Archive for December 28th, 2006

String

So — it’s the 21st century and we’re going to hang Saddam Hussein … by the neck until he’s dead [a little Texas justice, sounds like.] Hopefully, they’re good at in Iraq; hopefully he won’t linger, choking and kicking. The great Lion of Babylon will never sit in the Hague [to testify for himself in regard to his own crimes, or against United States complicity in the Middle East] … and while the Persians pound the Arabs into oblivion, and vice versa, perpetuating ancient tribal vengeance and ethnic cleansing, GWB, reportedly the leader of the free world, wholeheartedly commends the “eye for an eye” verdict achieved in a mock and suspect trial.

Stunning, isn’t it? If EVER there needed to be no question whatsoever that this is the will of the Iraqi people and none of the “occupiers” .. if EVER there needed to be no holes, no mistakes, no wiggle-room on a verdict … if EVER there needed to be a “new model” set for appropriate sentencing … oh, piffle. It’s George’s war — it’s George’s mirror — and it’s George’s reflection he’s looking at in Saddam’s eyes … the men who would be King.

Gandhi’s “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” could have been written to describe Dub and his NeoCon’s. The killing fields will continue as long as Bush and his kind continue to loop this archaic and nihilistic non-sense into the consciousness of the world … and today, they’re all meeting in Crawford to plan their “new way forward.” Pretty ironic since they’re actually the most “backward” human beings I can think of.

But if their aim is to further the bloodshed, keep the military-industrial complex spinning and profits piling up, the oil fields in play and the Middle East in chaos, they’re helped today by Saddam’s letter to his faithful.

George and Saddam — pea’s in a pod, those two … a couple of blind men who can only see themselves.

Jude

Saddam letter: Key excerpts
BBC
12/28/06

A letter written on 5 November by Saddam Hussein has been released by the former Iraqi leader’s lawyers. Here are some key excerpts:

God, exalted by He, wished that I face the same again in the same manner and the same spirit in which we were before the revolution but with a problem that is greater and harsher.

Oh beloved, this harsh situation, which we and our great Iraq are facing, is a new lesson and a new trial for the people by which to be judged, each depending on their intention, so that it becomes an identifier before God and the people in the present and after our current situation becomes a glorious history.

It is, above all, the foundation upon which the success of the future phases of history can be built.

In this situation and in no other, the veritable are the honest and faithful and the opposing are the false.

When the insignificant people use the power given to them by the foreigners to oppress their own people, they are but worthless and lowly. In our country only good must result from what we are experiencing.

To the great nation, to the people of our country, and humanity: Many of you have known the writer of this letter to be faithful, honest, caring for others, wise, of sound judgement, just, decisive, careful with the wealth of the people and the state… and that his heart is big enough to embrace all without discrimination.

His heart aches for the poor and he does not rest until he helps in improving their condition and attends to their needs.

His heart contains all his people and his nation, and he craves to be honest and faithful without differentiating between his people except on the basis of their efforts, efficiency, and patriotism.

‘Sacrifice’

Here I am speaking today in your name and for your eyes and the eyes of our nation and the eyes of the just, the people of the truth, wherever their banner is hoisted.

You have known your brother and leader very well and he never bowed to the despots and, in accordance with the wishes of those who loved him, remained a sword and a banner.

This is how you want your brother, son or leader to be… and those who will lead you (in the future) should have the same qualifications.

Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if He wants, He will send it to heaven with the martyrs, or, He will postpone that… so let us be patient and depend on Him against the unjust nations.

In spite of all the difficulties and the storms which we and Iraq had to face, before and after the revolution, God the Almighty did not want death for Saddam Hussein.

But if He wants it this time, it (Saddam’s life) is His creation. He created it and He protected it until now.

Thus, by its martyrdom, He will be bringing glory to a faithful soul, for there were souls that were younger than Saddam Hussein that had departed and had taken this path before him. If He wants it martyred, we thank Him and offer Him gratitude, before and after.

‘The enemies’

The enemies of your country, the invaders and the Persians, found that your unity stands as a barrier between them and your enslavement.

They planted and grounded their hateful old and new wedge between you.

The strangers who are carrying the Iraqi citizenship, whose hearts are empty or filled with the hatred that was planted in them by Iran, responded to it, but how wrong they were to think that they could divide the noble among our people, weaken your determination, and fill the hearts of the sons of the nation with hatred against each other, instead of against their true enemies that will lead them in one direction to fight under the banner of God is great: The great flag of the people and the nation.

Remember that God has enabled you to become an example of love, forgiveness and brotherly co-existence…

I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave a space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking and keeps away one from balanced thinking and making the right choice …

I also call on you not to hate the peoples of the other countries that attacked us and differentiate between the decision-makers and peoples…

‘Forgiveness’

Anyone who repents - whether in Iraq or abroad - you must forgive him…

You should know that among the aggressors, there are people who support your struggle against the invaders, and some of them volunteered for the legal defence of prisoners, including Saddam Hussein…

Some of these people wept profusely when they said goodbye to me…

Dear faithful people, I say goodbye to you, but I will be with the merciful God who helps those who take refuge in him and who will never disappoint any faithful, honest believer… God is Great… God is great… Long live our nation… Long live our great struggling people…

Long live Iraq, long live Iraq… Long live Palestine… Long live jihad and the mujahideen.

Saddam Hussein
President and Commander in Chief of the Iraqi Mujahid Armed Forces

[Additional note:]

I have written this letter because the lawyers told me that the so-called criminal court - established and named by the invaders - will allow the so-called defendants the chance for a last word.

But that court and its chief judge did not give us the chance to say a word, and issued its verdict without explanation and read out the sentence - dictated by the invaders - without presenting the evidence.

I wanted the people to know this.

Bush’s Support for Death Penalty Opens Rift With UK
Anne Penketh, The Independent UK
Thursday 28 December 2006

The Bush administration welcomed the confirmation of the death penalty against Saddam Hussein, reopening the divide with the European Union and the United Nations, which are opposed to execution.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said Saddam should not be hanged for crimes against humanity because his trial had been flawed and was marred by political interference by the Iraqi government.

A spokeswoman for Amnesty said: “We are against the death penalty as a matter of principle but particularly in this case because it comes after a flawed trial.”

Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, said: “Imposing the death penalty, indefensible in any case, is especially wrong after such unfair proceedings. That a judicial decision was first announced by Iraq’s National Security Adviser underlines the political interference that marred Saddam Hussein’s trial.”

Iraq’s US-appointed interim government reinstated the death penalty in August 2004, causing friction with its coalition partner, Britain. The former top British representative in Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said the UK would not participate in a tribunal or legal process that could lead to execution.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that while the execution of Saddam was “a matter for the Iraqis”, Britain remained opposed to the death penalty, and had made representations to the government on that score.

The outgoing UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has expressed opposition to imposing the death penalty on Saddam on principle.

But the deputy White House press secretary, Scott Stanzel, struck a different note. “Today marks an important milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Saddam Hussein has received due process and legal rights that he denied the Iraqi people for so long.”

Some Iraqis fear Saddam execution would fuel violence
Mussab Al-Khairalla
Wed Dec 27

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Many Iraqis said on Wednesday they would welcome a swift execution of Saddam Hussein but others expressed fears that carrying out the death sentence now would further fuel sectarian violence.

An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld Saddam’s death sentence for crimes against humanity and said he should hang within 30 days. It comes amid raging violence between Saddam’s fellow Sunni Arabs and majority Shi’ites.

“This is a just sentence because Saddam oppressed the Iraqi people but I think it came at the wrong time because we’re living through a cycle of violence,” said Baghdad resident Mohammed Nasir.

Edward Iskander, a 37-year-old shopkeeper, agreed.

“I just hope they let him die naturally because if we execute him, his followers will unleash mayhem,” Iskander said as he opened his small food store in central Baghdad’s Karrada district.

Some people fear Saddam’s die-hard followers, who form part of the Sunni Arab insurgency, will produce a bloody backlash if he is executed. But others say his death will end their hopes and their fight.

“I think his death will end violence from Sunnis and they’ll be forced to negotiate for reconciliation. We desperately need to turn this page in history,” said Akram Salman, a 21-year-old mathematics university student.

Shi’ites and Kurds, Saddam’s main victims during his 24-year rule, have been keen to speed up the execution but some minority Sunni Arabs, who had been the ruling elite for decades, are nostalgic for his return.

There were no major celebrations or protests against the decision as many Iraqis, struggling to live through sectarian violence and shortages in basic services, had expected the November 5 death sentence to be upheld.

Iraqi newspapers squeezed in headlines and small articles on the announcement late on Tuesday by the head of the Iraqi High Tribunal, Aref Abdul-Razzaq al-Shahin, but no editorials focused on the decision.

It remains unclear when Saddam will be executed for his role in the killings of 148 Shi’ite villagers after a failed 1982 assassination attempt against him in the village of Dujail, but al-Shahin said the sentence must be carried out within 30 days.

Although many Iraqis anxiously wait to see if it may help ease violence or improve their lives, laundry owner Yusif Ali said he just wanted to enjoy the moment when it comes.

“I’m very happy that justice was finally done,” Ali said. “All I ask the government is for a broadcast of his execution.”

Additional reporting by Yassir Faisal

Bombs Rock Baghdad as Saddam Judgment Published
Sabah Jerges, Agence France Presse
Thursday 28 December 2006

An Iraqi court has published its formal written condemnation of Saddam Hussein, putting in motion the legal machinery which will lead to his execution, as bombs rocked Baghdad.

The confirmation of the ousted dictator’s death sentence came as his foe US President George W. Bush convened a meeting of his top security advisers to find a way to stem the rising tide of bloodshed in Iraq.

More than three-and-a-half years after a US-led invasion deposed Saddam’s totalitarian regime, the country remains in the grip of a vicious conflict that claims more than 100 Iraqi lives per day.

American soldiers are also still dying in near record numbers; the military confirmed the deaths of three more on Thursday, bringing December’s toll to 99, and keeping it on course to be the bloodiest month for US troops this year.

Saddam’s imminent demise - on December 26 a court ordered his execution within 30 days - has been welcomed by Washington, but US forces are nevertheless braced for a backlash from his remaining supporters.

Meanwhile, sectarian and insurgent violence continues to claim scores of lives every day and make a mockery of promises by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government to put in place a new Baghdad security plan.

Seven people were killed and 25 wounded when two booby traps exploded in a popular Baghdad market during the busy morning shopping rush, military officials and medics at the Al-Kindi hospital said Thursday.

The devices exploded in the Baab al-Sharki neighbourhood in the centre of the Iraqi capital, they said.

Another 10 people were killed and 35 wounded in east Baghdad near the Shaab stadium when a bomb exploded among a crowd queuing for heating fuel, according to a security official and medics at the Ibn-Nafis hospital.

South of the capital, three more civilians were killed in two bomb attacks, according to the defence ministry and the Yarmuk hospital.

Meanwhile, north of Baghdad, two Iraqi soldiers were killed when a booby trap exploded on the highway between the oil refinery depot of Baiji and Saddam’s hometown Tikrit, said the local Iraqi-US coordination centre.

Another three soldiers were wounded in the explosion, which destroyed an Iraqi military vehicle, the source said.

In Diyala province north of the capital, a police captain and two civilian women were killed by unidentified gunmen in separate attacks, said Lieutenant Ali Khaled of the Baquba police.

The violence raged on as the Iraqi High Tribunal published a formal written judgement rejecting Saddam’s appeal against his death sentence.

The official release of the judgement, signed by Judge Arif Abdulrazzak Shaheen of the Iraqi High Criminal Court in Baghdad, set in motion procedures which should lead to Saddam being executed within days or weeks.

“The court decided to endorse the condemnation and punishment of the condemned, Saddam Hussein, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, by hanging, for committing a deliberate crime against humanity,” it said.

The 17-page ruling was published on the website of the Iraqi High Tribunal, which on November 5 convicted Saddam, his half-brother and intelligence chief Hassan and former judge Bandar of ordering the deaths of 148 Shiite villagers.

Following the formal release of the judgement, the responsibility for organising the execution of the defendants passes to Iraq’s government, court officials said. Iraq’s cabinet was in session Thursday morning.

Later in the day, in the calmer surroundings of Bush’s Texas ranch, the US president was to assemble his top aides to review his Iraq strategy and the role of America’s 129,000 troops deployed in the country.

“That will be a meeting of all the members … of the National Security Council,” said Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman.

“This is a time for the president to be talking with his advisers about all the potential options, making sure that due consideration is given to the next steps, making sure that we’re thinking through the new way forward in Iraq.”

Bush is expected to deliver a speech announcing a new way forward in Iraq sometime early in the New Year.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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Add comment December 28th, 2006

Speak no ill …

There’s a bit of Ford blowback today — a look at the accomplishments of the man who had no ambitions to the presidency, and a few mild surprises. We can’t untangle Jerry from the circumstance that popped him into the Oval Office, of course … and thinking about Nixon magnifies our angst about Bush, because we let it happen again — this time, worse worse worse!

As I mentioned yesterday, Jerry had a raging case of the Bumbles, much like Bush … one can imagine him choking on a pretzel or running somebody down on his bike. He wasn’t all that articulate, he made a series of Dub-like gaffes that the press loved to land on. I read a blog post today that the writer concluded by suggesting that Jerry was the one president he’d have liked to have had a beer with … roll it back a couple of years and who’s that sound like?

But Jerry was the genuine “average guy” … not the “faux-average guy,” like Bush. He didn’t come from money or privilege … he didn’t bring a superior brain to the White House, also like Bush. And Ford won’t suffer the unspoken disapproval of millions for having failed the “to whom much is given, much is expected” homily, as will the Dub. He was a boot-strap kinda guy … old-shoe friendly, mild-mannered, easy with the press and unassuming. And perhaps those very non-offensive, mid-western qualities will define him, finally.

Jerry Ford believed the presidency was larger than himself, and that America was larger than the presidency … it’s almost an anachronism to think it, these days. Looking at that from our experience of the last six years, Jerry was a damn hero.

Today’s post includes a too-late-to-help interview with Bob Woodward, expressing Ford’s disapproval of the Iraq misadventure — his influence on the Supreme’s [he gave us Stevens, God/dess bless him!] — and op/ed’s both pro and con.

My own personal opinion is that Gerald Ford did the best he knew to do … he put his pieces of the puzzle in place … and for good or ill, changed history. But his rush to smooth things over did not serve this countries understanding of itself. As painful as it might have been to watch a flawed and emotionally broken ex-president face the music, it all happened much too quickly to serve as a cautionary tale. What might we have learned about government, politics, ourselves if we’d held Nixon accountable instead of letting him fade into obscurity? What kind of message might we have sent to future leaders who felt free to duplicate his lack of ethics and dark entanglements?

Like I said yesterday — Jerry was a nice guy. Judging from the Woodward interview, too little, too late and the man too mild-mannered to speak against a sitting-president, he was TOO nice. And he played his role in destiny by being a gentleman in dealing with thugs and [famously] “crooks” — he chose the pragmatic solution to that challenge and did nothing to prepare us for “worse” … for playing hardball with lack of ethics … for truly grasping the frightening and isolated power of the executive … for surviving radical governmental coup … for stopping the machine that threatens to gobble us whole today.

Gerald Ford — a man of his time … but not ours. So much for playing “nice.”

Jude

Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq
Bob Woodward, WaPo
Thursday, December 28, 2006; Front Page
[video clips to be found at this link]

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”

In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.

“Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford said, referring to Bush’s assertion that the United States has a “duty to free people.” But the former president said he was skeptical “whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest.” He added: “And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”

The Ford interview — and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 — took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published at any time after his death. In the sessions, Ford fondly recalled his close working relationship with key Bush advisers Cheney and Rumsfeld while expressing concern about the policies they pursued in more recent years.

“He was an excellent chief of staff. First class,” Ford said. “But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious” as vice president. He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell’s assertion that Cheney developed a “fever” about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. “I think that’s probably true.”

Describing his own preferred policy toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Ford said he would not have gone to war, based on the publicly available information at the time, and would have worked harder to find an alternative. “I don’t think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly,” he said, “I don’t think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer.”

Ford had faced his own military crisis — not a war he started like Bush, but one he had to figure out how to end. In many ways those decisions framed his short presidency — in the difficult calculations about how to pull out of Vietnam and the challenging players who shaped policy on the war. Most challenging of all, as Ford recalled, was Henry A. Kissinger, who was both secretary of state and national security adviser and had what Ford said was “the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.”

“I think he was a super secretary of state,” Ford said, “but Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend.”

In 1975, Ford decided to relieve Kissinger of his national security title. “Why Nixon gave Henry both secretary of state and head of the NSC, I never understood,” Ford said. “Except he was a great supporter of Kissinger. Period.” But Ford viewed Kissinger’s dual roles as a conflict of interest that weakened the administration’s ability to fully air policy debates. “They were supposed to check on one another.”

That same year, Ford also decided to fire Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger and replace him with Rumsfeld, who was then Ford’s White House chief of staff. Ford recalled that he then used that decision to go to Kissinger and say, “I’m making a change at the secretary of defense, and I expect you to be a team player and work with me on this” by giving up the post of security adviser.

Kissinger was not happy. “Mr. President, the press will misunderstand this,” Ford recalled Kissinger telling him. “They’ll write that I’m being demoted by taking away half of my job.” But Ford made the changes, elevating the deputy national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to take Kissinger’s White House post.

Throughout this maneuvering, Ford said, he kept his White House chief of staff in the dark. “I didn’t consult with Rumsfeld. And knowing Don, he probably resented the fact that I didn’t get his advice, which I didn’t,” Ford said. “I made the decision on my own.”

Kissinger remained a challenge for Ford. He regularly threatened to resign, the former president recalled. “Over the weekend, any one of 50 weekends, the press would be all over him, giving him unshirted hell. Monday morning he would come in and say, ‘I’m offering my resignation.’ Just between Henry and me. And I would literally hold his hand. ‘Now, Henry, you’ve got the nation’s future in your hands and you can’t leave us now.’ Henry publicly was a gruff, hard-nosed, German-born diplomat, but he had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.”

Ford added, “Any criticism in the press drove him crazy.” Kissinger would come in and say: “I’ve got to resign. I can’t stand this kind of unfair criticism.” Such threats were routine, Ford said. “I often thought, maybe I should say: ‘Okay, Henry. Goodbye,’ ” Ford said, laughing. “But I never got around to that.”

At one point, Ford recalled Kissinger, his chief Vietnam policymaker, as “coy.” Then he added, Kissinger is a “wonderful person. Dear friend. First-class secretary of state. But Henry always protected his own flanks.”

Ford was also critical of his own actions during the interviews. He recalled, for example, his unsuccessful 1976 campaign to remain in office, when he was under enormous pressure to dump Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Republican ticket. Some polls at the time showed that up to 25 percent of Republicans, especially those from the South, would not vote for Ford if Rockefeller, a New Yorker from the liberal wing of the Republican Party, was on the ticket.

When Rockefeller offered to be dropped from the ticket, Ford took him up on it. But he later regretted it. The decision to dump the loyal Rockefeller, he said, was “an act of cowardice on my part.”

In the end, though, it was Vietnam and the legacy of the retreat he presided over that troubled Ford. After Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States evacuated from Vietnam, Ford was often labeled the only American president to lose a war. The label always rankled.

“Well,” he said, “I was mad as hell, to be honest with you, but I never publicly admitted it.” ++

Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.

Ford Pardon Sealed Watergate Shut
Larry Margasak, AP
Wednesday 27 December 2006

Washington - On a September Sunday in 1974, President Gerald Ford told the nation it was time to “shut and seal this book” of Watergate by pardoning his predecessor, Richard Nixon.

Ford’s stunning announcement may also have sealed his political fate, since the nation’s only president never elected to nationwide office - a Republican - lost the 1976 election to Democrat Jimmy Carter. Many said the unpopular pardon was a cause of Ford’s defeat.

But years later, Ford’s act of conscience was viewed differently. In 2001, Ford, who died Tuesday, received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award named after the former Democratic president. He was chosen by a bipartisan committee of political and community leaders, who had the luxury of looking back at the fateful day of Sept. 8, 1974.

Ford was not known for his eloquence, but he was eloquent when he addressed the nation that morning in the Oval Office.

He said his was a solitary decision. “There are no historic or legal precedents to which I can turn in this matter, none that precisely fit the circumstances of a private citizen who has resigned the presidency of the United States,” he said.

The accusations of Nixon’s Watergate misdeeds “hang like a sword over our former president’s head, threatening his health,” Ford said. But his primary concern was for the nation.

“My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed,” he said. “My conscience tells me that only I, as president, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book.

“My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.”

Ford revisited the pardon is his autobiography.

“I simply was not convinced that the country wanted to see an ex-president behind bars,” he wrote. “We are not a vengeful people; forgiveness is one of the roots of the American tradition. And Nixon, in my opinion, had already suffered enormously.”

And, Ford said, so had the nation.

“It was the state of the country’s health at home and around the world that worried me,” he said.

Nixon had not been indicted but stood accused of serious crimes that would take time - perhaps years - to sort out. A grand jury had voted 19-0 to name him an unindicted coconspirator in the cover-up of White House involvement in the 1972 break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office building.

Ford knew the pardon could damage his election chances.

“I’m aware of that,” Ford recalled snapping at a cautious aide. “It could easily cost me the next election if I run again. But damn it, I don’t need the polls to tell me whether I’m right or wrong.”

Nixon held up the process when he balked at Ford’s request for a public statement of contrition.

The final draft of Nixon’s statement bore no acknowledgment of guilt.

“That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me,” Nixon wrote.

Before taking the statement back to Washington, Ford’s aides asked to see Nixon.

Shuttered in his San Clemente, Calif., offices, Nixon was gaunt, shrunken and unresponsive. His handshake was weak, Ford’s aides reported.

“His attention span was short,” Ford wrote. “What few remarks he made were left incomplete, in mid-sentence.”

“I was taking one hell of a risk, and he didn’t seem to be responsive at all,” Ford wrote.

Still, he accepted the statement and made his way to the Oval Office. Ford turned to face the cameras, and the nation.

“Finally, it was done,” Ford wrote in his book. “It was an unbelievable lifting of a burden from my shoulders. I felt very certain that I had made the right decision, and I was confident that I could now proceed without being harassed by Nixon or his problems any more.” ++

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.

Ford and the Court
Jess Bravin, WSJ
December 27, 2006

Reflecting on his legacy last year, President Ford wrote that “historians study the significant diplomatic, legislative and economic events that occurred during a presidential term to evaluate that presidency,” with little consideration given to Supreme Court nominees.

“Let that not be the case with my presidency,” he wrote. “For I am prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination 30 years ago of Justice John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The occasion was a symposium on Justice Stevens’s three decades of jurisprudence, held at Fordham Law School in New York. But in recent years Stevens, the court’s senior member and perhaps the most consistently liberal justice, has been cast by conservatives as their bete noire, and many activists on the right openly have yearned for the 86-year-old justice to depart the bench to make way for a more reliable nominee.

Ford, however, made clear he was not merely vouching for Stevens’s good character, but for his old friend’s approach to the law. “I endorse his constitutional views on the secular character of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, on securing procedural safeguards in criminal [cases] and on the Constitution’s broad grant of regulatory authority to Congress,” Ford wrote, words that could just as well have described such Warren Court stalwarts as Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall — or, for that matter, William O. Douglas, whose seat Ford selected Stevens to fill after the stroke-crippled Douglas resigned in 1975.

Though Ford didn’t mention it, there was perhaps a peculiar sort of justice in that. Prior to the Nixon pardon, Ford’s most controversial act may well have been his 1970 crusade to impeach Douglas. As House minority leader, Ford accused Douglas, then in his 70s and onto his fourth marriage (to a woman in her 20s) of questionable financial dealings, coddling lefties and promoting immorality. Ford’s effort to impeach Douglas ran aground, but it no doubt contributed to the justice’s determination to remain on the court after his December 1974 stroke.

But reflecting on the passing of his patron, Stevens, legendary for his bow ties and sprightly manner as well as his writings, lent his own influential voice to the act of executive power that defined Ford’s short presidency. “Decency, intellectual honesty, and sound judgment are characteristics possessed by our finest lawyers. Gerald Ford was such a lawyer,” Stevens said, in a statement released by the Supreme Court. “He was a wise president who had the courage to make unpopular decisions that would serve the country’s best interests in the long run. Time has proved that his decision to pardon Richard Nixon was such a decision. We mourn his passing but remember his All-American career with admiration, affection and total respect.” ++

Adieu, Gerald Ford
Farewell to Our Greatest President
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, CounterPunch
December 27, 2006

We bid a sad adieu to Gerald Ford. Here at CounterPunch it has always been our position that Gerald Ford was America’s greatest President. Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible harm. Under Ford’s tranquil hand the nation relaxed after the hectic fevers of the Nixon years. And, of course, it was Ford who finally pulled the US troops out of Vietnam.

As a visit to the Ford presidential library discloses, the largest military adventure available for display was the foolish U.S. response to the capture of the U.S. container ship Mayaguez by the Khmer Rouge on May 12, 1975. As imperial adventures go, and next to the vast graveyards across the planet left by Ford’s predecessors and successors, it was small potatoes.

Ford was surrounded by bellicose advisors such as his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger; his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller; his chief of staff, and later secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld and his presidential assistant, Dick Cheney. The fact that this rabid crew were only able to persuade Ford to give the green light for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor–an appalling decision to be sure — is tribute to Ford’s pacific instincts and deft personnel management. Unlike George W. Bush, Ford was of humane temper and could mostly hold in check his bloodthirsty counselors.

Kissinger was part of the furniture when Ford took over, after Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. With latitude to chose, Ford made sensible selections, none more fruitful than his Attorney General, Edward Levy, who in turn prompted Ford to nominate John Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he has long distinguished himself and dignified Ford’s choice by being the most humane and progressive justice.

As a percentage of the federal budget, social spending crested in the Ford years. Never should it be forgotten that Jimmy Carter campaigned against Ford as the prophet of neo-liberalism, precursor of the Democratic Leadership Council, touting “zero-based budgeting”.

If Ford had beaten back Carter’s challenge in 1976, the neo-con crusades of the mid to late Seventies would have been blunted by the mere fact of a Republican occupying the White House. Reagan, most likely, would have returned to his slumbers in California after his abortive challenge to Ford for the nomination in Kansas in 1976.

Instead of an weak southern Democratic conservative in agreement to almost every predation by the military industrial complex, we would have had a Midwestern Republican, thus a politician far less vulnerable to the promoters of the New Cold War.

Would Ford have rushed to fund the Contras and order their training by Argentinian torturers? Would he have sent the CIA on its most costly covert mission, the $3.5 billion intervention in Afghanistan? The nation would have been spared the disastrous counsels of Zbigniev Brzezinski.

Those who may challenge this assessment of Ford’s imperial instincts should listen to the commentators on CNN, belaboring the scarce cold commander-in-chief for timidity and lack of zeal in prosecuting the Cold War. By his enemies shall we know him.

During Ford’s all-too-brief tenure a mood of geniality was the rule. Even the attempted assassinations of the president by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Moore, in September, 1975, had a slapdash, light-hearted timbre. The arts flourished, as is attested by Vicki Carr’s frequent appearance in the photographic record of White House galas.

At the side of America’s greatest president was America’s most sympathetic First Lady, Betty, whose enduring memorial is the Betty Ford Clinic, home port for beleagured boozers. We send our sympathies to the former First Lady. ++

Against Hagiography: The Relevance of Gerald R. Ford
Frank Dwyer, HuffPo
12.28.2006

In 1970 Representative Gerald R. Ford (R-MI) led a movement in the House to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on the grounds that Douglas had published an article in the “pornographic” Evergreen Review.

That’s my favorite Ford moment, even better than the typically earnest, forthright way he liberated Poland, all by himself, in his 1976 campaign debate with Jimmy Carter.

In fact, Ford obligingly liberated more than Poland, revealing an eerily (though blessedly smirkless) George W. Bush-like grasp of the Terra Incognita beyond his Grand Rapids bailiwick. “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” the Babbitt of Grand Rapids told a surprised and presumably grateful nation, “and there never will be any under a Ford administration.”

Wow. That’s a really good Ford moment, too: he didn’t only bump his head on helicopters. But it was the hot-button Whip Douglas Now episode that delighted me then and has remained one of my favorite sightings, in the pages of American history, of the not-so-rare Boobus Americanus. Gerald R. Ford, defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. There he was in all his glory: anti-liberal, anti-Constitution (he justified his attack on Douglas by claiming that an impeachable offense was whatever Congress said it was at the time, which is almost exactly what Humpty Dumpty told Alice in a similar situation), anti-literature, anti-culture, anti-dissent, anti-art, anti-nudes (there were, I have to admit, a few arty nude photographs in that issue of the Evergreen Review: I had to see them for myself, purely in the service of defending America, just like my colleagues across the aisle).

When he called for Douglas’s impeachment, Ford was either a typical Republican political hypocrite, playing to his easily-riled moron base, or (and this is worse) he was sincere, thereby revealing himself to be truly, deeply, incontrovertibly stupid.

People are either qualified by intelligence and some basic level of information (and ideally some basic level of decency) for public office, or they aren’t. Most aren’t. (Which reminds me: why aren’t liberals demanding that Silvestre Reyes step down from his new chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee? Imagine how we’d all be howling if a Republican chairman couldn’t say whether Al Qaeda was “predominately” Sunni or Shia.)

Judging Gerald R. Ford by what he knew about Soviet domination (as he presided over the end of the hottest part of the cold war), or what he knew about the Constitution (as he went after liberal Justice Douglas’s political scalp), he apparently didn’t even have “the necessities” to represent Grand Rapids, much less lead the nation.

He looks pretty good now, of course, for the same reason he looked pretty good back then, compared to the man he replaced or our hapless Decider. ( But is this comparison altogether fair to Bush? One reason Bush looks so bad today is that he let himself be guided by those two now fully-metastasized machiavels, Rumsfeld and Cheney, that he inherited from Ford!)

How good for us was Ford? What verdict will history render on his Presidency? Over the next few days, as we break away occasionally from the evidently irresistible proto-American total immersion in sanctimonious eulogy and sappy hagiography, we might want to consider whether all the intoning newsreaders are right. He made his own French toast! He was the best athlete ever to hold that high office! But was he, was this comparatively decent, amiable, unmonstrous, non-criminal, “healing” nonentity, really just what this country needed after Nixon. Really? And was his sincere conviction that “our long national nightmare” ended with him, was that, in fact, true. I don’t think so. I think the heartbreaking pardon of Nixon has actually worked to prolong our national nightmare, one way or another, to the end of time. Americans need accountability, justice. (Look how Ford’s poll numbers plummeted after his profile-in-courage pardon.)

Americans need to believe in the institutions of their government. Most of all, they need to believe that the same law that applies to them applies to everyone, even CEOs, even Presidents. Do you think that most Americans believe that now?

Would the trial, conviction, and incarceration of Richard Nixon have torn us apart? Really? But we were already torn apart. It’s funny how the Grand Old Party that has, in general, such a soft spot for executions and harsh sentences was so sure the Nixon pardon was “good for us.” What about the “deterrent power” of swift and sure punishment that was usually so important to them? Isn’t it possible that Nixon’s mug shot, perp walk, prison fatigues-that the thought of him working in the prison library, say, or the kitchen, patiently doing his time for his crimes-isn’t it possible all that would have reminded future presidents that they too were bound by the rule of law? Isn’t it possible that Nixon’s example would have made them think twice before committing their own high crimes and misdemeanors?

Healing. It’s such a lovely notion. Nixon in jail might have been a true prescription for healing this country, healing all of us, one by one, and truly ending the long national nightmare. But however useful it might have been for “closure,” it would surely not have been necessary as a deterrent. Surely not. Surely no American president, in the long wake of Watergate, would ever again allow himself to participate, say, in the wiretapping of the rival party’s campaign committee, and then lie about it and cover it up. Surely not.

Our long national nightmare isn’t over, not yet, but there may be light–a surge of light-at the end of the tunnel. ++

Bob Woodward: Thanks for the Memories
Scarecrow, FireDogLake
12/28/06

Gee, that Bob Woodward fellow knows a lot of interesting stuff. Like things that, had he reported them earlier, might have stopped a war, or changed an election.

Woodward’s latest late disclosure consists of statements by the late President Gerald Ford that Ford strongly disagreed with Bush about going to war with Iraq. The “scoop” is in today’s Washington Post.

[...]

Of course, it’s not uncommon or unethical for reporters to interview famous people about sensitive matters on the condition that the information will not be disclosed until much later, like after the person’s death. I’m okay with that.

But when a reporter is in possession of information that is vital to the country, that might change whether we go to war or whom we elect for president, and the only reason for withholding the information is to protect the person interviewed from embarrassing his own party — well, there must be some other principle that applies, don’tcha think? And doesn’t a reporter then have an obligation to work his butt off to obtain permission or find some ethical way to report what he knows when we need to know it? Just askin, cause this is getting to be a habit, and it’s . . . uh, annoying. ++

I’ve Seen That Movie Too
Jane Hamsher, FireDogLake
12/27/06

Gerald Ford always seemed like a decent guy, from an era when it was possible to be a “moderate” Republican and not live the political life of a complete hypocrite. But as the above photo of Rumsfeld, Ford and Cheney demostrates, Ford’s legacy — at least the one that is wounding us all so greviously at the moment — is one he might not want to be remembered for. As Digby says, in explaining a vote cast for Ford:

I did not understand the zombie nature of Republicanism and had no way of knowing that unless you drive a metaphorical stake through the heart of GOP crooks and liars, they will be back, refreshed and and ready to screw up the country in almost exactly the same way, within just a few years. In those days, I couldn’t imagine that the Republicans would ever elect someone worse than Nixon. I thought we had gone back to “normal” where nice moderate guys like Jerry and Ike would keep the seat warm until the real leaders would return. Live and learn.

When I heard Bill Clinton speak in Waterbury this past summer, he was trying to triangulate his differences with Lieberman and repeating his “forgive and forget” mantra about the past, calling for everyone to go forward in unision. I guess the point is that there is no unision possible with the extreme right, they do not compromise and they will steal everything that isn’t nailed down. Letting the Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s (and Libby’s) have a medal and a pat on the head in the interest of “sparing the nation the scandal” (as Ford supposedly did when pardoning Richard Nixon) just means, as Digby says, that the same zombies will re-emerge and commit the same crimes again and again, or their heirs will, thinking there is no price to be paid.

As Steve Benen notes over at K-Drum’s place today (I just wanted to say “K-Drum”), there is speculation as to whether the Democrats are going to be naughty or nice in the majority. I just hope they don’t wind up a bunch of co-dependent saps who give in to the GOP demands for quarter they never gave, and I most certainly hope that they do not accept the Clintonian notion of no accountability in the interest of moving forward.

That’s hooey.

As Digby says, it’s stake-in-the-heart time for the right wing crazies and the crooks. Anything less is short-term political opportunism that shirks responsibility and endangers the future. ++