The saga continues. Was President Bush the innocent dupe of misleading information about Iraq’s weaponry? As the British put it, was he the victim of “sexed up” information—a question that seems to say more about the British libido than anything else—or did he and his cohorts deliberately distort qualified intelligence reports, limited information, and educated guesses?
And what about the media or what passes for news in this country? Compare more than six months of daily appearances on television and radio by the most publicity conscious president we’ve ever seen, leaning over the podium to tell us the 9/11 terrorists “must have thought we’d sue them” and later one-liners like “bring ’em on” while our troops and equipment massed on Iraq’s borders and Tommy Franks played computer games in Wolf Blitzer’s “Cutter” (Qatar) and the Iraqis dismantled their short range missiles or played with drones from FAO Schwarz.
With about 80 percent of the rest of the world against our invasion of Iraq, the substantive news coverage of opposing views could have been written on a pinhead with a shovel. And Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda and disinformation empire still absolves itself of any complicity in the illegal invasion or the fantastic promotion of weapons of mass destruction.
No doubt our compassionate conservative, fiscally frugal, born-again Christian President is the innocent victim of poor advice from the intelligence community. Nor should he be held accountable for any of the following:
• Ignoring a decade of on-the-ground first hand experience and documentation of the destruction or absence of WMDs by the United Nation inspectors. Instead of vilifying former inspectors who tried to tell us otherwise, we could have simply gone to the UN files for information or to at least draw a comparison with our own intelligence. Of course, the UN team, like most intelligence agencies, seems steeped in wishy-washy qualified reports and hesitation to make the sort of didactic statements that appeal to fascist war mongers.
• Expecting and demanding that Iraq prove the negative “yes, we have no bananas” when we knew full well they once bought them from our store and we still had the invoices.
• Stonewalling everything about Vice President Cheney’s energy commission meetings with people like Enron’s Ken Lay where the Iraqi oil fields were openly discussed and thrown into the mix of eventual availability and control.
• Abandoning the 1972 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Treaty so that we could get on with the development of a star wars shield and other nuclear testing.
• Establishing a first-strike initiative. For the first time in U.S. history we have established a foreign policy that allows us to attack sovereign nations that have done us no harm and obviously can be attacked on hearsay.
• Passing the Patriot Act that takes away the very freedoms Americans have been
willing to fight and die for.
• Making a mockery of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by extending our own nuclear development into “mini-nukes” that can be used by foot soldiers and have one third the power of the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The President of Brazil summed it up best when he said: “The nuclear nonproliferation treaty makes no sense unless the big boys lay down their weapons.” So far, not one nuclear secret has remained secret and, therefore, new nuclear development means the proliferation of more weapons of mass destruction.
• Extending our own weapons of mass destruction with things like “Tactical Bunker Busters” or the “Mother of All Bombs” and COIL (the chemical oxygen iodine laser) that destroys all plant and animal life while preserving buildings and infrastructure and is being mounted on all Apache helicopters.
• Rather than do the common sense thing of closing our borders immediately after we were infiltrated by illegal aliens who trained in our nation and carried out the suicidal attacks of 9/11, George W. Bush has gone forward to a proposal to open our borders even further by allowing legal status to those who break our immigration laws and then claims that “it’s not amnesty.” Illegal immigration has gone up fifteen percent since his announcement.
• After running up the national debt $555 billion last year, the situation for 2004 is even worse, but like an ad on late night television Bush promises to cut the deficit in half in five years. Wow, a fifty percent reduction after a one hundred percent mark-up. Just have your credit card ready.
These activities can, no doubt, all be laid at the feet of faulty intelligence and justified by special commissions set up to investigate how our hapless leader was duped into going along with the opinions of his staff.
As Ted Lang so aptly put it in a recent Ether Zone article titled “Another Phony Bush Investigation: Has everyone already forgotten the special, independent, autonomous, separate, jointly created 9-11 Kean commission, created via agreement by both Congress and the White House? Has everyone already forgotten how the Bush administration blocked funding to the commission, blacked out 28 pages of its report, refused to turn over information and documents, and is now fighting to shut down the commission after having so seriously delayed it? Has everyone already forgotten how Bush tried to stack it and bias the commission by appointing as its chair Kissinger the Hun?”
And let’s not forget the special commission Bush appointed to study “private accounts” for Social Security where ex-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the very same person who along with Bob Dole was responsible for the 1983 skyrocket increase to payroll taxes that is still producing an overtaxed surplus, was appointed to co-chair this committee—a committee that never did put together a final report or recommendations other than a wishy-washy pile of actuarial data compiled by the underlings in the committee.
We don’t need another phony investigation. Bush needs it, but we don’t. We already know the answer and we got it from the horse’s mouth. It was decided that “weapons of mass destruction” was the best argument to use in order to rally the troops and get the people behind an invasion of Iraq and seizing their oil. The end justifies the means. Just like Nuremberg, the only question now is what’s the punishment?
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”