The Downing Street Memo that says the Bush administration KNEW Saddam was NOT a threat and that the Bushies were "fixing the facts around the policy," means the Bush administration betrayed the public trust in ways that make the offenses that lead to the resignation of Nixon and impeachment of Clinton seem embarrassingly trivial by comparison.
If this were Bush's only sin, and he was otherwise only as bad as his dad, an average president at worst, it would still be impeachable. But Bush has not only lied about Iraq, but has systematically lied and withheld information on just about every issue imaginable from the cost of his Medicare prescription drug reform, when he threatened to fire the actuary who figured out the true cost if he revealed it, to 9/11 when the entire administration lied about the number and specificity of the warnings they had and even withheld key documents from the joint congressional inquiry that they eventually deigned to release to the 9/11 Commission, and of course they barred the joint inquiry from release the portion of their report that dealt with Saudi financing of the 9/11 hijackers, which independent reporters like Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker found amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If the public knew that, they might have demanded a different focus for the "War on Terror" that didn't fit the Bush agenda.
Perhaps more disturbing than anything the Bush administration itself has done is the complicity and silence of the mainstream press and the rest of Washington. Something is profoundly wrong when a president is allowed to ignore and break law after law, and tell lie after lie, and even attack the Constitutional framework of our government without public comment or censure equal in magnitude to the offense.
If you have not yet signed John Conyers petition demanding the Bush administration answer the questions raised by the Downing Street Memo, you should do so now.
John Conyer's Bush War Lies Petition
KEY EXCERPTS:
Richard Nixon was [about to be] impeached for a cover-up of a two-bit break-in.
Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex with an intern.
Now we have the irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush lied about the reasons for taking the United States to war.
The intelligence wasn't flawed.
The weapons weren't hidden.
Our elected leaders were LYING.
So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and empire, in the first place.
FULL TEXT:
Administration's offenses impeachable
Thursday, June 02, 2005 - Bangor Daily News
Let's consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago:
A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole cloth fabrication.
So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't. We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib...
read the rest of the article here...
No comments:
Post a Comment