. Incredibly, a White House spokeswoman says that Bush continues to support Tomlinson.
Republican Rush Limbaugh went on the air to try to convince audiences that Michael J. Fox, who supports stem cell research and suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, is faking his illness. (10/26/06)
Republican Ken Lay, one of Bush’s biggest campaign contributors and the man the president was fond of calling “Kenny Boy,” is found guilty on all counts of fraud and conspiracy, including conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. As a result, thousands of Enron employees were wiped out of their retirement, savings and benefits. (5/25/06)
The charges in detail:
Count 1 Conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. Covers alleged acts from late 1999 through December 2001. Lay allegedly lied to employees, credit rating agencies and analysts with claims that Enron was healthy or that its books had been sanitized of problems when he knew otherwise. Guilty
Counts 12-13 Wire fraud. Stems from alleged false statements made to Enron employees via the Internet or video teleconference. Prosecutors alleged that as Lay assured employees in a September 2001 online forum that third-quarter performance was "looking great" and "we will hit our numbers," he knew Enron in mid-October would announce a massive loss and a $1.2 billion writedown in shareholder equity. The government also alleged that while Lay told analysts in a conference call days after the negative earnings announcement that he was disclosing all the bad news he had found, he held back information on dire problems. Guilty
Counts 27-29 Securities fraud. Alleged Lay misled a credit rating agency representative days before Enron announced massive quarterly losses, saying Enron’s books were clean when he knew otherwise. Also alleged that on two subsequent conference calls with analysts after the losses were announced that Lay minimized their impact and lied, claiming Enron wasn’t hiding anything when he knew the company’s financial health was worse than disclosed. Guilty
Counts 38-41 One count of bank fraud and three counts of making false statements to banks pertain to his personal banking. The charges alleged he obtained $75 million in loans from three banks and then reneged on an agreement with the lenders that he wouldn’t use the money to carry or buy Enron stock on margin. Lay faced trial without a jury before U.S. District Judge Sim Lake on these charges shortly after jurors in the conspiracy case against him and Skilling began deliberations. Guilty
Once the Enron scandal broke, Bush conveniently distanced himself from “Kenny Boy.”
Republican Vice President Cheney says that holding terrorist suspects underwater for a time during interrogations is a "no-brainer," prompting complaints from human rights advocates that he was endorsing the use of a controversial technique known as waterboarding on prisoners held by the United States. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and other lawmakers have said "waterboarding" is viewed as a violation of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. criminal law.
Republican Carl Truscott, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, resigns following an internal investigation into his misappropriation of funds and mismanagement practices. (8/03/06)
Two Republicans, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Warner of Virginia, say the Middle East and the world at large have become far more dangerous because of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Says Hagel: “We need to find a new strategy, a way out of Iraq, because the entire Middle East is more combustible than it’s been probably since 1948, and more dangerous. And we’re in the middle of it.”
Republican supporter Ted Haggard is forced out as leader of the megachurch he founded after a church board determined the influential evangelist had committed "sexually immoral conduct.” Haggard acknowledged paying a Denver man, Mike Jones, for a massage and for methamphetamine, but said he did not have sex with the man and did not take the drug. Jones said they had drug-fueled trysts together.
Republican Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who has repeatedly substituted sloganing for strategy, says those who criticize the war in Iraq suffer from “moral confusion” and likens them to those who delayed military action against Hitler and Nazi Germany. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi replies, “If (Rumsfeld) is so concerned with comparisons to World War II, he should explain why our troops have now been fighting in Iraq longer than it took our forces to defeat the Nazis in Europe.” Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., told Rumsfeld “Debate in our democracy is based upon respect, not vilification.”
Republican Defense Secretary Rumsfeld fails to respond to lawmakers demanding he remove known racists, neo-Nazis and extremists from active military duty.
Republican Terry Nelson, who served as political director for Bush’s 2004 campaign, is found responsible for the racist Republican National Committee television ad attacking a Democratic black candidate for senate.
Republican senator George Allen, R-Va., smugly throws a racial epithet "macaca" at a young man of Indian descent during a mid-August rally, then tries to distance himself from his Jewish mother by saying she cooked pork chops. "This fellow over here with the yellow shirt, macaca or whatever his name was, he's with my opponent," Allen said, referring to Democratic aide S.R. Sidarth. "Let's give a welcome to macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." "Macaca" is used to describe a monkey, or in some contexts, a person from North Africa. (11/04/06)
Republican Defense Secretary Rumsfeld loses the backing of even the staunchly pro-GOP military newspapers who have demanded his ouster. "Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress, and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt," the editorial says. "The time has come to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go." (11/4/06) The editorial ran in the 250,000 copies of Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times and Air Force Times.
Bush’s own private reality:
- Refuses to believe the British medical journal Lancet’s estimate that 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and its ensuing chaos.
- “You’re either with us, or you’re with them (the terrorists).” (Dissent, as this president would have you believe, is unpatriotic — that is, until recently when some Republicans began to dissent.)
- “Mission accomplished”: (What mission would that be?)
- “I’m a war president.” (Bully for Bush. But what this country needs is a peace president, or at the very least, a Congress committed to finding a way out of Iraq.)
- Refuses to watch Al Gore’s film about global warming “An Inconvenient Truth” (the Bush administration has downplayed the threat of global warming during its six years in office and in fact, manipulated numerous scientific reports to make it sound as if there was a controversy about the findings). However, a National Academy of Sciences study of data on global warming supports earlier findings that recent decades have been the hottest in 400 years (6/23/06). NASA scientists warn Arctic Sea ice is melting because of global warming. (9/14/06) Heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2005 and are still increasing, the U.N. weather agency says. (11/04/06) The vast ice cap that covers Greenland nearly three miles thick is melting faster than ever before on record, and the pace is accelerating year by year at a frightening rate, according to global scientists gathering data from twin satellites that probe the effects of warming on the huge northern island. (8/11/06) Twelve states join with environmental groups in a legal action against the Bush administration’s stance on global warming. (8/31/06)
- Lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and illegal uranium purchases in Africa, thereby coercing a Republican Congress into giving him a green light to invade Iraq at a price of 3,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqis, and fostering chaos where it didn’t exist before and a fertilizing a breeding ground for terrorists and insurgents.
- Thinks warrantless wiretapping should be his God-given right (In rejecting Bush’s demand for this power, federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said, “It was never the intent of the framers of the Constitution to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the Bill of Rights.” (8/06)
- Thinks war crimes charges should only apply to non-Americans
- Uses fear as a way to control the vote (You notice Orange Alerts and the like have disappeared because people thought it was arbitrary and stupid.)
- Claims that “amazing progress” has been made in Iraq. (9/01/06)
- Resorts to scare tactics about what will happen in America if we don’t follow George Bush’s policies. (9/08/06) In complete denial, Bush says Iraq is the centrist front in the global fight against al Qaeda but he has actually made the country less safe by diverting resources from the real war on terrorism. (9/01/06)
- Attempts to first opt out of the Geneva Conventions, which have been in place for decades, and later to redefine the War Crimes Act so that he has a free hand in interrogating suspects now in U.S. custody; drafts amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect his policymakers from possible criminal charges for authorizing humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees.
- Claims he can hold tribunals for detainees without affording them due process. But the U.S. Supreme Court's rules that prisoners held abroad by the United States, including detainees at Guantanamo Bay, are protected by international law, counter to Bush's assertion of wide-ranging wartime powers. (8/31/06)
- Admits the CIA operates secret prisons abroad for holding key suspects in the war on terror. While claiming the U.S. never tortures suspects, "alternative" interrogation methods are used to glean information from them and these procedures "were tough,” he said.
- Rarely mentions Afghanistan, the original stage for battling terrorism, as a success because it isn’t — the country is still ruled by warlords, the Taliban have come back to near-2001 strength, and the U.S. has dumped the problem of securing the country on NATO troops.
- Portrays himself and the GOP as protectors from terrorism, but tries to hand over management of six major ports to the United Arab Emirates. “People don’t need to worry about security,” Bush said. (2/23/06) When seacoast senators Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Patty Murray, D-D.C., called for tougher port security in 2005, the Bush administration all but yawned. Those 9 million containers entering US ports every year were just another terrorist target — competing with trains, subways, nuclear facilities, bridges, dams, and (of course) tall buildings and airplanes for scarce federal dollars. But the deal with Dubai Ports World was scrapped after a maelstrom of outrage from Congress, the public and the press.
Cheney’s own private reality:
- Says in 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its final throes
- Claims prior to the invasion of Iraq that Iraqis would greet American soldiers as liberators
- Makes liberals out to be the scourge of the earth, yet quotes liberal President Franklin D. Roosevelt when it suits him. Other liberal presidents, who gave us things such as the Peace Corps, the Civil Rights Act, the New Deal, the Great Society and the greatest budget surplus in history include John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, FDR and Bill Clinton. Liberalism is about the defense of the underdog, of minority rights, of social justice, of protection of the environment, of active but restrained government, of civil liberties, of openness and of tolerance — none of which are evident in this arrogant and dogmatic administration which has gutted pollution controls and called it the “Clean Air Act,” which has suspended portions of the Bill of Rights and called it the “Patriot Act,” which allows logging in once-protected wilderness and called it the “Healthy Forests Initiative,” which has repeatedly deceived the American public about WMDs, the economy, the threat to America from terrorists. This is a fear-based administration, anxious to control the electorate by instilling terror in our consciousness.
Five years after Bush declares the bombing of Afghanistan and routing the Taliban is a great success, the Taliban is regaining strength, Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, and Afghanistan’s record opium crop is helping to finance and empower the bourgeoining Taliban insurgency, meaning the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. and Britain have spent to eradicate the drug trade has been ineffective.
During a debate on "The Today Show" Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, tells America that Bush has lost Afghanistan to terrorists. "…. the goal is defeating the terrorists and making sure that Iraq is able to not become another Afghanistan, which would be the consequence if we were to cut and run," Mehlman says. He paints Democrats and a majority of Americans that want to get out of Iraq as "cut and runners," but says the administration’s policies in Afghanistan failed and conceded defeat there. (10/22/06)
The Bush administration cost taxpayers at least $1.6 billion on its spending for public relations and advertising campaigns over 30 months, according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Thanks to the Bush administration’s policies of “drop taxes-build debt,” the comptroller general of the United States warns – and the vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree – the U.S. is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency refuses to take action to curb the release of heat-trappig carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere. (8/31/06)
Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq's oil, electricity, water and sewerage sectors has fallen below pre-invasion levels even though $16 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, several government witnesses told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
More Lies: A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but continually denied by industry officials testifying before Congress.
A senior congressional investigator has accused his agency of covering up a scientific fraud among builders of a $26 billion system designed to shield the nation from nuclear attack. The disputed weapon is the centerpiece of the Bush administration's anti-missile plan, which is expected to cost more than $250 billion over the next two decades. The investigator, Subrata Ghoshroy of the Government Accountability Office, led technical analyses of a prototype warhead for the anti-missile weapon in an 18-month study, winning awards for his "great care" and "tremendous skill and patience." Ghoshroy now says the accountability office ignored evidence that the two main contractors had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements in a 2002 report that credited the contractors with revealing the warhead's failings to the government.
A federal judge rules that Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency devoted substantial resources to making discretionary rules, many of which are "more congenial to industry,'' instead of fulfilling its legal obligation to curtail toxic air contaminants.
Two of Bush’s top military generals tell senators that Iraq is on the brink of civil war.
A judicial panel orders privacy-rights lawsuits from around the nation, accusing telecommunications companies of collaborating with a Bush administration electronic surveillance program, to be transferred to a federal judge who has already issued a key ruling against the government.
Abu Ghraib: With the conviction of an Army dog handler, the military has now tried and found guilty another low-ranking soldier in connection with the pattern of abuses that first surfaced two years ago at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But once again, an attempt by defense lawyers to point a finger of responsibility at higher-ranking officers failed in the latest case to persuade a military jury that ultimate responsibility for the abuses lay further up the chain of command.
Desperate campaigns resort to attack ads: 91% of Republican commercials are called negative ads by nonpartisan policy center (11/1/06)
A year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ poverty-stricken population struggles to survive while the city’s affluent areas are quickly rebuilt. (8/20/06)
Bush fires his Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill for estimating that a war in Iraq would cost the country $400 billion. To date, it has cost even more: $450 billion and climbing!
U.S. military officials are enraged that Bush has slashed millions in military aid to Africa, moves that Pentagon officials and senior commanders say is short-sighted and undermines U.S. efforts to combat terrorist threats there.
The Bush administration moves to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others. (7/23/06)
Bush’s Homeland Security Department spent $34 billion in its first two years on private contracts that were poorly managed or included significant waste or abuse, a congressional report concludes. (Keep in mind that Congress is Republican-controlled). (7/28/06)
The U.S. trade deficit reaches record $68 billion as demand for foreign goods and services increases. (7/06)
The Bush administration tries to target the Sequoia National Monument, home of half of the surviving big trees, for logging.
A federal judge rules the Bush administration “clearly violated” the Endangered Species Act by approving pesticides and eliminating wildlife reviews by officials responsible for protecting rare animals and plants. (8/25/06)
Analysts across the political spectrum say the Bush Doctrine — pre-emptive warfare, choking the roots of terrorism by planting democracy, and brandishing power to force others into line — is a dismal failure and has left the country with few options and damaged its standing worldwide. (8/27/06)
Republican Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher is indicted by a grand jury (5/06) on charges of conspiracy, misconduct and political discrimination. He is embroiled in a state hiring scandal in which his administration is charged with illegally giving protected state jobs to political supporters; Fletcher then issues a blanket pardon for anyone in his administration who might be charged. (8/25/06)
Overhead costs have consumed more than half the budget of some reconstruction projects in Iraq, leaving far less money than expected to provide the oil, water and electricity needed to improve the lives of Iraqis. The report by a federal oversight agency provides the first official estimate that in some cases, more money is being spent on things like housing and feeding employees, completing paperwork and providing security than on actual construction. In some cases, 55 percent or more of the budget, with the highest proportions incurred by KBR, the Halliburton Co. subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, which has frequently been challenged by critics in Congress and elsewhere.
(10/25/06)
An intelligence report ordered declassified by Bush offers a sober assessment of the spread of Islamic terrorism, finding that the war in Iraq is "cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.''
In ordering the release of sections of a secret national intelligence estimate prepared last April, Bush was reacting to an election-year leak that threatened to undercut his claims about how well the war in Iraq was going. (9/27/06)
The chief official responsible for investigating abuses at Bush’s Interior Department accuses top officers there of tolerating widespread ethical failures from cronyism to cover-ups of incompetence. (9/14/06)
Republicans throw their weight behind two of Bush's most controversial national security programs, warrantless wiretapping and extrajudicial military tribunals. (9/14/06)
Bush wants to give the CIA virtually a free hand to treat detainees as it wishes so agents would be immunized against accusations of unlawful conduct, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. His proposed strategies for interrogating and trying enemy combatants is rejected. Alternative legislation that he has strenuously opposed is approved. (9/15/06)
Republican Lewis “Scooter” Libby, White House aide and Cheney’s chief of staff, is indicted on five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in connection with the investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA official Valerie Wilson in 2003. (10/29/05)
Republican Richard Perle, one of the architects of Bush’s hawkish policies and a strong advocate for the invasion of Iraq, says dysfunction within the Bush administration turned U.S. policy there into a disaster. Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisors to Bush, says had he known where Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney would take the war, he would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. A White House spokesman replied, "We appreciate the Monday-morning quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to succeed in Iraq and we are going forward with it."
Republican Kenneth Adelman, who served on the Defense Policy Board that advised Bush says he is "crushed" by the performance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam's military power and liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." But he says he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's national security. "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," he says. "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." (11/04/06)
Lies: The CIA knew Saddam Hussein had no ties to bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, but a week or so later, Bush told reporters the two work together and that al Qaeda was “an extension of Saddam’s madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world. . . You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” (9/15/06)
Eight months before the invasion of Iraq, Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain's spy agency MI6, reported to Tony Blair that George Bush wants “to remove Saddam Hussein through military action" and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This is a fancy way to say they were cooking intelligence, which, in even plainer language, means lying. Other damning statements from British intelligence: the fact that the evidence was "thin," and that "Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." (Opponents of the war were saying this at the time, too, but no one was listening...if only they'd had this "C" fellow at those peace rallies!) There was also talk about whether the war was legal, but those at the meeting agreed this fine point didn't bother the Americans. There was also talk about the need for creating political cover by giving Saddam a U.N. ultimatum which they mistakenly thought he would ignore and about goading Saddam into taking military action (perhaps even using those WMDs they couldn't otherwise prove existed!) by increasing bombing in the no fly zones. Dearlove got his info straight from the horse's mouth, in this case, his counterpart at the CIA, George Tenet and from members of the National Security team in Washington.
Detailed evidence emerges suggesting that Bush played a direct role in authorizing a selective, surreptitious, vindictive leak of information from a highly classified national security document to rebut critics of the invasion of Iraq. Critics say the disclosures, made public in a court filing in Washington related to the CIA leak case, appear to show Bush doing something he has repeatedly decried: trying to manipulate public opinion by quietly leaking information to the press behind a veil of anonymity. According to the filing, Cheney told a top aide that Bush had authorized the release of information supporting the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had sought nuclear weapons materials in the African nation of Niger, a blatant falsehood.
Bush's proposed rules for trying terror suspects are facing stiff opposition, not only from powerful politicians in both parties who have accused him of playing politics, but also from military and civilian legal experts who say his proposal is fatally flawed. "It is crucially important, after holding these folks for more than four years, that trials that are held are deemed to be fundamentally fair by neutral and unbiased observers," said Kevin J. Barry, director of the National Institute of Military Justice. "If we are to begin to regain our ability to be seen as the true leader of the world -- leading with our American values -- then we must make these trials manifestly fair. The president's bill doesn't appear to make it." (9/08/06)
And finally, supporting a war against terrorism does not require supporting this administration’s policies.
