Taking responsibility
First off, today, prayers and Light to Teddy Kennedy, as he recuperates from brain surgery.
On Saturday, I went to the county seat, eight miles away, to see Ike Skelton, who was bringing a flag to the local library that had flown over the Capital. Ike is our 16-term Congressional Rep and chairman of the Armed Services Committee; I write him constantly, so I’m sure his office staff is familiar with my name. Ike isn’t. “Do I answer them?” he asked when I told him same. If he did, he’d know.
Ike and I have a love/hate relationship, as so many American’s have with their representation. By virtue of his long tenure as a moderate and his military chops, we are antagonists. But I do appreciate that he is loyal to the country folks; much as Barack has spoken of traveling hours to get to a handful of voters, Ike doesn’t forget the little spots on the map. Our dinky library is in Hermitage, Hickory County seat, with 406 citizens and a per capita income of less than $13,000. We have no traffic lights … that should tell the tale.
There were perhaps 30 people at the flag raising [determined "a good crowd"] which occurred as thunder rolled overhead and large drops of rain threatened to splat, which they did minutes later. There was a color guard of Vets, and we recited the pledge — as I’d only hours before done my daily news search and read about the American prison ships, while remembering THIS bit:
Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.
… as we finished the pledge with “liberty and justice for all,” I added … “some day.” No one said anything but Fishin’ Jim snickered.
As we headed for the meeting room for cookies and lemonade, provided by the Dem ladies [who are Excellent at cookies, although the Dem Club doesn't do much else] a likable guy came through handing out cards with elephants in the corner, stumping votes for assemblyman of the local district. I asked him where his Flag Pin was — he seemed distressed by the question. A Pub friend, wearing a suit as he’d just come from a wedding, was sporting his. “You can borrow Jerry’s,” I said.
All politics is local … and I stick out like a sore thumb. But you bloom where you’re planted, they say. These folks need to get some blood running, they need some of Obama’s “Fired up, ready to go” call and response. They don’t know what a perfect little slice of Americana they’ve got here — they don’t give their kids a platform upon which to appreciate it, and they don’t realize they have to fight to keep it … except by offering up their kids to military bloodsport.
Which brings me to the topic of responsibility. The reads below all have that in common — they all mention the pitfalls of sloughing off the problems of this nation to the next president without some accountability of HOW we got here and who must be forced to take ownership for that activity. Because we’ve come to that party very late [all the cocktail weenies are gone, doncha know] impeachment will not happen in these last few month, surely not with all the worries and concerns involved in the campaigns and economic turndown sucking the oxygen; after we turn the page in November, it will look like sour grapes. But perhaps our anger, and our discoveries, will bring a bit of boil to this pot; I still maintain this couldn’t have happened if Nixon had been properly chastened, as a cautionary tale to any who came later. Rule of Law. Period. And never too late.
There IS a louder call for accountability and McLellan gave us a gift with his confirmations of Bushie doin’s. If there’s no time for impeachment, then perhaps we will consider penalties for war crimes; I expect the cry for that to grow, as the problems that have been slicked over get attention, as the downturn becomes more dramatic. I think the Bushies feel confident they’re safe, but it’s got to niggle at the back of their minds … especially since Bolton was almost arrested by a citizen, and as Rove has not been forgotten [his prediction that they'll 'come get me' by the end of the year looks more probable.]
Obama has pledged to immediately scrutinize all Bush’s laws and return them to constitutionality if he’s elected — maybe that will get us ‘fired up.’ Of course, it will still be a shock to George, who is so clueless, witless and bewildered, that he gave a recent graduation address urging the students to Be Responsible [while the faculty stood in protest.] The reason you can’t shame a hypocrite is that they’ve never actually glimpsed the guy in the mirror; psychosis is like that. [Justin Frank explains projection here, in a bit from his new book "Politics on the Couch."]
Reads and links include Frank Rich, Vincent Bugliosi and MoDo; at the end, an excerpt from Scotty’s book, under the title “George Bush: the great pretender.” Ouch!
Accountability, it’s coming – you can smell it in the wind.
Jude
McCain’s McClellan Nightmare
FRANK RICH, NYT
June 1, 2008
THEY thought they were being so slick. When the McCain campaign abruptly moved last Tuesday’s fund-raiser with President Bush from the Phoenix Convention Center to a private home, it was the next best thing to sending the loathed lame duck into the witness protection program. John McCain and Mr. Bush were caught on camera together for a mere 26 seconds, and at 9 p.m. Eastern time, safely after the networks’ evening newscasts. The two men’s furtive encounter on the Phoenix airport tarmac, as captured by a shaky, inaudible long shot on FoxNews.com, could have been culled from a surveillance video.
But for the McCain campaign, any “Mission Accomplished” high-fives had to be put on hold. That same evening Politico.com broke the news of Scott McClellan’s memoir, and it was soon All Bush All the Time in the
mediasphere. Or more to the point: All Iraq All the Time, for the deceitful
origins of the war in Iraq are the major focus of the former press secretary’s tell-all.
There is no news in his book, hardly the first to charge that the White
House used propaganda to sell its war and that the so-called liberal media were “complicit enablers” of the con job. The blowback by the last Bush defenders is also déjà vu. The claims that Mr. McClellan was “disgruntled,” “out of the loop,” two-faced, and a “sad” head case are identical to those leveled by Bush operatives (including Mr. McClellan) at past administration deserters like Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, John DiIulio and Matthew Dowd.
So why the fuss? Mr. McClellan isn’t a sizzling TV personality, or, before
now, a household name beyond the Beltway. His book secured no major
prepublication media send-off on “60 Minutes” or a newsmagazine cover. But if the tale of how the White House ginned up the war is an old story, the big new news is how ferocious a hold this familiar tale still exerts on the public all these years later. We have not moved on.
Americans don’t like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are
casualties involved and especially if there’s no accountability. We view it
as a crime story, and we won’t be satisfied until there’s a resolution.
That’s why the original sin of the war’s conception remains a political
flash point, however much we tune out Iraq as it grinds on today. Even a figure as puny as Mr. McClellan can ignite it. The Democrats portray Mr. McCain as offering a third Bush term, but it’s a third term of the war that’s his bigger problem. Even if he locks the president away in a private home, the war will keep seeping under the door, like the blood in “Sweeney Todd.”
Mr. McCain and his party are in denial about this. “Elections are about the future” is their mantra. On “Hardball” in April, Mr. McCain pooh-poohed debate about “whether we should have invaded or not” as merely “a good academic argument.” We should focus on the “victory” he magically foresees instead.
But the large American majority that judges the war a mistake remains
constant (more than 60 percent). For all the talk of the surge’s “success,” the number of Americans who think the country is making progress in Iraq is down nine percentage points since February (to 37 percent) in the latest Pew survey. The number favoring a “quick withdrawal” is up by seven percentage points (to 56 percent).
It’s extremely telling that when Gen. David Petraeus gave his latest
progress report before the Senate 10 days ago, his testimony aroused so
little coverage and public interest that few even noticed his admission that those much-hyped October provincial elections in Iraq would probably not happen before November (after our Election Day, wanna bet?). Contrast the minimal attention General Petraeus received for his current news from Iraq with the rapt attention Mr. McClellan is receiving for his rehash of the war’s genesis circa 2002-3, and you can see what has traction this election year.
There are other signs of Iraq’s durable political lethality as well. Looking
for a bright spot in their loss of three once-safe House seats in special
elections this spring, Republicans have duly noted that the Democrats who won in Louisiana and Mississippi were social “conservatives,” anti-abortion and pro-gun. They failed to notice that all three Democratic winners, including the two in the South, oppose the war. Even more remarkably, new polling in Texas finds that an incumbent Republican senator and Bush rubber stamp, John Cornyn, is only four percentage points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Rick Noriega, a fierce war critic who served in Afghanistan.
In the woe-is-us analyses by leading Republicans about their party’s
travails - whether by the House G.O.P. leader John Boehner (in The Wall
Street Journal) or the media strategist Alex Castellanos (in National
Review) - Iraq is conspicuous by its utter absence. The Republican brand’s crisis is instead blamed exclusively on excessive spending, scandal and earmarks - it’s all the fault of Tom DeLay’s K Street Project, Jack Abramoff and that Alaskan “bridge to nowhere.”
This transcends denial; it’s group psychosis. Nowhere is this syndrome more apparent than in the profuse punditry of Karl Rove, who never cites Iraq as a problem for Mr. McCain (if he refers to it at all) and flatly assured George Stephanopoulos last Sunday that Mr. McCain has no need to make a “clean break” from Mr. Bush.
Mr. Rove is to the McCain campaign what Bill Clinton was to the Hillary
Clinton campaign: a ubiquitous albatross dispensing dubious, out-of-date
political advice and constantly upstaging the candidate he ostensibly
supports. Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Rove is a camera hog who puts his need to vehemently defend his own administration’s record ahead of all else. So what if he’s under subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee? He doesn’t care if he reminds voters of administration scandals or of Mr. McCain’s association with Iraq any more than Mr. Clinton cared if he reminded voters of his continued ties to suspect financial donors and the prospect of an out-of-control co-presidency.
Damaging as Mr. Clinton’s behavior was to his wife’s campaign, Iraq was
worse. Mrs. Clinton could never credibly explain away her vote authorizing the war. Her repeated disingenuous attempts to fudge it ended up contaminating her credibility on other issues.
Mr. McCain’s record on Iraq is far worse than Mrs. Clinton’s. He didn’t just cast a vote but was a drumbeater for the propaganda Mr. McClellan cites, including the neocon fantasies of a newly democratic Middle East. On “Hardball” and “Meet the Press” in March 2003, Mr. McCain invoked that argument, along with the promise that Americans would be “welcomed as liberators,” to assert the war would be “one of the best things that’s happened to America.”
To cover up these poor judgments now - and questionable actions, including his public boosting of Ahmad Chalabi, then a lobbying client of the current McCain campaign guru, Charles Black - Mr. McCain is hoping that the “liberal media” will once again be complicit enablers. We’ll see. He’s also counting on the press to let him blur his record by accentuating his subsequent criticism of the war’s execution - as if the war’s execution (also criticized by countless Democrats), not its conception, was the fatal error.
His other tactic is to try to create a smoke screen by smearing Barack Obama as unpatriotic. Mr. McCain has suggested that the Democratic front-runner is the Hamas candidate and has piled on to Mr. Bush’s effort to slur Mr. Obama as an apostle of “appeasement.” A campaign ad presented Mr. McCain as “the American president Americans have been waiting for” (not to be confused, presumably, with the un-American president Al Qaeda has been waiting for).
Now Mr. McCain is chastising Mr. Obama for not having visited Iraq since
2006 - a questionable strategy, you’d think, given that Mr. McCain’s own
propagandistic visit to a “safe” Baghdad market is one of his biggest
embarrassments. Then again, in his frantic efforts to explain why he sided with Mr. Bush to oppose an expanded G.I. bill that the Senate passed by 75 to 22, Mr. McCain has attacked Mr. Obama for not enlisting in the military.
Besides making Mr. McCain look ever angrier next to his serene opponent, this eruption raises the question of why he chose double-standard partisanship over principle by not applying this criterion to the blunderers who took us into Iraq. Unlike Mr. Obama, who was 7 years old in 1968, Mr. Bush and company could have served in Vietnam as Mr. McCain did.
The McCain campaign may have no choice but to double down on Iraq - what other issue does the candidate have? - but it can’t count on smear tactics or journalistic and public amnesia to indefinitely enforce the McCain narrative. As the McClellan circus shows, unexpected bombshells will keep intervening - detonating not only on the ground in Iraq but also in Washington, where more Bush alumni with reputations to salvage may yet run for cover about what went down in 2002-3.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald would have it, we will be borne back ceaselessly into the past. Or so we will be as long as Americans continue to die in Iraq and as long as politicians like Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton refuse to accept responsibility for their roles, major and minor, in abetting this national tragedy. ++
Responsibility
Amy Branham, BuzzFlash
Fri, 05/30/2008
One would think we would feel some sense of validation knowing that all we accused our government of doing: the lying, the torture, the deceit, is true. Piece by piece and time after time, those of us in the peace movement and, in particular, Gold Star Families who have worked in the peace movement have learned we were right. I don’t know about the rest of the families today, but I can tell you, I do not feel in the least bit happy about it.
For those of you whose heads have been in a hole somewhere out in Never Never Land, let me explain. Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan wrote a book that has been talked about hour after hour this week called “What Happened.” He talks about the lead up to the war and how the Bush Administration fed all of us, including him, propaganda as they beat the drums to illegally invade Iraq. It is, seemingly, a tell-all book written by a man who now says he has a duty to the truth.
Sir, you have always had a duty to tell the truth, to speak truth to power.
As a public servant, that should have always been your moral and ethical
responsibility! To do anything less leaves you culpable in one of the
greatest crimes against humanity of all time. If you knew what the
administration was spewing were lies, you should have said something and done something. But you did not and because of it, all of us have suffered.
You were not alone in this; I’ll give you that. There were many others who spewed the lies, the rhetoric, the propaganda that cost so many lives and so many trillions of dollars. You helped to totally ruin a foreign country and kill their civilians.
I can feel little more than anger today, after I have listened to hours of
interviews and talking points on the TV and radio.
A few years ago, I never thought I’d find myself in the position I am in
today, as I look back over time and what I have experienced because of this war and this disastrous administration. I have been called a traitor to my country, unpatriotic, and a disgrace to my son and his service to his country. I have been threatened physically and shouted at by misled people (who are generally otherwise probably pretty decent people) who thought I was crazy because I did not believe. My phones have been tapped and my e-mails read illegally. One morning during August 2005, shortly after coming home from Crawford, Texas, my husband went outside to find a government car parked in front of our home, the windows blacked out. The car sped away as soon as they spotted my husband.
We have worried for our jobs and the safety of our family. Many of our
friends thought we were just plain nuts, while we have had others who worked for the government tell us, we can’t be friends anymore — it endangers us and our jobs. Even our own family thought we had lost our marbles.
Yet, I cannot lay full blame on Scott McClellan. The blame for all of this
also lies with the media, who did not question properly even though it would have put their jobs on the line. The blame also lies with our elected officials who should have questioned more carefully and explained to the American people what they were doing.
We no longer have a system of checks and balances on the Presidency of this country, in Congress, or in the media. When responsible, patriotic citizens stand up to hold our government and the media to accountability, we are generally ignored and pushed to the side like an unwanted pile of weeds.
The corruption goes down to the very deepest, darkest levels of our society now. When people such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and the likes of Fox News and the other Murdoch-owned media outlets only report what the government wants them to report, there is something seriously wrong. When people are getting rich off the war, there is something wrong.
We know the truth. There is inescapable evidence right in our faces as to what the truth is. Yet, absolutely nothing is being done to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its actions. Those few honorable elected representatives who have tried eventually get buried and forgotten. It is not just the Republicans who are responsible for this, the Democrats hold equal responsibility for not taking responsibility, holding the administration accountable and doing what is right.
What we have all feared for so long has come to pass… The terrorists won, but not in the way we thought they would. It did not take more violence, only a government and military industrial complex that fed upon our worst nightmares and fears. Worse, We, The People, let them.
Amy Branham
Houston, TX
Gold Star Mom for Peace ++
McClellan’s Missile: Media Crimes As War Crimes
Danny Schechter, Smirking Chimp
June 1, 2008
Duh: The Bush Administration deployed a dishonest but very effective
propaganda campaign to sell the Iraq War to the American people on virtually every media outfit. Their “Culture of Deception” is now acknowledged.
How do we know? Scotty McClellan told us so. It’s all in the former Press
Secretary’s new book. And, happily, it’s all over the news.
It’s easy to put McClellan down. On the right he’s a traitor. The President dismissed him as “sad.” Karl Rove compared him to a left-wing blogger. Most of the real left-wing bloggers were equally contemptuous suggesting he’s just trying to sell books, some asking: Why did he wait so long? Wasn’t he part of the plot? Is this just the pot calling the kettle black?
Yes, but, at least, he had the courage, these many years later, to confirm what I and other have been saying for years. And he didn’t avoid taking a poke at the media which did the Administration’s job for them by carrying unverified claims as facts, while blocking out any other narrative. To his credit, McClellan called our media “deferential, complicit enablers.”
He’s not the first rat to jump ship and won’t be the last. Think of him like
the informants who turn on the mafia. The fact that a high profile former
propagandist blew a whistle matters in the same way that it was a former Vietnam strategist named Daniel Ellsberg, who with Anthony Russo, exposed the Pentagon Papers. We all knew the government had lied then, but the Pentagon Papers explained how they did it. (The Papers came out in 1971; the war had been underway since l945.)
Ellsberg was branded a rat too. But without rats, prosecutors can’t get
convictions. In Ellsberg’s case, he was the one convicted. Lets hope that in McClellan’s case, we can get to the real criminals in the dock along with the many who collaborated with them.
To be honest, what’s needed here are not more confessions by political
insiders but an actual trial of the perpetrators. This government strategy, and the media coverage that served it, were not just mistakes or lapses in otherwise accurate coverage but crimes with real world consequences. Try a million dead in Iraq, and 40,000 Americans. And counting…
As I and others probed into the daily indifference to Iraqi suffering and
the continuing orchestration of pro-war coverage, we came to see the problem not as continuously flawed reporting or even as a series of institutional failures, but in the same way as many whistleblowers tend to view the practices they expose–as a crime.
Given the number of lives lost and the amount of money wasted, these were the moral equivalents of serious felonies. When crimes take place in other settings, eventually government officials step in. As the scandals become public, there are exposés and then prosecutions. In this case, it is the government committing the crime, and the media, in essence, covering it up. Yes, media crimes rationalize war crimes. Both are shameful and worthy of indictment.
Official scrutiny of media practices rarely happens, partly because of
Constitutional protections afforded journalists and media outlets, and
partly because wronged parties have little recourse.
It’s hard to fight back against media irresponsibility. Public shaming seems the only response, and its effectiveness depends on whether critics can be heard in the so-called public square. In the case of Iraq, there were 800 experts on all the channels in the run-up to the war. Only 6 opposed the war. No wonder, judgments like this are left to historians.
After the Second World War at the Nuremberg Tribunal, American prosecutors wanted to put the German media on trial for promoting Hitler’s policies.
State propagandists were condemned. More recently, hate radio was indicted by the Rwanda tribunal investigating the genocide there, while in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian TV were criticized for inciting a war that divided that country, encouraging murderous ethnic cleansing.
The principle that media outlets can, for reasons of omission or commission, be held responsible for their role in inflaming conflicts and promoting jingoism, has been well established. Many remember William Randolf Hearst’s famous yellow journalism dictum: “You give me the pictures, I will give you the war.”
In February 2005, Italy hosted the citizens-initiated World Tribunal on
Iraq, which put the media “on trial” for its role in selling of the Iraq
War. It was of course not covered here. The Tribunal was modeled on an
earlier initiative during the Vietnam War by the then-leading international
intellectuals Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone du Bouvoir. As a young journalist, I covered their sessions in Stockholm in 1967. I saw it as an act of conscience.
Most of the U.S. media saw it as an exercise in propaganda. Most of the
charges they made then about U.S. war crimes are largely corroborated by the historical record even though only a few were reported when they occurred. I still remember watching CBS correspondent Morley Safer filming a stand-up in Stockholm, denouncing the Tribunal. Decades later, his “60 Minutes” returned to the scene of the My-Lai massacre interviewing former US soldiers who charged the U.S. military with the very war crimes Safer had dismissed when it mattered.
Critics today believe the media has covered up war crimes in Iraq, minimized civilian casualties, downplayed the destruction of cities like Fallujah, and misreported the reasons for going to war and how it was conducted. And they are right.
Will any of the “enablers” in TV news, or our leading newspapers, face
consequences for their actions? I am not just talking about high profile
journalists but their editors, producers, executives and proprietors.
Unlikely.
Many pro-war reports won awards; many of those who engineered the
propagandistic “coverage” were promoted. Their patriotically-correct ‘all
the war, all the time’ approach raised ratings and revenues. Some were
hailed as heroes, critics dismissed as zeros. Dick Cheney even dropped into a post-invasion media dinner to thank them for their service.
Media companies were happily co-opted as embeds while naysayers like Peter Arnett were banished. Later, many reporters were killed and wounded while trying to tell a story that has now largely disappeared from view.
Has there been any outbreak of conscience in newsrooms over the last five years or, more importantly, any commitment to cover Iraq in a less
jingoistic manner? Not that I can see even though there is some occasionally “good” reporting. The title of the book by Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell sums it up: “So Wrong for So Long.”
No wonder, many of the outlets abandoning journalism for “mili-tainment”
lost viewers and credibility.
So thank you Scotty, whatever your motives, for reopening the debate. (And thank the indy media and a few gutsy websites and mainstreamers for telling the truth.)
Now it’s time to consider potential remedies even if we lack the power to
enforce them. Our main media outlets have already been convicted in the global court of public opinion. ++
Death Penalty for Bush?
Bugliosi Makes the Case
CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
May 31 / June 1, 2008
If Vincent Bugliosi were prosecuting George W. Bush for the murder of the more than 4,000 American soldiers who have died in Iraq, he would seek the death penalty.
“If I were the prosecutor, there is no question I would seek the death
penalty,” Bugliosi told Corporate Crime Reporter in a wide-ranging
interview.
Bugliosi is the author of the just published book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (Vanguard Press, 2008).
“I’m urging here that an American jury try George Bush for first degree
murder. I want to see him on trial for murder before an American jury. And if they convict him, it will be up to the jury to decide what his punishment is. One of the options would be the imposition of the death penalty. If I were prosecuting him, absolutely I would seek the death penalty. As Governor of Texas, George Bush signed death warrants - 152 out of 152 - most of them for people who only committed one murder.”
Bugliosi said he is sending a copy of his book to all fifty state Attorneys
General, offering his assistance in prosecuting Bush for homicide.
“I’m herein enclosing a copy of my book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” Bugliosi writes in the letter to the Attorneys General. “I hope you will find the time to read it and that you will agree with its essential conclusion - that George W. Bush is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4,000 American soldiers who have died fighting his war in Iraq.”
Bugliosi said he’s also meeting with a high profile California District
Attorney to urge him to bring the case.
“I am going to meet here soon with a very prominent DA,” Bugliosi said. “I
don’t think he is going to do it. But I do think he will give me some ideas
as to who would be likely to do it. I’m going ask him to do it. My guess is
he is not going to do it. But he attends DA conventions. And he may very well know someone. There may be a case where a DA or an AG lost a son over in Iraq.”
“I offer my services to help out in any way that they see fit,” Bugliosi
said. “But I want to convey the thought that this is a serious thing. This
is not a fanciful reverie. At my age, I don’t have time for fanciful
reveries. If I had to guess what the probabilities are, my guess is that
there is not a high probability of it. But I think there is a very
substantial probability that George Bush, as a direct result of this book,
will end up in an American courtroom being tried for murder. And the main reason that I say that is because of the great number of American
prosecutors that I’ve established jurisdiction for.”
Bugliosi said that the homicide prosecution against Bush can be brought by the U.S. Attorney General, any of the U.S. Attorneys, any of the 50 state Attorneys General, or any of the hundreds of district attorneys - if a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq is from their districts.
Bugliosi says that even if the prosecution of Bush doesn’t come about for a number of years, he wants to plant in the President’s mind the idea that such a prosecution is possible.
“The least I can do is put that thought in his mind until he goes to his
grave,” Bugliosi said. “That’s the least I can do for the thousands of
American soldiers who came back in an aluminum box or came back as a jar of ashes. And the parents are told - don’t open the box, it is unviewable. They are getting back limbs and body parts. And this - I don’t want to use a cuss word here - this small, horrible human being - while young men who never had a chance to live out their dreams, being blown to pieces by roadside bombs - and this guy is having a ball dancing. I want to put the thought in his mind that in any time in the future, five years from now, ten years from now, some aide is going to tap him on the shoulder and say - Mr. President, there is this prosecutor, I don’t know how to pronounce his name, he’s up in Fargo, and he’s charging you with murder sir, and we are due for an arraignment next Wednesday in Fargo, sir.”
“Bush will never know whether that will happen. They went after (former
Chilean strongman Augusto) Pinochet for murder 33 years later. I want to put that thought in Bush’s mind. This guy has been enjoying himself throughout this entire war. And the suffering and the horror and blood is unbelievable. And he has enjoyed himself throughout this whole thing.”
At the center of Bugliosi’s indictment of Bush is a October 7, 2002 speech to the nation in which Bush claims that Saddam Hussein was a great danger to this nation either by attacking us with his weapons of mass destruction, or giving these weapons to some terrorist group.
“And he said - the attack could happen on any given day - meaning the threat was imminent,” Bugliosi says.
“The only problem for George Bush - and if he were prosecuted, there is no way he could get around this - is that on October 1, 2002, six days earlier, the CIA sent George Bush its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a classified top secret report. Page eight clearly and unequivocally says that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country. In fact, the report says that Hussein would only use whatever weapons of mass destruction he had against us if he feared that America was about to attack him.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Vincent Bugliosi, see 22
Corporate Crime Reporter 22, June 2, 2008, print edition only.] ++
Corporate Crime Reporter is published in Washington, D.C.
Cult of Deception
MAUREEN DOWD, NYT
June 1, 2008
With Liberty And Justice For All: US Secret Prisons, Then and Now: 2001-2005, 2008
GreyHawk, Epluribusmedia
Sun, 06/01/2008
George Bush: the great pretender
In an extract from a book that has rocked the White House, Scott McLellan,George Bush’s former press secretary, accuses his boss of manipulating the truth to launch the Iraq war
Times UK
June 1, 2008
Perhaps God’s greatest gift to us in life is the ability to learn from our
experiences, especially our mistakes, and to grow into better people. I have written a book about the slice of history I witnessed during my years in the White House and about the well intentioned but flawed human beings - myself included - who shaped that history.
In my efforts on behalf of the presidential administration of George W Bush I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.
As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration
from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realise that some of them were badly misguided.
More significant, however, is the larger story in which I played a minor
role - the story of how the presidency of George Bush veered terribly off
course.
Bush is a man of personal charm, wit and enormous political skill. On paper, the team he assembled was impressive. Dick Cheney, the vice-president, was a serious, vastly experienced hand in the top levels of government. Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, had already enjoyed one successful run at the Pentagon. Colin Powell, the secretary of state, was easily the most popular public figure in the country and could well have been the first African-American president of the United States had he been interested in the job. Even Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, had a powerful reputation as a brilliant strategic thinker.
I believed in Bush’s leadership and agenda for America and had confidence in his authenticity, integrity and judgment, but today the high hopes that accompanied the early days of his presidency have fallen back to earth. Rumsfeld and Powell are gone, their tenures controversial and disappointing. Cheney’s role is widely viewed as sinister and destructive of the president’s legacy. And Rove’s reputation for political genius is now matched by his reputation as an operative who places political gain ahead of the national interest.
Through it all, Bush remains very much the man he always was -
self-confident, quick-witted, down-to-earth and stubborn - though not quite the leader I once imagined him to be. It was the decision to go to war in Iraq that pushed his presidency off course. For Bush, removing the “grave and gathering danger” that Iraq supposedly posed was primarily a means for achieving the far more grandiose objective of reshaping the Middle East as a region of peaceful democracies.
This fateful misstep was based on a confluence of events (the shock of 9/11 and our deceptively quick initial military success in Afghanistan), human nature (ambition, certitude and self-deceit), and a divinely inspired passion (Bush’s deeply held belief that all people have a God-given right to live in freedom). Every president wants to achieve greatness but few do. As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the upheavals of war provide the opportunity for the transformative change that he hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness.
I do not know how the war will be viewed decades from now. What I do know is that war should be waged only when necessary and the Iraq war was not necessary. Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake. But I’ve come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made - a decision to turn away from candour and honesty when those qualities were most needed.
In the autumn of 2002 Bush and his White House engaged in a carefully
orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We’d done much the same on other issues - tax cuts and education - to great success, but war with Iraq was different. Our lack of candour and honesty in making the case for war would later provoke a partisan response from our opponents that further distorted and obscured a more nuanced reality.
Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats, are good, decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it. Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign, a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin. Candour and honesty are pushed to the side in the battle to win the latest news cycle.
Bush, I believe, did not consciously set out to engage in these destructive practices but, like others before him, chose to play the Washington game the way he found it rather than changing the culture as he had vowed to do at the outset of his election campaign. And, like others before him, he has engaged in a degree of self-deception that may be psychologically necessary to justify the tactics needed to win the political game.
He has always been an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader. He is not one to delve deeply into all the possible policy options -
including sitting around engaging in extended debate about them - before making a choice. Rather, he chooses based on his gut and his most deeply held convictions. Such was the case with Iraq.
One core belief Bush holds is that all people have a God-given right to
freedom. Another is his deep disdain for tyrants like Saddam Hussein and his well grounded belief that tyrants never give up their desire to possess the world’s most deadly weapons. Bush also believes that America has an obligation to use its power to lead the rest of the world towards a better and more secure future. And he believes a leader should think and act boldly to strive for the ideal.
Once Bush set a course of action, it was rarely questioned. That was
certainly the case with Iraq. He was ready to bring about regime change and that, in all likelihood, meant war. The question was not whether, but merely when and how.
Over the summer of 2002 top Bush aides outlined a strategy for carefully
orchestrating the coming campaign to sell the war aggressively. But in the pursuit of that goal, embracing a high level of candour and honesty about the potential war - its larger objectives, its likely costs and its possible risks - came a distant second.
What drove Bush towards military confrontation more than anything else was an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom. This view was grounded in a philosophy of coercive democracy, a belief that Iraq was ripe for conversion from a dictatorship into a beacon of liberty through the use of force and a conviction that this could be achieved at nominal cost.
Intoxicated by the influence and power of America, Bush believed that a
successful transformation of Iraq could be the linchpin for realising his
dream of a free Middle East. But there was a problem here - a disconnect between the president’s most heartfelt objective in going to war and the publicly stated rationale for that war.
Bush and his advisers knew that with their strong isolationist streak the
American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East. The idea of coercive transformation might also provoke all kinds of debates about the realism of the project.
Rather than open this Pandora’s box, the administration chose a different
path - not employing out-and-out deception but shading the truth;
downplaying destruction threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain than they were; quietly disregarding some of the crucial caveats in the intelligence and minimising evidence that pointed in the opposite direction.
They also encouraged Americans to believe as fact some things that were unclear and possibly false (for example, that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons programme) and other things that were overplayed or wrong (for example, that Saddam might have had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda). In late August, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, Cheney said: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
Although Cheney’s strong language may have been due to his habit of being unable to stay on message - at times he simply could not contain his deep-seated certitude, even arrogance - it’s obvious that Bush knew the increasingly strong language he was employing on Iraq. Their relationship has always been clouded in mystery to some extent, but it is a close one. They spend considerable time together in private meetings, their discussions largely kept confidential.
In the 2004 re-election campaign, Cheney would be the attack dog who went after John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, a little more pointedly than the president could. It is clear to me now that some of the same strategy was used in the Iraq campaign. The vice-president can lean a little more forward in his rhetoric than the president - though I was present on one occasion when, with the media excluded, Bush himself was conspicuously candid.
On Friday September 20, 2002 he hosted a meeting with Republican governors at the White House. “Military force is my last option but it may be the only choice,” Bush stated. “I’m gonna make a prediction. Write this down. Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.”
Saddam was a “brutal, ugly, repugnant man who needs to go. He is also
paranoid. This is a guy who killed his own security guards recently. I would like to see him gone peacefully, but if I unleash the military, I promise you it will be swift and decisive”.
When asked about building public support for war, Bush said: “There is a
case to be made and I have to make it. Iraq is a threat we will deal with in a logical way. If we have to act, my choices are really three. One, someone kills. Two, the population rises up and overthrows him. Three, military action.” He emphasised the need to press ahead urgently. He also noted that the mission would be to topple Saddam and change the regime, stating that his two sons and top generals would be removed as well.
“There is nothing more risky than letting Saddam Hussein develop weapons of mass destruction,” Bush commented. “We will deal with him. This is not about inspections. It is about weapons of mass destruction and disarming the regime of them. The inspections are a means to an end. He is an evil man. I have seen a video of Saddam Hussein himself pulling the trigger on a man who didn’t like his policies.”
He stated that “it is a tough decision to commit troops. I assure you,
though, if we have to go, we will be tough and swift and it will be
violent so troops can move very quickly”.
When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is
clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help
him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so. I know the president pretty well. I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war - more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured and tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens dead - he would never have made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly today.
A well considered understanding of the circumstances and history of Iraq and the Middle East should have been brought into the decision-making process. The responsibility to provide this understanding belonged to the president’s advisers and they failed to fulfil it. Powell was apparently the only adviser who even tried to raise doubts about the wisdom of war. The rest of the foreign policy team seemed to be preoccupied with regime change or, in the case of Condi Rice, seemingly more interested in accommodating the president’s instincts and ideas than in questioning them or educating him.
A pro-war campaign might have been more acceptable had it been accompanied by a high level of candour and honesty, but it was not. As the campaign accelerated, caveats and qualifications were downplayed or dropped altogether. Contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or disregarded. Evidence based on high confidence from the intelligence community was lumped together with intelligence of lesser confidence. A nuclear threat was added to the biological and chemical threats to create a sense of gravity and urgency. Support for terrorism was given greater weight by playing up a dubious Al-Qaeda connection to Iraq.
As the president’s top foreign policy adviser, Rice should have stood up to more experienced, strong-viewed advisers such as Cheney and Rumsfeld rather than deferring to them. However, my later experiences with Rice led me to believe that she was more interested in figuring out where the president stood and carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort on helping him understand the considerations and potential consequences.
It goes to an important question that critics have raised about the
president. Is Bush intellectually incurious or, as some assert, actually
stupid? Bush is plenty smart enough to be president, but, as I’ve noted, his leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate. His intellectual curiosity tends to be centred on knowing what he needs in order to articulate, advocate and defend his policies effectively. He keenly recognises the role of marketing and selling policy in today’s governance, so such an approach is understandable to some degree, but his advisers needed to recognise how potentially harmful his instinctual leadership and limited intellectual curiosity can be when it comes to crucial decisions.
The fact that he has been portrayed as not bright is unfortunate, but it’s a result of his own mistakes - which could have been prevented had his beliefs been properly vetted and challenged by his top advisers. Instead, his credibility has been shattered and his public standing seemingly irreparably damaged.
In the end, of course, Bush bears ultimate responsibility for the invasion
of Iraq. He made the decision to invade and he signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest. An issue as grave as war must be dealt with openly, forthrightly and honestly. The American people, and especially our troops and their families, deserve nothing less.
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“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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