Well, goolly.
Looks like the guy Bush is going to sneak into the U.N. while Congress is on vacation, er, “neglected” to tell the truth to Congress about having been questioned by investigators about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction claims.
But hey, that’s OK, right? Apparently, you know, he just didn’t remember to tell the truth.
I guess we should be like the Republicans, and not get all worked up about people lying to Congress. Right?
Remember all those claims by Republicans that the Abu Ghraib torture and humiliation of prisoners by American soldiers was just an isolated incident that a bunch of low-level soldiers cooked up all by themselves? Remember how the Bush Administration said that there was no plan for the torture, and that the Pentagon surely didn’t have a plan to torture people in a similar fashion around the world?
Lies. It was all lies. And for that, we have the sworn testimony of American soldiers, testifying independently of one another.
It turns out that there was a systematic program to take torture techniques used in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and teach those techniques to Americans working as prison guards in Abu Ghraib. Forced nudity, sleep deprivation, attacks by guard dogs are among the techniques of torture approved by Donald Rumsfeld and taught, like a course in mathematics, by soldiers from Guantanamo Bay to soldiers in Abu Ghraib.
This conspiracy of torture has now been proven to go all the way up to the Bush Administration Cabinet – right outside of George W. Bush’s door.
And who says that this was illegal? Not just a bunch of anti-war protesters (though I’d value that, given that the anti-war protesters have been right about just about everything having to do with the Iraq War. No, it’s high level officers in the United States military who warned the Bush Administration, in writing, that the kind of interrogation techniques they were planning to use in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, would constitute war crimes:
“We need to consider the overall impact of approving extreme interrogation techniques as giving official approval and legal sanction to the application of interrogation techniques that U.S. forces have consistently been trained are unlawful.“
– Air Force Major General Jack L. Rives, February 5, 2003
The Bush Administration conspired to spread torture around the world, and was told that to do so would be illegal. Then the Bush Administration went ahead with the conspiracy anyway. Is that serious enough?
Apparently not. Republicans in Congress say that they have no plans even to ask President Bush or Donald Rumsfeld questions about these war crimes.
I ran across a bit of information today that caused me to reflect upon the movement to impeach and imprison Bush. According to a Zogby poll conducted recently, 58 percent of American voters would not want President George W. Bush to be impeached if conclusive evidence were presented that Bush purposefully lied in order to get America into the Iraq War.
What occurred to me as I read this information was that it will not be enough for those of us who want to impeach Bush and imprison him to find just a minimum amount of evidence necessary to convict Bush of a crime. We have to build up an emotionally compelling case that makes Bush look like a stereotypical criminal, not just a political creep.
The Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton made the mistake of impeaching him for behavior that just didn’t seem criminal. Getting a blow job and then lying about it may be technically against the law in a few circumstances, but to most Americans, it’s perfectly natural behavior.
Just so, we would make a mistake by impeaching Bush for merely attempting to push through a radical political agenda using illegal means. Americans expect politicians to do that.
No, when Americans think of criminals, they think primarily of murderers and thieves, or people who brutally attack little old ladies. Tax evasion doesn’t register a big reaction, and neither does insider stock trading. That’s a shame, because white collar crimes often cause more damage, but that’s the way it is. If we’re going to be successful in getting the American people to support an effort to impeach Bush, we’re going to have to find an overwhelming case against him that really makes Americans feel betrayed. Without that support, the effort will fail.
The material has been handed to us by Bush – he has committed several heinous crimes. But, it’s up to us to wrap it all up in a neat package that the public at large will understand and agree with.
Karl Rove and Lewis Libby leaked the identity of an active undercover CIA agent out to the press in order to punish that agent’s husband for exposing the lies of George W. Bush about Iraq. Rove is the top political aide to George W. Bush and Libby is the top aide to Dick Cheney.
Now we learn that former Bush Administration Press Secretary Ari Fleischer perjured himself when he said that he never saw a memo circulating through the Bush White House discussing the revelation of the undercover CIA agent’s identity – Valerie Plame. Ari Fleischer is also known to have taken a telephone call from Robert Novak, who wrote about Valerie Plame’s identity in newspapers across the country, thus endangering every undercover American agent who had ever worked with Plame. Ari Fleischer is refusing to comment about that phone call. How convenient for him – a man who made his living speaking for the President of the United States is now shut tight like a clam.
Then there’s John Bolton, that big bully who yells at anyone who gets in his way and wants the United States to storm around the world like he storms around his office. John Bolton has been asked to testify before the grand jury about that same memo about Valerie Plame memo that Ari Fleischer was caught reading. Why? Well, it turns out that John Bolton saw it too. Furthermore, we have learned that John Bolton was an anonymous source feeding government misinformation about the imaginary Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to journalist Judith Miller. Judith Miller has gone to jail rather than reveal the name of her source that told her the identity of Valerie Plame, and encouraged her to write about that identity. Put two and two together…
These four top White House insiders, plus a whole bunch of others, were packed on a White House airplane to cover up the tracks of Ambassador Wilson’s truth-finding mission in Africa. Are we honestly supposed to believe that there was no conspiracy to attack Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson? Are we really supposed to buy the line that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney knew nothing – and that’s why they refused to testify separately and under oath? Criminals. Criminals all.
The time has come for the grand jury to get new depositions from President Bush and Vice President Cheney – separately, and under oath.
The depths to which the Republican government of the United States has sunk is revealed in a new talking point that Republicans are using to excuse the mountain of deadly mistakes they’ve made while in charge: “We can’t change the past, so let’s just look to the future.”
I see this Republican excuse all the time these days. Most recently, on the Irregular Times blog, I read it from a Republican commenter who seriously wrote that we shouldn’t pay attention to all the tragic mistakes of Bush’s War in Iraq because “We can’t control the past.”
What strange reasoning! These Republicans are really trying to say that we citizens should just shut up about the things we cannot control. So, by that logic, if a person is committing a string of murders across the country, we should just keep quiet about it because that murderer is out of our control.
I say NO to that kind of Republican moral weakness. I say that if a person is committing murders, we talk about it, and investigate it because that’s the way that we bring criminals under our control.
The new Republican weakness argues that there’s no point in worrying about crime, and there’s no point in bringing criminals to justice, because the crimes are all in the past, and we should just let bygones be bygones.
It seems a simple point, but in these days of Republican relativism, it does need to be made: If President Bush broke the law, he needs to be brought to justice and punished. We should not let a criminal President remain out of control. President Bush is suspected of many, many crimes, but the Republican Congress, the government body that should be investigating him, is sitting on its hands and doing nothing about it.
The message of the Republican Congress: Crime doesn’t matter.
The message of Imprison Bush: Oh, yes, crime does matter, and we’ll be replacing any lazy Republican member of Congress who doesn’t start investigating government crime as it is the duty of Congress to do.
I’ve got to hand it to Karl Rove. The guy plans stuff out four or five moves in advance. Then he punches and dodges in combination:
Case in point:
Punch: 1. The Supreme Court strikes down sodomy laws, effectively legalizing homosexuality in the U.S. for the first time. 2. Gay rights activists follow up by pushing to legalize gay marriage.
Counterpunch: 1. Bush responds by bravely promoting a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as “between a man and a woman.” 2. The brave stand for “family” fails, conservatives portray themselves as victims, and marshal conservative Christian forces for a counterattack. 3. States draw up their own ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage, just in time for the 2004 elections. 4. The initiatives draw conservative Christian voters who might not have voted otherwise in out of the woodwork in record numbers. 5. Bush wins in 2004.
Rove had it planned out, probably since the Supreme Court decision on sodomy laws. Several moves in advance.
Now we see the same thing with the Plame leak case. I’ll hand it to you, even when he’s on the losing end, he can still dodge and feint to avoid the square hit that’s coming to him.
Look what’s happened in the last few weeks:
1. Punch: It finally comes out that Rove and Libby leaked the name of a CIA officer to the press. Turns out the administration lied through Scott McClellan, who outright denied they were involved. Also turns out the administration will not keep its promise to fire anyone involved.
2. Counterpunch: The talking points are unleashed: The conservative talking heads come out and say Plame wasn’t under cover. Or they say everybody knew who she was, saw her go to work every day. This isn’t a big deal, and they prophesy all the fuss will be over in days rather than weeks…
3. Slip the Counter-Counterpunch: How do all these media talking heads know whether or not Plame was under cover? And how do they get off saying “We don’t know the facts so we should suspend judgement” at the same time they say “she wasn’t under cover?” Their counterpunch is not going to stand up to scrutiny. They are left in a vulnerable position. What to do? Slip. Dodge. Declare a nominee for the Supreme Court. That’ll distract them.
4. The Counter-Counterpunch: This comes in the form of an open letter to congress from eleven former employees of the CIA saying, among other things, that “These comments [about Plame not being under cover] reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who ‘work at a desk’ in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.” They also had this to say: “We believe that the partisan attacks against Valerie Plame are sending a deeply discouraging message to the men and women who have agreed to work undercover for their nation’s security.” That’s a heavy hit. It’s square on.
5. And nobody’s paying attention, because the Bush administration has announced a new nominee for the Supreme Court. See, it wasn’t a big deal after all, because all the fuss was over in days rather than weeks…
At the heart of the Bush administration is a powerful mix of naive credulity and Machiavellian scheming, embodied in the partnership of Bush and Rove. A mix of these two is a powerful engine for propaganda. But in the absence of pragmatism or a moral compass, it’s a lousy framework for building genuine security or democracy.
Yesterday, eleven former CIA agents sent a letter to the United States Congress. In that letter, they advised members of Congress that the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover American agent by Karl Rove and Libby Lewis created a serious amount of damage to America’s national security and to the ability of American agents to gather intelligence in the future. As such, the leak by Rove and Lewis was not just a politically motivated attack against a single CIA agent, but an attack against the security of all Americans.
Also included in this letter was the new information that the Bush Administration has been telling CIA officials and other government officials to lie to the press and to the American public, saying that Valerie Plame was not undercover, when in fact, she was. The Bush Administration also told these government officials to tell the public that Valerie Plame’s identity never ought to have been protected in the first place – although it was not only official government policy, but also the law of the land, that the identity of all undercover CIA agents be protected.
This is evidence that George W. Bush himself is involved in an attempt to coverup the leaks by Rove, Libby (and perhaps other Bush Administration officials), and help them to evade the law.
Well well. This is starting to get interesting. Check out what Cooper said, according to today’s Associated Press:
“As part of Fitzgerald’s criminal investigation, Cooper testified about his conversation with Libby in a deposition at his lawyer’s office in August 2004. Libby, as Rove did this month, provided a specific waiver of confidentiality. In a grand jury appearance last Wednesday, Cooper gave his account of what Rove told him.”
So now we learn Cooper was already talking to prosecutors almost a year ago, with Libby’s permission.
Why would Libby let Cooper testify? Maybe because it made Rove look like the original leaker, since Cooper talked to Rove first and Libby second? Was Libby trying to deflect blame from himself by throwning Rove to the wolves?
And how did Fitzgerald get Libby to allow Cooper to testify last August? He obviously had something up his sleeve we haven’t heard about.
Now, though, undisclosed sources close to Rove’s legal team are leaking suggestive stuff of their own: Rove is going to “cooperate fully” (throw Libby to the wolves?), and he is not the “target of the investigation” (Libby is?).
Are we seeing a slow-motion battle between Libby and Rove–each trying to get the other one to take the fall? Who knows.
Of course, we can only guess what’s really going on. The White House’s lies and secrecy have seen to that.
But one thing’s for sure. This case is still unravelling, and there are plenty more surprises to come.