Bring It Down. Now.

[struggle4progress]

by David Michael Green

The Downing Street Memo is the gift that just keeps on giving. And well it should. It is the smoking gun which proves that the gravest possible crime was committed by the Bush administration, and among its victims were the American people. <snip>

Generally content or frightened people will forgive a lot, sometimes even murderous lies of this magnitude. But angry, deceived people will not. Bush has built himself a credibility gap of which Lyndon Johnson could be proud, which probably accounts more than anything for his inability to sell the bundle of Social Security deceits he's been peddling. He said he was going to get Osama 'dead or alive'. He didn't. He said his tax scheme would revive the economy. It didn't. He said it wouldn't add to the national debt. Boy, did it. <snip>

The Memo itself lays out in clear text the game of deceit played by the Bush and Blair gangs in the run-up to the Iraq War. Among its highlights, the DSM confirms that the war had been decided upon well before Congressional or UN Security Council action, and before weapons inspectors were inserted and then removed because of the 'urgency' of Iraq's threat (of course, the real urgency and real threat was that the absence of WMD would kill Bush's pretext for war). The Memo then goes on to show, most significantly, that the war planners knew their case was "thin", so they distorted - "fixed" - the intelligence and facts in order to market the war. (For a more complete discussion of the Memo itself and the wholesale failures of the mainstream media to treat this earth-shattering story with anything approaching the coverage it deserves, see http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0513-20.htm.)

Eighty-nine members of the House sent a letter to the president asking for clarification of the ominous implications of the Memo, and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan soon began getting questions about it. It will hardly surprise attentive readers that his response to these questions was smug, condescending, and maximally disingenuous. Without addressing the content or implications of the Memo (and, most absurdly of all, while claiming not to have read it), McClellan refers us to the president's statements of the time, which he says provide a clear record of Bush's honest and very public diplomacy on the Iraq issue. It turns out, however, that if one examines that record just as McClellan suggests, one finds anything and everything but honesty from Bush and his team. Instead, precisely as the DSM prescribes, we were given a boatload of knowing lies from the administration, often in the most visible of fora, like the State of the Union address (see http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0519-30.htm). <snip>

<Ends with call for impeachment>
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0607-26.htm

[Jack Rabbit]

1. No, not Impeachment now; impeachmentS now

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Gonzales.

I can think of more who should be fired, but I think they would be too low level to be subject to impeachment.

And the whole bloodly lot of them should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.