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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (51437)	1/14/2006 2:35:11 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

Proof Bush Deceived America by Ray McGovern James Risen's State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, may hold bigger secrets than the disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. Risen's book also confirms the most damning element of the British Cabinet Office memos popularly called the "Downing Street memos;" namely, that "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy." The result is that it is no longer credible to maintain that the failures in the Iraqi intelligence were the product of a broken intelligence community. The Bush administration deliberately fabricated the case against Iraq, lying to Congress and the American people along the way. Risen, a senior reporter for The New York Times, reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had an urgent need in the summer of 2002 to get the equivalent of a "second opinion" regarding Bush's plans for war in Iraq – insight independent of his own telephone conversations with the president and independent of what Blair was hearing from his own foreign office. During his April 2002 visit to Crawford, Blair had gone out on a limb in pledging to support war on Iraq. The following months saw him getting nervous. So he chose what intelligence parlance calls a "back channel," and sent the chief of British intelligence, Richard Dearlove, to Washington to sound out his counterpart: the garrulous CIA director George Tenet, who he knew to be very close to the president. The highly revealing Downing Street memo contained the minutes of Dearlove's briefing of Blair and his top advisers upon his return from Washington on July 23. But what the memo left unanswered was the question of who gave Dearlove the confidence to say this to his prime minister: Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy. When the Sunday Times published the minutes of that key briefing on May 1, 2005, it seemed a safe bet that Dearlove's source was Tenet, and I said so. Now we have the confirmation. Risen writes that George Tenet was reluctant to receive Dearlove, but acquiesced when the British made clear that Blair considered the back-channel meeting urgent. Tenet then rose to the occasion – with a vengeance. Risen, quoting a former senior CIA official who helped host the British for a session that lasted most of Saturday, July 20, 2002, reports that Tenet and Dearlove had a 90-minute one-on-one conversation, during which Tenet was "very candid." Risen adds that by the time of this "intelligence summit," senior CIA officials had concluded that "the quality of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction didn't really matter," since war was inevitable. That perverse attitude certainly prevailed two months later, when the fabricated National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and WMD was produced by Tenet's National Intelligence Council in a successful attempt to deceive Congress into voting for war. A former CIA official told Risen that after the conversation with Tenet, Richard Dearlove could certainly "figure out what was going on; plus, the MI6 station chief in Washington was in CIA headquarters all the time, with just about complete access to everything." In any case, we now know that Blair got what he wanted out of the visit – the inside scoop from someone enjoying the complete trust of, and daily access to, President Bush. The president now says that he does not want his political opposition to dwell on how he lied to Congress and the American people in order to invade a country and kill tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and more than 2,200 U. S. troops – not to mention the many thousands maimed for life. Perhaps he knows that Risen's book could do as much damage to his administration by calling renewed attention to the Downing Street memos as is likely to be done by the revelations of the secret NSA wiretapping. One world leader recognizes the extreme danger of official lies told to a nation in the service of an aggressive war. He also happens to be a leader who survived the horrors of fascism in the last century. In a Jan. 1 address to the world, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the consequences of lies such as these, in what can only be a thinly veiled reference to the president of the United States: "…Sacred Scripture, in its very first book, Genesis, points to the lie told at the very beginning of history by the animal with a forked tongue, whom the Evangelist John calls 'the father of lies' (Jn 8:44). Lying is also one of the sins spoken of in the final chapter of the last book of the Bible, Revelation, which bars liars from the heavenly Jerusalem: 'outside are... all who love falsehood' (22:15). Lying is linked to the tragedy of sin and its perverse consequences, which have had, and continue to have, devastating effects on the lives of individuals and nations. We need but think of the events of the past century, when aberrant ideological and political systems wilfully twisted the truth and brought about the exploitation and murder of an appalling number of men and women, wiping out entire families and communities. After experiences like these, how can we fail to be seriously concerned about lies in our own time, lies which are the framework for menacing scenarios of death in many parts of the world." The ethos of the Central Intelligence Agency in which my contemporaries and I worked was chiseled into the marble at the entrance of CIA headquarters: "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." Sadly, the agency has come a long way. Reprinted courtesy of TomPaine.com. Find this article at: antiwar.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (51437)	1/14/2006 3:39:19 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

For sheer incompetence, this administration takes the cake By Molly Ivins sltrib.com Boy, you really can't take your eyes off this bunch for a minute, can you? If they're not screwing up one thing, then they're screwing up another - busy little beavers. And then there are the administrative nightmares they have created all by themselves: The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit is such a disaster area, four states took it over in less than a week just to make sure poor people received their drugs. Some of the press is starting to get the drill. Give us something like the West Virginia coal mine disaster, and instead of standing around emoting like Geraldo Rivera, a few reporters have enough sense to ask the obvious question: What is this mine's safety record? And when it turns out to be abysmal, a few more reporters have enough sense to ask: Who's in charge of doing something after a mine gets 205 safety violations in one year? Where's the Mine Safety and Health Administration? Who runs it? What's their background - are they professionals or mining industry stooges? Who's the Michael ''Heckuvajob'' Brown in this outfit? Why are so many jobs at MSHA just left completely unfilled? How much has MSHA's budget been cut since 2001 to pay for tax cuts for the rich? The great irony is that this was supposed to be the CEO administration. Bush was supposed to put people in charge of government who had track records in private industry, who did in fact know how to run a railroad. For just sheer incompetence, this administration sets new records daily. All those years the right wing sat around yammering about government incompetence, and it took this administration to make it true. But while the press is busy sort of figuring out what government needs to do - homeland security, anyone? - other agencies are slipping quietly out of control, with almost no attention paid. In the case of the Internal Revenue Service, the problem appears to be more malice than incompetence. Right-wing conspiracy theorists used to enjoy frightening themselves with the possibility that the IRS would somehow become politicized and be used as a tool by some nasty socialist like Jimmy Carter to go after their ill-gotten gains stashed illegally offshore. Always seemed like a good plan to me. Unfortunately, the only people who ever tried to politicize the IRS were on the right - first Richard Nixon and now George W. Bush. Hundreds of thousands of poor Americans have had their tax refunds frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, according to the IRS's taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson. Testifying before Congress this week, Olson said the average income of these taxpayers is $13,000. Olson and her staff sampled the suspected returns and found that, at most, one in five was questionable. The poor citizens are seeking refunds under the Earned Income Tax Credit, a Reagan program to help the working poor. The total possible tax fraud amount involved in these returns is $9 billion - compared to the $100 billion problem with fraud by small businessmen who deal in cash. That's the kind of shrewd administration we've come to expect from the Bushies. Olson points out it is not only unfair, but also a waste of time. Meanwhile, mind-boggling sums in taxes are being evaded by those at the other end of the income scale. David Cay Johnston, The New York Times' tax expert and author of Perfectly Legal, reports the IRS is now involved in an effort to cover up these very kinds of incompetence that Olson demonstrated. ''Records showing how thoroughly the IRS audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts the additional taxes assessed after audits, are being withheld from the public despite a 1976 court order requiring their disclosure,'' Johnston writes. In an episode reminiscent of the three stooges, the IRS simply announced there was no court order. This is, of course, part of a far wider and grimmer shutdown of information about our government. Despite cheerful burbling from the president (''The presumption ought to be that citizens ought to know as much as possible about the government decision-making,'' he said last year), this administration's love of secrecy is monumental. In fact, the cost of keeping what our government does secret from the public has gone up alarmingly: The classification system that cost $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2000 was up to $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004. That's a lot of Wite-Out. Meanwhile, the IRS has also tracked the political affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states. Its explanation is that the information was ''routinely collected by a vendor'' and, of course, it made no use of it. And now the IRS is planning to ''outsource'' collecting overdue taxes to private firms around the country. Now, let's see, do we think any of those private firms will have Republican Party affiliations? --- Creators Syndicate