"If the notion of a timely, legal heads-up from inside a Republican ...

understandinglife

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Mon Jul-25-05 01:21 PM
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"If the notion of a timely, legal heads-up from inside a Republican ...

... administration during the early days of a burgeoning scandal sounds familiar, it should. We've seen this act before, specifically during Iran-Contra, which ultimately crippled president Reagan's second term. Back then, the tip-off came from Reagan's AG and devoted troubleshooter, Ed Meese. Working from the inside and determined to protect the president, Meese's sloppy, out-of-the-gate legal work conveniently gave key Iran-Contra players, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and former national security advisor John Poindexter, ample time to destroy relevant documents regarding the White House's illegal arms-for-hostage initiative.

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So on the night of Sept. 29, 2003, the Justice Department, then run by president Bush's hyper-political AG John Ashcroft, called the White House counsel's office, manned by one of Bush's most devoted Texas allies, Alberto Gonzales, to give the word that a criminal investigation was underway regarding the outing of a CIA operative. Gonzales then immediately informed the president's number two man, Chief of Staff Andrew Card but we're supposed to assume that that sensitive information�news of the first high-profile probe targeting Bush's WH aides--just went to bed with Card and Gonzales, and that nobody talked to, say, Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, giving them a chance to play beat the clock? (The official clock started ticking 12 hours later when Gonzales got around to informing the White House staff about the DOJ probe and noting that all relevant materials should be preserved.)

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From The Ghost of Ed Meese by Eric Boehlert on July 25, 2005

More at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/eric-boehlert/the-ghost-of-ed-meese_4649.html

As opposed to Iran-Contra, what we confront is an attack on the core of America; the willful destruction of the Republic.

What we now know for certain is that an honest and thorough investigation will uncover evidence of the willful deception of the American people, the Congress, the UN and our allies as to the truth - Iraq was not a threat.

What we also know without any doubt is the Administration willfully disclosed a CIA covert officer and an intelligence infrastructure focused on weapons of mass destruction.

One of the best summaries of the deception appeared on Sunday in an Baltimore Sun Editorial.

War Stories

Baltimore Sun Editorial

July 24, 2005

The Plame-Wilson-Novak-Rove-Libby-Cooper-Miller-Fitzgerald drama is more than a case of the usual hardball style of White House politics straying a little too far over the line. It's different, because it gets at the very heart of the way in which the U.S. went to war in 2003. The Bush administration decided to justify a war with Iraq on the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. Plenty of people thought it likely that Iraq possessed nerve agents and biological arms, because the circumstantial evidence was fairly persuasive. Yet there was an unavoidable problem, from the administration's point of view: Even if those stocks had existed, they were a fundamentally insufficient reason to launch an attack. Containment was clearly working. Iraq had putatively possessed such arms for years, and had not used any of them since before the first Persian Gulf war. Iraq, moreover, had no means to launch a biological or chemical attack on New York or St. Louis or Oshkosh, Wis. It posed no threat to the United States.

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That July brought the article by Joseph C. Wilson IV, the diplomat and husband of Valerie Plame, in which he wrote that he had gone to Niger and reported back to Washington - a full year earlier - that the story was groundless. What this did was to demonstrate that the excitement over Iraq's supposed uranium purchases in the months leading up to the war wasn't a mistake, or an exaggeration. It was a lie.

This was Mr. Wilson's sin. The nuclear threat was the only justification for the urgency of war, and not only was it baseless but because of what he wrote, it was now clear that the architects of the war knew it was baseless.

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This is the context in which the continuing investigation by the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, must be viewed. This is not simply about the Karl Rove brand of politics taken too far, but about the fabrication that launched a war.

Link:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bal-ed.wilson24jul24,1,5383336.story

What we must understand is that the scope of deception extends to everything being done by Bush and the neoconsters.

We are living within a coup d'etat - the destruction of the American Republic. Among the most articulate accountings of the coup was published today by Chris Floyd.

The United States long ago ceased to be anything like a living, thriving republic. But it retained the legal form of a republic, and that counted for something: As long as the legal form still existed, even as a gutted shell, there was hope it might be filled again one day with substance.

But now the very legal structures of the Republic are being dismantled. The principle of arbitrary rule by an autocratic leader is being openly established, through a series of unchallenged executive orders, perverse Justice Department rulings and court decisions by sycophantic judges who defer to power -- not law -- in their determinations. What we are witnessing is the creation of a "commander-in-chief state," where the form and pressure of law no longer apply to the president and his designated agents. The rights of individuals are no longer inalienable, nor are their persons inviolable; all depends on the good will of the Commander, the military autocrat.

President George W. Bush has granted himself the power to declare anyone on earth -- including any U.S. citizen -- an "enemy combatant," for any reason he sees fit. He can render them up for torture, he can imprison them for life, he can even have them killed, all without charges, with no burden of proof, no standards of evidence, no legislative oversight, no appeal, no judicial process whatsoever except those that he himself deigns to construct, with whatever limitations he cares to impose. Nor can he ever be prosecuted for any order he issues, however criminal; in the new American system laid out by Bush's legal minions, the Commander is sacrosanct, beyond the reach of any law or constitution.

This is not hyperbole. It is simply the reality of the United States today.

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From Master Plan: The Rise of the Commander-in Chief State by Chris Floyd on July 25, 2005

Link:

http://www.bushwatch.com/floyd.htm

Mr Floyd notes that "There has been virtually no institutional resistance to this open coup d'etat. It's now clear that the American Establishment -- and a significant portion of the American people -- have given up on the democratic experiment."

And, that is not an accident. It is the consequence of just how aggressively and pervasively the "Master Plan" has been pursued by the necons; and infused by the vast corporate media propagandists.

With the publication of Robert Merry's Sands of Empire:Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition we have as clear a picture of the intrepid zeal of the neoconsters in their crusade for world-domination. David Corn recently reviewed 'the anti-Neocon' Robert Merry:

His book is the most scorching mainstream critique of the neocons and their misadventure in Iraq that I have encountered. Merry, the publisher of Congressional Quarterly and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rips apart that small band of ideologically driven chickenhawks and leaves their bones scattered on the floor of a Council of Foreign Relations conference room. Merry is a hard-ass practitioner of global realpolitik. There is not a smidgeon of sentiment in a single sentence of this book. He's certainly not keeping company with one-worlders and those who would identify (or misidentify, in his view) American national security interests with feel-good global humanitarianism. But in a classic example of that old Middle East clich� � the enemy of my enemy is my friend � he has produced a book that liberal-minded foreign policy folks ought to gobble up. And I would dare the neocons to enter Merry's knife-throwing gallery.

His high-minded goal was to pen an intellectual history that traced the ideas that led � over decades � to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. (Let's assume that ideas had something to do with it.) Merry does reach back far, reviewing the works and notions of such profound ponderers as the Abb� Charles-Ir�n�e Castel de Saint-Pierre (who postulated that humankind was on an inevitable journey toward further enlightenment and civilization), Oswald Spengler (the chronicler of the ups and downs of civilizations), and such big-idea moderns as Frances Fukuyama (the premature prophet of the End of History), Samuel Huntington (the advocate of the Clash of Civilizations), and Thomas Friedman (the cheerleader for the Glory of Globalization). Merry suggests that in the broadest terms there are two ideas that have motivated Western thought: the Idea of Progress (humankind is on a never-ending advance), and the Cycle of History (history is the story of civilizations that rise and then fall; screw progress). And a corollary to the Cycle of History view, he notes, is Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, which suggests that not only is progress not inevitable but that conflict between civilizations is. The capital letters are his.

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Merry is talking about wrestling with realities. The neocons speak of redefining reality � which also can become ignoring reality. Remember Dick Cheney's promise that American troops in Iraq would be welcomed as liberators? Merry does, and he catalogues all the false assumptions made by the neocons and Bush's foreign policy team:

"This litany of misstatements, misperceptions, faulty thinking and off-the-mark predictions raises a question: how could so many highly intelligent people be so wrong? The only answer is that they stumbled into a classic case of ideological policymaking � viewing the world through the prism of a rigid ideology, and then placing the pieces together to fit that ideological picture."

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From The Anti-Neocon by David Corn published at TomPaine.common sense on July 20, 2005

More at the link:

http://www.tompaine.com/print/the_antineocon.php

We can distill the situation we confront to the simple reality that we are either willing participants of the neoconster coup d'etat or not.

If not, then our task firstly requires blunt, unrelenting discourse with every person we can contact. Whether in a check-out line or at a ball game or on a coffee break, we must encourage all our fellow Americans to call it what it is:

TREASON.

WAR CRIMES.

TORTURE.

DICTATORSHIP.

WATCH IT; SPREAD IT http://www.bushflash.com/right.html

Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - How ever long it takes, the day must come when tens of millions of caring individuals peacefully but persistently defy the dictator, deny the corporatists their cash flow, and halt the evil being done in Iraq and in all the other places the Bu$h neoconster regime is destroying civilization and the environment in the name of "America."