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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mannie who wrote (10121)	12/7/2002 8:54:47 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Kissinger unlikely seeker of 9/11 truth By HELEN THOMAS Columnist HEARST NEWSPAPERS Sunday, December 8, 2002 WASHINGTON -- President Bush must have been kidding when he named Henry Kissinger to head an independent commission to investigate all aspects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. What a travesty. The master of duplicity in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations is now -- what? -- going to follow the truth wherever it leads? Not likely. In announcing the appointment Bush said that "Kissinger and I share the same commitments." He added that the commission "should carefully examine all the evidence and follow all the facts, wherever they lead. We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson" from the attacks. That's actually a welcome order from the president. But he was unintentionally revealing when he said he and Kissinger share the same commitments. Bush did everything he could to avoid an inquiry into the causes of the attacks as well as the policy failures and intelligence breakdowns that made us vulnerable to them. Bush held out long enough to force Congress, in setting up the commission, to let him pick the chairman and to grant his wish that it would require six votes of the 10-member commission to subpoena a witness. The president would have stalled even longer, but the families of the 3,000 victims of 9/11 demanded answers and lobbied successfully for a separate panel to supplement the joint House-Senate intelligence committee probe that is now ending. Yet for all his high-minded charges to the Kissinger panel, George W. Bush is not given to soul-searching. And it is difficult to imagine anyone in the country fonder of operating in secrecy, more protective of the government establishment and less forthright in many of his past activities than Henry Kissinger. So he and Bush make a perfect pair in their goal of keeping the disturbing secrets of official ineptitude secret. I agree with David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine, who wrote on Nov. 27 that "asking Henry Kissinger to investigate government malfeasance or nonfeasance is akin to asking (former Yugoslav dictator) Slobodan Milosevic to investigate war crimes." I covered Kissinger during his years as Nixon's national security adviser and later as secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford cabinets. Henry the K, as he was often called, was not known for veracity. In fact, I was amazed at the lengths he would go to in giving unnecessary as well as untrue denials. I traveled with him in 1973 to the Middle East as he was leading U.S. efforts to win a cease-fire to end the war between Israel and Egypt. We reporters asked many times if he was bringing a plan to halt the fighting and Kissinger vehemently denied many times that he had one. But after we left Israel and arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, we learned that Israeli Radio had announced the Kissinger peace proposal. Kissinger has plenty of charm and wit. He often joked about his alleged paranoia, saying, "Even paranoids have enemies." But on the sinister side, he wiretapped his own aides, whom he suspected of leaks during the Vietnam War, as well as selected columnists and reporters. He has been accused of encouraging the bombing of Cambodia and trying to keep it a secret. Of course, the Cambodians knew they were being bombed. So did the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians. Only the American public at home was not supposed to know. After the invasion of Cambodia, Kissinger assured us that American troops would soon discover the headquarters of the Cambodian communist rebels. All the U.S. soldiers found were bags of rice. The Cambodia venture widened the Vietnam fighting and blew this nation apart by arousing thousands of antiwar protesters to demonstrate around the country and to march on Washington. Kissinger assured reporters in the White House press room that "peace is at hand," a statement beautifully timed to boost Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign. But the war dragged on until 1975. As a government official, Kissinger was not only a master of deception but also of the fine art of back-stabbing. As Nixon's national security adviser in the White House, he undercut the late Secretary of State William P. Rogers at every turn. Rogers did not even know that Nixon had dispatched Kissinger to Beijing on the super-secret mission that paved the way for the 1972 resumption of U.S. relations with China. Kissinger was roundly criticized for his involvement in the CIA-backed 1973 coup that overthrew the elected leftist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende and for his support of the tyrannical regime of Allende's brutal successor, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. When David Popper, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, cabled the State Department complaining of Pinochet's human rights abuses against his people, Kissinger wired back, telling Popper that human rights in Chile was not our business. Last week, in appointing Kissinger, Bush set a rushed deadline of 18 months for the commission to come up with its report. Despite the enormous scope of its inquiry, its initial allocation has been a paltry $3 million to cover its costs. So, with his own checkered career and Bush's clear reluctance to divulge government shortcomings, Kissinger hardly seems capable of leading the commission in its probe of 9/11. However, everyone deserves a second chance, and Kissinger does have some pluses. As Bush noted in announcing his appointment, the former diplomat is "a distinguished author, academic, Army veteran and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize." So maybe he will see his new assignment as the chance of a lifetime to make up for some of his past mistakes. Certainly, it's possible that he could redeem himself by assiduously seeking the truth -- and then telling it. That would be one of the greatest role reversals ever. Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2002 Hearst Newspapers. seattlepi.nwsource.com

To: Mannie who wrote (10121)	12/7/2002 9:13:48 PM
From: abuelita	Respond to of 89467

scoot- i beg to differ. fleischer's not a moron - he's an idiot. but you're right, they are much worse than that. i thought that a year ago. hoser

To: Mannie who wrote (10121)	12/10/2002 5:48:37 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Gulf News says: Provide proof, not rhetoric Dubai:Tuesday, December 10, 2002 gulf-news.com It is no great shock that copies of the Iraq dossier on weapons of mass destruction, WMD, have been passed on to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The only surprise is that the Security Council should have been so coy about it. For it was inevitable that it would vote itself the power for the permanent members - the U.S., Russia, France, China and Britain - on the basis that the members "have the technical expertise to assess the risks involved in releasing the contents to other countries. It is likely that both the U.S. and Britain were itching to get their hands on the documents, to be able to prove their lack of credibility in comparison to the information that has been so painstakingly crafted by western intelligence. While it is true that the five permanent members all have nuclear capability, and all have expert knowledge of weapons of mass destruction - some having used such deterrents - the claim that their inspection will stop any leakage of sensitive information is merely a ploy. For it is obvious that both Britain and America want to speed up the process of evaluation of the documents. Already the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Unmovic, were saying that it will take "several weeks" before a full and proper analysis of the dossier would be forthcoming. Such a claim would have disheartened the American president and the British prime minister, who are both keen to "get things moving". Or, put another way, to discredit the dossier and start an invasion campaign against Iraq. So far, America and Britain have not produced tangible and credible evidence that Iraq has any weapons of mass destruction; nor have any inspectors found any such evidence. If there was such evidence, it would seem logical for the inspectors to home in on those locations first. If that is what they have done, then they have come away remarkably empty-handed. America consistently claims that if Iraq claims it has no weapons of mass destruction, or dual-use material in its possession, then this in itself would be contravening UN Resolution 1441, since it would be a falsehood. But, for that to be true, America has to supply proof of the falsehood. Mere words alone will not suffice.