Cheney’s Paper Trail Preserved

A US District Court Judge has forbidden the destruction of documents from Vice President Dick Cheney’s years in the White House.

As you may have guessed, Cheney was opposing this. I suspect he’d like to leave a lot of his paper trail in the form of ashes. That seems to be what the judge thought too. From CBC.CA:

A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is suing Cheney and the Executive Office of the President in an effort to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.
The judge said the administration’s legal position “heightens the court’s concern” that some records may not be preserved.

In a 22-page opinion, Kollar-Kotelly revealed that in recent days lawyers for the administration balked at a proposed agreement between the two sides on how to proceed with the case.

She said the administration wanted any court order on what records are at issue in the case to cover only the office of the vice-president, not Cheney himself or the other defendants in the lawsuit: the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives.

The suit alleges that the administration’s actions over the past 7½ years raise questions over whether the White House will turn over records created by Cheney and his staff to the National Archives when the newly elected administration takes over in January.

Now, all those who believe Dick Cheney is going to leave the paper trail intact, please raise your right hands and board the bus to Fantasyland.

 

Why We All Have a Huge Stake in America’s Election

Look at George Bush and South Ossetia. See any connection? Too bad because it’s there.

One of the lasting scars we’ll all have to deal with after the death of the BuCheney regime will be the enormous damage it’s caused to global security. Answer a few questions.

Who drove the revival and spread of Islamist fundamentalism?

Who has destabilized the once Sunni-dominated Middle East and precipitated the ascendancy of Shiite power in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Occupied Territories?

Who relentlessly pressed for the expansion of NATO right to the borders of Russia?

Who has undermined the strength and economic stability of the very nation the world has accepted for so long as the leader of the Free World, the United States itself?

Who has sparked and then fueled arms races around the world?

These are just some of the dregs of BuCheney that’ll be left behind for others to deal with. The Frat Boy and his puppeteer have done their work. They don’t see their administration as a failure if only because they managed to enact the social agenda they wanted, albeit with some setbacks such as the Social Security debacle.

George w. Bush meant it when, during his first term, he addressed a black-tie dinner and described the guests as “his base” calling them “the haves and the have-mores.” To these people, this top sliver of American society, the Bush years have been grand indeed.

So, what’s the connection between George w. Bush, Dick Cheney and South Ossetia? The White House has relentlessly pressured NATO to expand to the very borders of Russia. It was France and Germany that balked at admitting Georgia into the Alliance. America has encouraged Georgian adventurism and defiance of Russia, even backing a thug like Saakashvili (shown with Bush above) while he violently suppressed dissent in his country.

Georgia was no place for clumsy meddling. The Ossetia issue has been around since at least 1922 when the South Ossetia Autonomous region came into being. In fact the Russians have been backing Ossetian autonomy since the reign of Catherine the Great. Since 1925 there has been a movement to unite South and North Ossetia. Georgia moved on South Ossetia in 1989 declaring it no longer autonomous and trying to force assimilation by measures such as declaring Georgian the official language. Fighting between the Ossetians and Georgians has been an on and off reality since 1991.

When America, despite the wishes of the Europeans, moved to consolidate its influence with Georgia, it emboldened Saakashvili to the point where he thought he could execute a coup de main while everyone was distracted with the Beijing Olympics.

America’s puerile foreign policy has played a direct role in the current fighting and has been reflected in Condoleeza Rice calling for Russia but not Georgia to withdraw entirely from Ossetia. Her rank stupidity and complete disregard for the historical realities at play in Ossetia has been nothing short of breathtaking.

We can only hope that we’ll see a new face of America after the November elections.

 

Arrest Bush, Arrest Them All

The United States Army general who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture scandal has accused the Bush regime of war crimes and challenged American prosecutors to act.

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who claims he was forced into early retirement for his outspoken findings, says Bush and his minions have disgraced the honour of the United States and its military:

“This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals’ lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted – both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The former detainees in this report – each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life – require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.

And so do the American people.”

Read the summary of the Taguba report here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4894001/

Look, people, here’s another challenge. These draft-dodging despots, beginning with Cheney and working on down through the ranks of the neo-con vultures, are war criminals, plain and simple. Why, then, are we still treating them as legitimate members, nay leaders, of the community of nations of the free world? Bush/Cheney have caused the slaughter of far more people than Mugabe ever did, more than Ghadaffi, more than Arafat, more than al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, more than just about anyone save for Nixon, Stalin and Hitler.

These people, and the right-wingers in other nations who serve as their enablers, are vermin and if our world is to heal the wounds they’ve torn into us, the leadership must be denounced and condemned, charged and tried. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced deserve nothing less.

Before you dismiss this call as histrionic or hyperbole, at least read this:

http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/

Then, those of you interested in seeing the complete mosaic of how the American people and the rest of us were neo-conned into the War Without End on Terror, throw 75-bucks at PBS and get a copy of their 4.5-hour DVD “Bush’s War.” If you still have some hold on your senses and integrity, it’ll make your blood boil.

 

NEO-CONNED?

Is this the Bush regime’s Watergate? It’s a long post and it’s far from complete but it suggests a pattern of duplicity, corruption and even treachery that led to the American invasion of Iraq and the deaths of tens, perhaps thousands of innocents. A look at the villains and miscreants involved reads like a spy novel, only worse. This post is assembled from various sources. It’s long but I believe well worth the read.

McClatchey Newspapers has broken a story that suggests the “neo-cons” either naively duped or recklessly conned the Bush administration on behalf of the Iranian government to invade Iraq.
The cast of characters is fascinating – Rumsfeld, Cheney, Douglas Feith, Peter Cambone, Michael Ledeen and a supposed Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar.

Rumsfeld and Cheney you know. Douglas Feith headed Rumsfeld’s private intelligence agency within the Pentagon (the Office of Special Plans) that somehow always seemed to produce supposed intelligence far more provocative than what was coming out of America’s established intelligence agencies such as the CIA.

Michael Ledeen. This character is a “scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-cons own bat cave where folks like John Bolton, David Frum, Fred Kagan, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz hide from the sunlight. Born in Los Angeles, Ledeen moved to Rome in 1974 to study – why, of course, Italian fascism. A founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen worked for the Italian military intelligence service in 1980 as a risk analyst and later served as a Special Advisor to Secretary of State Al Haig during the Reagan administration.

Then there’s Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, the supposed Iranian exile. Here’s part of his Wikipedia bio:

Manucher Ghorbanifar (nickname Gorba) is an expatriate Iranian arms dealer. He is best known as a middleman in the Iran-Contra Affair during the Ronald Reagan presidency. He is suspected to be a double agent for Mossad. He re-emerged in American politics during the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq during the first term of President George W. Bush as a back-channel intelligence source to certain Pentagon officials who desired regime change in Iran.

In the 1980s Ghorbanifar’s principal American contacts were National Security Council agents Oliver North and Michael Ledeen. Ghorbanifar also tried to get the US to support the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) opposition to the Khomeini government of Iran. Ledeen vouched for Ghorbanifar to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. Oliver North later claimed that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea for diverting profits from TOW and HAWK missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Ghorbanifar’s suspected duplicity during the Iran-Contra deal led CIA Director William Casey to order three separate lie-detector tests, all of which he failed. Iranian officials also suspected Ghorbanifar of passing them forged American documents. The CIA issued a burn notice (or “Fabricator Notice”) on Ghorbanifar in 1984, meaning he was regarded as an unreliable source of intelligence, and a 1987 congressional report on Iran-Contra cites the CIA warning that Ghorbanifar “should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance”.

His own cohorts in the arms trading affair were also non-plussed. “I knew him to be a liar,” North eventually acknowledged. Robert McFarlane, the national-security adviser who approved the Iran-Contra arms trades, once described Ghorbanifar as “one of the most despicable characters I have ever met.”

In December 2001, Michael Ledeen organized a three-day meeting in Rome, Italy between Manucher Ghorbanifar and Defense Intelligence Agency officials Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode. Also present were two officials from Italy’s SISMI. In addition to a position at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen was working as a consultant to then U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who oversaw the Office of Special Plans.

The 2001 meeting took place with the approval of then-Deputy National Security Advisory Stephen Hadley. The meeting concerned a secret offer from reportedly dissident Iranian officials to provide information relevant to the War on Terror and Iran’s relationship with terrorists in Afghanistan.

In June 2002, officials of the Department of Defense met with Ghorbanifar and Iranian officials in Paris, France, without approval from the White House or other relevant Executive agencies. It is unclear if the other Iranians were actually MEK members.

Summer 2003 news reports of the meetings prompted an internal review, as well as an investigation by the US Senate Intelligence Committee. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described the meetings as, “There wasn’t anything there that was of substance or of value that needed to be pursued further.”

Now, back to the McClatchey story.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials’ contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a “fabricator” in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran’s Islamic regime.

Stephen Cambone, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the counterintelligence investigation after only a month, the Senate report said.

The Senate report said that Pentagon officials never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a comprehensive analysis of whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried “to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials.”

The counterintelligence investigators recommended that U.S. officials attempt “to map Ghorbanifar’s relationship within Iranian elite social networks and, if possible, his contacts with other governments and/or intelligence organizations,” but that effort was never undertaken.

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney’s office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.

Franklin, who, in an unrelated matter, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison in 2006 for providing classified information on Iran policy to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, passed the information about the alleged Iranian hit squads to a U.S. Special Forces commander in Afghanistan. Although a DIA analyst told the Senate committee that he couldn’t speculate on whether the information had been “truly useful,” Ledeen and Pentagon officials claimed it saved American lives, the committee said.

During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. “The plan,” said the Senate committee, “involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures” in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion.

Ghorbanifar asked for $5 million in seed money, Franklin told the committee, and indicated that if the traffic jam plan succeeded, he’d need additional money.

After Franklin and Rhode returned from the Rome meetings, the Senate report said, two series of events began to unfold in Washington that were typical of the gamesmanship that plagued the Bush administration’s national security team.

“First,” the report said, “State Department and CIA officials attempted to determine what Mr. Ledeen and the DOD representatives had done in Rome, and second, DOD officials debated the next course of action.”

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen’s contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were “nefarious and unreliable,” the Senate committee reported.

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein’s archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney’s office, the Senate report said.

Now for a quick look at Peter Cambone- the guy who shut down the investigation. From Wikipedia:

“In January of 2001, as George W. Bush prepared to take office, Cambone served on a panel for nuclear weapons issues sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. Other members of the panel included Stephen Hadley, William Schneider, and Robert Joseph. This panel advocated using tactical nuclear weapons as a standard part of the United States defense arsenal.

According to Peter Ogden, of the Center for American Progress, Cambone’s nomination as undersecretary of defense for intelligence was “the culmination of [Donald] Rumsfeld’s efforts to politicize intelligence gathering and analysis… Cambone is despised by many within the Pentagon for his attempts to steamroll all opposition to Rumsfeld’s military transformation projects and is widely perceived as a pompous ideologue who cannot be trusted to bring the requisite objectivity to intelligence matters.”

Cambone was known in the Pentagon as Donald Rumsfeld’s “chief henchman”. The orders to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators (both military and private contractors) are said to have come directly from Cambone’s office. In a 2006 Counterpunch article, Jeffrey St. Clair reported that Cambone is responsible for intelligence operations like Gray Fox, a kind of sabotage and assassination squad. Several sources report that Cambone has become so hated and feared inside the Pentagon as Rumsfeld’s hatchetman that one general told the Army Times: ‘If I had one round left in my revolver, I would take out Stephen Cambone.’ ” In early December 2006 it was announced that Dr. Cambone would step down at the end of that year, becoming the first key department member to leave in the wake of Rumsfeld’s resignation.

War crimes prosecution

On 10 November, 2006, the German Federal Government announced that it had decided, within the legal framework of universal jurisdiction, to permit the war crimes prosecution of Stephen A. Cambone for his alleged role in condoning the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison during his tenure from 2001 to 2003 as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.”

What conclusions can be drawn from this? Just one – that there’s an urgent need to investigate what was really going on within the vice-president’s office, Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans and the American Enterprise Institute itself. There’s just too much smoke here to avoid the conclusion there’s fire to be found underneath all this.

Above all, this investigation needs to be purused urgently before these very same reprobates manage to push the United States into war on Iran. There have been too many crimes and too much death to let these punks, thugs and fixers continue to operate with impunity.

Addendum:

More on Michael Ledeen.

Former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, Vincent Cannistaro, believed Ledeen was also directly tied to the Niger yellowcake story used by Bush and Cheney to claim that Saddam was pursuing the development of nuclear weapons.

“When the former CIA head of counter-terrorism was asked if a Michael Ledeen had been the one who produced the Iraq documents he said “You’d be very close.”

This is consistent with the theory that the documents are the work of Iraqi dissidents associated with Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

The documents would have flowed from Chalabi to Ledeen to SISME, and thus would have been laundered to make them appear as legitimate products discovered by a legitimate intelligence agency.

This sophistication in the use of foreign intelligence agencies appears to be part of the modus operandi of the neocons, and may derive from the particular expertise of Ledeen and Richard Perle, developed in various shenanigans going back to the 1970’s in particular the Iran-Contra affair.

Intelligence agencies in Britain, France, and Germany were also used in the same campaigns of lies which led to the attack on Iraq. One of the strategies was to feed some nonsense to one intelligence agency, and then have that nonsense distributed to other intelligence agencies. Then the claim would be that the information must be true, as it came from multiple sources.”

And, as intended from the outset, Bush & Company are still falling back on the “everybody believed it” line to bury the reality of how they lied their asses off in order to invade Iraq.

 

LIAR, LIAR

The US Senate Intelligence Committee has finally said it – George w. Bush and Dick Cheney deliberately made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence.

There’s the verdict. They weren’t mistaken. They weren’t misled by faulty intelligence. It wasn’t just an honest mistake. THEY LIED!

Yes Messrs. Bush and Cheney lied their assess off to deceive Congress and the American people into supporting their war of whim in Iraq. From McClatchey Newspapers’ Washington Bureau:

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” said committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va.

It’s long been known that the administration’s claims in the runup to the Iraq war, from Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to al Qaida to whether Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, were incorrect, and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino suggested the problems were faulty intelligence.

“We had the intelligence that we had fully vetted, but it was wrong,” she said. “We certainly regret that and we’ve taken measures to fix it.”

But the Senate report, the first official examination of whether the president and vice president knew that their claims were incorrect at the time that they made them, reached a different conclusion.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate,” Rockefeller said in a statement.

‘Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information,” the report concluded.

Among the reports conclusions:

Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership “were not substantiated by the intelligence.”

The president and vice president misrepresented what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons capabiliies.

Rumsfeld misrepresented what the intelligence community knew when he said Iraq’s weapons productions facilities were buried deeply underground.

Cheney’s claim that the intelligence community had confirmed that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 was not true.”

Looking for the High Crimes and Misdemeanours department? Look no further than the White House and its denizens. The committee report reads like an indictment for crimes that have directly taken the lives of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of innocents. Finally official Washington has said what a lot of us have known all along, this criminal regime deliberately and methodically betrayed its nation and lied the country into a war that has brought little but devastation and rebuke. If ever an executive belonged behind bars and high walls, this is it.

 

Who Will DeThrone the President?

The most important, and critical, reason for impeachment of Bush and Cheney was to defend the Constitution against their excesses, their abuses and restore America’s system of checks and balances. America will not long sustain a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” unless balance is restored which requires, in essence, removing powers wrongfully usurped by the executive and restoring to Congress its rightful powers.

There is a solid case for impeachment of the president and vice-president for “high crimes and misdemeanours” but, so far, it’s been reduced to a plaything for constitutional scholars. Unfortunately, the American public has poorly understood the nature of the case and what’s at stake if nothing is done. House and senate Republicans would have fought it out of fear of the damage it could cause their party in future elections. Democratic congressional leaders Reid and Pelosi likewise showed little stomach for a fight which surely must rank right up there as one of the most serious derelictions of duty by senior American congressional leaders since Bush was first appointed president.

Without impeachment, America’s next best hope is for the incoming president to do the right thing and disavow the abuses of the Bush regime. Right now the prospects of that aren’t great.

Republican nominee John McCain (yes, I know, he’s the “presumptive” nominee) has already indicated that he’ll retain the full powers of a “wartime president”, basically embracing the abusive precedents set by George w. Bush and his henchman Cheney. Now McCain is quick to claim that no American president is above the law but he also maintains that the constitutional powers of a wartime president override laws such as the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

It sure sounds as though John McCain will be happy accepting the basketful of purloined powers filched by the Cheney administration these past eight years. More one-man rule.

Maybe Congress needs to address this forcefully. One way might require any president seeking to circumvent the Constitution and Bill of Rights to make a public declaration of a State of Emergency capped at, say, four to six months after which that president would be required to make a fresh declaration of a State of Emergency. Let the people clearly know and force the president to regularly remind them that he’s placed every one of them and their constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms in suspension and then let them judge whether they’re content with that.

I think that would put an end to this nonsense in short order. With congressional elections every two years, the American people would be able to respond forcefully to hand an abuser his hat at the polls and punish the president and his party by stripping them of their seats. In essence, it would be a popular call or endorsement for impeachment.

America has allowed its president and viceroy to get too comfortable atop their thrones these past few years. It’s time that was put to an end.

 

Bush Mouthpiece Finally Comes Clean

Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan has decided to try selling something different – the truth.

In his newly released memoir, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” McClellan writes that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”

From the Washington Post:

“…He describes Bush as demonstrating a “lack of inquisitiveness,” says the White House operated in “permanent campaign” mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president’s inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative’s name.

The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney “the magic man” who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

McClellan describes Bush as able to convince himself of his own spin and relates a phone call he overheard Bush having during the 2000 campaign, in which he said he could not remember whether he had used cocaine. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘How can that be?’ ” he writes.

The former aide describes Bush as a willing participant in treating his presidency as a permanent political campaign, run in large part by his top political adviser, Rove.

“The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office,” he writes. “And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned.”

 

Did Cheney Authorize Maliki’s Basra Blunder?

The Axis of Weasels

When Dick Cheney made a surprise visit to Baghdad two weeks ago, I was left wondering what that was all about. When Cheney leaves his crypt in Washington it’s not to say hi, it’s to get things done.

Cheney hits Baghdad. A week later Maliki tries to hit Basra. Maybe you believe in coincidences but this one’s a real stretch. Imagine Maliki has Cheney sitting in his office and simply omits to tell him he’s planning on attacking Sadr’s militia next week. What are the chances?

Let’s put things in perspective. Israel got the White House’s blessings before it tried to crush Hezbollah. Swing and a miss. Fatah had the Bush regime’s backing to launch civil war against Hamas. Strike two. And then Cheney flies into Baghdad just days before Maliki blunders into Basra? The Bush regime has quite an appetite for fomenting civil wars in the Middle East and the Iraq fiasco certainly fits the pattern. Strike three, you’re out!

The Bush frathouse has to be the most militarily incompetent administration in American history. There’s never been a bigger gang of screwups. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Hadley, Feith, Perle, Bolten, Gonzales – a cabal of utterly boneheaded mutts. It’s no accident that Afghanistan is in the mess it’s in today. The Iraq debacle was no accident. It took very rarely-witnessed levels of incompetence to botch these adventures so totally and behind each and every one has been the face of that bald bastard.

The latest news has it that Maliki, whose administration initially welcomed Sadr’s truce offer, has instead decided to keep going, even reinforcing the existing 30,000-strong Iraqi army force with another 6,000 soldiers. It sounds like Maliki is being pushed to try again – or else.

 

Maybe He Should Give Bush a Medal

According to Dick Cheney, the greatest burden of the Iraq War isn’t being carried by those soldiers now enduring their fourth combat tours in that hellhole. It isn’t by those who find themselves trapped beyond their enlistments thanks to the military’s “stop loss” policy. No, the real burden is being carried by President Bush.

“The president carries the biggest burden, obviously,” Cheney said. “He’s the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm’s way for the rest of us.”

There are no words to describe how vile this creature is. Dick Cheney knows a lot about fighting. He fought to bag five draft deferments during the Vietnam War to keep his ass safely at home while others went off to do his share of the fighting. This man is the poster boy of Chickenhawks. It’s no wonder he has no idea, none, of the burden his country’s trapped soldiers are truly bearing.

 

Damn Them All

This is about the most fitting tribute to the malevolence and carnage of Bush/Cheney and their minions. It’s a couple of years old but it’s perfect for the fifth anniversary of the war on Iraq.