Prosecuting Bush administration not politics, but matter of national security

After ignoring the grassroots movement to impeach Bush, which had twice as much support as impeaching Clinton and about as much as impeaching Nixon the night before he resigned, the mainstream media is now pooh-poohing the idea of prosecuting Bush administration officials for their domestic and war crimes.
If restoring Constitutional checks and balances and showing that the rich and powerful aren't above the law, especially laws of basic human decency like the Geneva Convention, isn't reason enough, there are some very immediate national security reasons to do so, related to 9/11 and the Iraq War.

In the case of 9/11, that day George W. Bush said,

I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

LINK

The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found that the Saudi government helped the hijackers, and declassified FBI documents show a Saudi agent picked up two of the hijackers at LAX, set them up in an apartment in his own building, and funneled checks to them from the Saudi ambassador's wife.

Did the Bush administration use this information to punish Saudi Arabia or change the nature of our relationship with them in any way?

No.

He even protected them by classifying the Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry's report and tried to smooth over uproar caused by the sketchy details that did leak out.

He likewise said little to nothing about Saudi terrorists entering Iraq even though more came from there than any other country according to Israel, our Pentagon, and even the Saudis themselves.

Why didn't Bush do anything about this? Even if you don't believe the Bush administration was involved in 9/11, covering up the Saudi role is at least a bigger crime than Richard Nixon covering up a second rate burglary.

Worse, it means that we may be vulnerable to another terrorist attack because for all the Patriot Act bluster and trampling of our civil rights, the Bush administration did nothing punish or restrain the real perpetrators.

There is a similar issue with how we became involved in the Iraq War. What was once considered a conspiracy theory, that the Bush administration intentionally lied to get us into the war, is more or less accepted as fact by the mainstream media now.

However, if we don't prosecute those responsible, they are free to return to government at a later date, and do the same thing. That is exactly what Cheney and Rumsfeld did after lying about the nature of the Soviet threat in the 70s.

While the lies and liars from within the administration are pretty well documented, their helpers outside the administration, like those who forged the Niger document claiming that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake, have not been outed and put out of business.

Perhaps most importantly, we have not had a public airing of WHY Bush bothered to trump up a war against Iraq and who it was meant to benefit. There are some clear clues like Cheney's secrecy about the energy task force he led that was pouring over maps Iraq's oilfields, and the Bush commissioned Hydrocarbon Law that would have given 88% of Iraq's oil income to foreign oil companies, a law that Iraqi legislators refused to pass even after being offered millions in bribes each by the oil companies. But those are just clues.

Without a definitive record of who lobbied for the war, who listened to them, and how they got their way, we are vulnerable to being misled into a war again in the future. If those who planned to profit from the war were punished, we would be even less likely to see it happen again.

It is a matter of public record that Bush diverted our attention from those responsible for 9/11 and fabricated a case for war, leaving us vulnerable to terrorist attacks from those he protected and squandering military resources we should have saved for real threats.

We are less safe because of it, and without the complete investigation and prosecution of those responsible, we will continue to be at risk.

If it does not happen, it would be because our government is looking after the interests of the very wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

Iraqis: US has no claim to our oil wealth

Iraqis are fed up with the US assuming they can tell Iraq what to do with their oil wealth, including using it to pay to reconstruct what Bush broke when he invaded the country and during the ongoing occupation. Congress has even suggested that Iraq subsidize their own occupation with low cost fuel for our military.

You don't do a home invasion robbery then hand the victim a bill for what you broke and stole, and tell them to bring you some sandwiches.

What the Iraqis are saying in this article actually doesn't complain about enough. Bush (and sadly even our Democratic Party majority Congress) have been pushing Iraq to pass a Hydrocarbon Law that gives up to 88% of Iraq's oil income to Bush's buddies at the big oil companies. Bush threatened to fire Maliki if he didn't get the law passed, and the oil companies have been trying to bride members of parliament with millions of dollars each for their votes.

The Iraqis won't do it because they know if they do, their own people would kill them. And they might have some sense of patriotism that keeps them from giving away the store to occupiers.

Not coincidentally, what Washington is trying to do with Iraq's oil money is a war crime under the Geneva and Hague Conventions.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Iraq: U.S. has no claim to oil boom

'America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq,' Baghdad official says

By Liz Sly

Tribune correspondent

12:42 AM CDT, May 1, 2008

BAGHDAD — As Congress gears up to debate the Bush administration's latest request for an additional $108 billion in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraqis are fuming at suggestions being floated by lawmakers that Baghdad should start paying a share of the war's costs by providing cheap fuel to the U.S. military.

"America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq," said Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi government spending. "This is an immoral request because we didn't ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we didn't have all these needs."

***

Behind the controversy lies a giant muddle of misspending, waste, corruption and poor accounting on the part of both Iraq and the U.S. surrounding about $100 billion worth of spending on reconstruction and the Iraqi security forces that has barely dented Iraq's needs over the past five years.

Of this, $46.7 billion came from U.S. taxpayers and $50.3 billion from Iraqi oil revenues, including $23 billion in Iraqi money that was spent by the U.S. under the occupation administration of Paul Bremer, according to Bowen.


***

Figures like these contribute to the widespread perception among Iraqis that the U.S. invaded only to steal the nation's oil, making it difficult for Iraqi legislators to contemplate contributing to the costs of the U.S. military in Iraq, said Sunni lawmaker Dhafer al-Ani.

"It's illogical, illegal and immoral," he said of the U.S. proposal that Iraq give the U.S. military cheap oil. "Any additional commitments by the Iraqis to the Americans will make it less respected in the eyes of the Iraqi people, and that will make things even more complicated."

FULL TEXT

OIL THEFT motive for IRAQ WAR resources

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CIA ‘refused to operate’ secret jails

I heard this on Democracy Now this morning, still the one hour of radio news you need to listen to everyday.

Our one hope for preventing the Bush administration from invading Iran and starting a world war isn't protesters or even elected Democrats, but a rebellion by the CIA and military.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker has documented the Pentagon generals dissent to Bush's goals and methods, and Sidney Blumenthal of Salon just published a book that documents how Bush has essentially been at war with the military since 2002 when they began to tell him what would happen if we invaded Iraq.

Right now, when generals dissent, they are forced to retire, which has a downside for the Bushies: they are then free to air their gripes PUBLICLY, which they are doing.

Either the Bushies will push things to the point that the military does what the CIA did in the case of secret prisons (simply refuse to follow orders) or they will realize that is the likely outcome and quietly start packing their bags for their retirement in Saudi Arabia (I think Idi Amin's cabana is now available).

There is something wrong with our democracy when the only way change can happen that a majority of Americans want is when government employees rebel. Our elected officials are not representing us, certainly not the Republicans, but sadly neither are a large number of Democrats.

KEY EXCERPTS:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/57e68ed8-48da-11db-a996-0000779e2340.html

CIA ‘refused to operate’ secret jails

By Guy Dinmore in Washington

Published: September 20 2006 22:07 | Last updated: September 20 2006 22:07

The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror suspects to the military-run detention centre at Guantánamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the secret facilities, according to former CIA officials and people close to the programme.

***

The administration publicly explained its decision in light of the legal uncertainty surrounding permissible interrogation techniques following the June Supreme Court ruling that all terrorist suspects in detention were entitled to protection under Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.

But the former CIA officials said Mr Bush’s hand was forced because interrogators had refused to continue their work until the legal situation was clarified because they were concerned they could be prosecuted for using illegal techniques. One intelligence source also said the CIA had refused to keep the secret prisons going.

FULL TEXT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/57e68ed8-48da-11db-a996-0000779e2340.html

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