Here's something I don't understand. The Golden Goose was about to lay another 9/11-type Golden Egg for Bush&Co. to pick up. And they didn't.

Surely, Karl Rove, who had seen Bush's approval ratings drop to all-time lows, knew days ahead that a Category 5 Hurricane was bearing down on New Orleans and a calamitous disaster was likely to unfold there if and when the levees were unable to hold back the water. What better way to improve those ratings than for Bush to be photographed the day after the disaster struck, standing on top of debris, bullhorn in hand, vowing that the government would help Gulf Coast states rebuild from the Katrina catastrophe?

But none of that happened. They bungled their own political resurrection! Nearly a full week went by, while thousands were dying and starving or were kenneled in unbelievable filth in New Orleans. Nobody seemed to be in charge. Bush remained "on vacation" in Crawford, and traveled around to fundraisers, played golf, etc.; Condi was theatergoing and buying thousand-dollar shoes on Fifth Avenue. What was going on? Did Karl Rove not understand the significance of what was happening? Was Bush...uh..."incapacitated"? What about Cheney, "on vacation" in Wyoming; was he "incapacitated," too? Are the Bush people really that politically obtuse?

So here's the question I have for those of you who voted for Bush in 2004: Do you get it now?

BUSH GOES AWOL, AGAIN

For the past four years, progressives and moderate-conservatives have been pointing out how incompetent this Administration is. Many Bush Republicans accused us of making up such accusations for purely political reasons. Now you yourself can see what we have seen: These guys are way over their heads and haven't got a clue; they're constantly having to come back at a problem in hopes of getting it right the second or third time around. Of course, that means they're always playing catch-up, which means they're always too late. (Such as this Alice-in-Wonderland comment by Bush a week after he went AWOL -- again -- when his country needed him: "In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.")

Those at the royal Bush court lead such isolated, circumscribed lives that when a disaster strikes, they are so far removed from the circumstances in which regular people find themselves that they simply don't understand the magnitude of what's happening out there in the real-world. You may remember that Bush's first response to the Asian tsunami was silence, and then a grudging piddling amount of aid offered; it took the international community shaming him for his unfeeling miserliness before his handlers began to change Bush's tune and he finally pledged genuine aid commensurate with the enormity of the catastrophe.

Our earlier assessment of the Administration as bumblers was made mainly on the disaster that Bush&Co. made, and are still making, in the Persian Gulf. But now the whole world gets to see, up close and personal, the thorough botch they made, and are still making, in the other Gulf, in New Orleans and environs.

THE IRAQ BOTCH

In Iraq, they launched a war based on lies and deceptions, and had no plan for what should happen after the major military fighting ceased.

They turned away Iraqis from participating in the reconstruction of their own society, preferring to award the multi-billion-dollar contracts to huge American firms like Halliburton and Bechtel. They disbanded the Iraqi army, leaving hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men unemployed and angry. They insultingly refused aid and advice from the United Nations and their former allies, wanting nobody to interfere with their Occupation. They didn't have enough troops, and the correct troops, in place to police the "post-war" phase. They didn't guard the abandoned ammo dumps, and then were surprised when those munitions were used to blow up U.S. soldiers.

They finally, a year or two late, realized that the U.S. was engaged in a guerrilla-style war against nationalist insurgents, along with some foreign jihadists, and started to change their military strategy. But it was too late, and insufficient, to make much of a dent. Now the U.S. is involved in a stalemated, Vietnam-like quagmire, and steady streams of flag-draped caskets make their way back to the U.S., and thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians continue dying as well.

And still Bush cannot bring himself to answer Cindy Sheehan's simple question: "For what noble cause did my son have to die?"

ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

Now in 2005, a natural disaster occurred that everyone predicted -- including the government's own emergency-response specialists. Specifically, Homeland Security Department chief Michael Chertoff and FEMA's head Michael Brown were briefed on the consequences of the levees breaking days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. But the Administration's response was non-existent. Or completely beyond belief: Bush actually told Diane Sawyer "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." Read your experts' frickin reports, man!

FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- which Bush turned into a stripped-down, underfunded subgroup buried in the Homeland Security Department, focusing on anti-terrorism measures rather than on emergency-management -- is led by an bumbling political appointee, Brown, someone with no experience in this field, and it showed; for example, neither he nor Chertoff were aware there were thousands of refugees in the city's Convention Center until Day 5. We ordinary citizens, paying attention to the news reports, knew that three days before they did.

Brown was a buddy of one of Bush's Texas pals, with a history in show-horses. That's the man in charge of FEMA. And, believe it or not, Bush the other day thanked him publicly for doing such a "heck of a job." Oh, by the way, guess which company has been awarded the contract for reconstructing New Orleans? Yep, Cheney's Halliburton.

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin hit the nail on the head about Bush's belated promise to send 40,000 troops into his city. "Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something."

Tens of thousands of New Orleans residents -- those mostly too poor to have been able to evacuate the city -- were herded into mass structures like the Superdome and Convention Center, locked inside, and then no government agency provided food, water, medicine, sanitation care, removal of the dead, etc. Those who wanted to leave those horrific shelters and cross over a bridge to dry land were prohibited by armed troops from doing so.

Many of those residents complained that the thousands of citizens there were treated worse than dogs in a kennel. It was a circle out of Dante's Inferno. Indeed, so atrociously were the victims treated in those facilities that even right-wing Fox News reporters Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera were appalled on the air, just trying to get viewers to understand the enormity of the hell-on-earth scenes they were witnessing. Rivera was crying and screaming to "let these people walk out of here...just let them leave." (You've got to see this powerful video of Shepard and Rivera live on air -- reality-TV at its best.)

DON'T BE POOR OR POOR-AND-BLACK

The fact that the great majority of those seeking refuge and rescue were African-American, and that no help came in the first five or six days, spoke volumes about the "compassionate conservatism" supposedly animating Bush's administration. Try to imagine how fast the federal government would have mobilized to reach an upper-class compound filled with thousands of well-do-do white people, with access and influence. You get the picture.

Speaking of pictures, two comments:

1. Bush flew into New Orleans to have his picture taken for public-relations purposes. At one location, he spoke at a "food-distribution" point, which disappeared shortly after the photo-op. It was a set! Various other photo ops likewise were organized that were equally as unreal. For more, see "The Potemkin Photo Op".

2. No doubt you've seen the way two virtually identical photos of hurricane survivors were captioned in local newspapers. In one, a white man, up to his chest in water, with some groceries in his hands: "...found food at a local market." In another, same scenario, but a young black man: "...looted food from a supermarket." Both were trying to survive and bring some form of sustenance back to their children and families. One "found" food, the other "looted" food.

Interestingly, when after Baghdad fell, we saw the video pictures of Iraqis looting stores and museums and such, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said: "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things". . . Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens."

Now the governor of Louisiana is talking about "shoot-to-kill" orders against those who, facing starvation from a non-caring government, are taking food from abandoned, flooded-out grocery stores. And right-wing, let-them-eat-cake pundits blame the mostly black, poverty-stricken residents for "choosing" not to evacuate New Orleans, as if these cashless folks should just have jumped in their non-existent cars or boats and headed out of town. Of course, FEMA or the military could have supplied the buses and trucks and trains to take out the trapped, but apparently there were no such contingency plans and/or nobody with any brains was in charge to get the mass evacuation organized.

A REVERSE-MIDAS TOUCH

But let's move on from America's perennial, always-just-below-the-surface racism and hits-on-the-poor. The point here is that George W. Bush has a reverse Midas touch. Whatever he involves himself in as a leader winds up in FUBAR land. (If you don't know what those letters stand for, ask someone in the military: ---- Up Beyond All Recognition.)

It happened with his botched oil-company ventures at Arbusto and Harken Energy in Texas; it happened, and is happening in Iraq; and now it's happening with regard to the Katrina disaster in Louisiana.

Except this time there's no wealthy family friend, or Saudi prince, or British prime minister, to bail Bush out of his difficulties. He's out there all by his lonesome, exposed for all the world to see as the emperor with no clothes, a figurehead leader with no emotional or intellectual wherewithal to deal efficiently and correctly with anything beyond the most simple scenarios. Introduce complexity into the equation, and he's a deer in the highlights of reality.

So...what to do? While Rove&Co. ratchet up the ol' spin machine -- and try to find others to blame for their own gross delays and mistakes -- Bush's normal allies are abandoning him, right and left and right. Business Week, Washington Times, newspapers around the country, conservative pundits David Brooks and Newt Gingrich, retired military officers, and so on -- they all can't believe the idiocy and deadly cluelessness of their GOP hero.

They all realize that this incompetent, way-over-his-head guy has three more years on his contract, and he's likely to take down the economy, political structure, and everything else with him as his administration self-destructs in an unholy mess. In short, the Bush Administration is not good for business, which CEOs and others are finally starting to realize.

LEAVE OR BE PUSHED

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Chertoff and the others simply have got to go, along with the other fools and criminals down there in his bunker. Bush and Cheney either must be encouraged by GOP powerbrokers to resign, or they must be impeached.

They each took a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution and all American citizens. They have shredded the Constitution -- in the name of "anti-terrorism," they have denuded the Bill of Rights -- and they have clearly demonstrated that they are incapable of protecting the citizenry, either in Iraq or here at home. Clear dereliction of duty.

Indeed, they have, for their own partisan purposes, revealed the identity of a covert CIA agent -- a crime that according to President George H. W. Bush is "traitorous"; indictments are expected shortly against key Bush Administration officials involved in this case. In addition, the Administration has "disappeared" American citizens into the military gulag, away from contact with lawyers or their families. This is the behavior of dictators; when it happens in African or Latin American countries, we are outraged. Folks, it's happening right here.

You and I, no matter for whom we voted in 2004, need to stop these incompetent fools from doing even more damage, and get this country back on its moral track, run by leaders who have something else on their minds other than power-hunger and take-the-money-and-run.

Bush and Cheney should resign voluntarily right now, in the best interests of the country. If they don't choose to go, it's long past time for impeachment hearings to begin and for local prosecutors and grand juries (perhaps in New Orleans parishes) to start their own investigations and indictments, and not depend solely on Congress for accountability-reckoning. That's the message that needs to go out from all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to our legislators.

I can't express it any better than Aaron Broussard, the president of New Orleans' Jefferson Parish. Here is what he had to say on Meet the Press.

"We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go
down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. ? Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership. It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Now!

A Cancerous Tumor in the Body Politic:
Time for Surgery

By Bernard Weiner,

August 19, 2005

When White House Counsel John Dean in 1973 told Richard Nixon that there was a "cancer growing on the presidency," it wasn't totally clear if he was referring to the Watergate coverup inside the White House, or to the felonies committed by Nixon's closest aides, or, without coming right out and saying so, to the President himself.

But, clearly, something toxic was eating away at the President's legitimacy, Dean was suggesting, thus putting Nixon in potential legal jeopardy. Something had to be done to protect the presidency, if not the President, from the mortal danger symbolized by that cancer metaphor.

Nothing remedial was done; the coverup grew worse -- one lie and deception and crime piled on another -- and the cancer killed Nixon's presidency. With the Congress about to impeach him, he resigned in disgrace.

That medical metaphor is much on my mind these days, and not just when thinking about the Bush presidency. Someone close to our family recently was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Something potentially deadly was growing inside her body.

WHEN TUMORS MUST BE REMOVED

The tumor had to be removed, and it was excised a few days ago. She appears to be recuperating well, but now steps will have to be taken (chemo, radiation, change in diet, etc.) to ensure that the cancer does not spread and that it will never return.

Going from the microcosmos to the macro, today there is a cancer growing in the body of the American polity. Its aggressive nature has forced its way into the social and political fabric of our lives, and is destroying both from within.

This destructive malignancy was not removed at the first opportunity and has now spread and infected the entire culture and political apparatus. It is running rampant and is strangling the foundation upon which our nation rests, the Constitution. It has leaped national boundaries and is attacking other nations beyond our shores.

These foreign invasions and occupations are connected vitally to the domestic outbreak at home. It's a closed loop, with one infection feeding the other, and vice versa. (Oddly enough, attacks from foreign terrorists seem to aid the power-cancer internally.)

But unlike in the time of Watergate, these days there are no journalistic radiologists, such as Woodward and Bernstein, to identify the malignancy, no skillful oncologists, such as Constitution scholar Sen. Sam Ervin, to diagnose it, and no Congressional surgeons, such as Ervin and Howard Baker and Peter Rodino, to remove it through impeachment and conviction.

SLOW-GROWING MALIGNANCIES

The American corpus, which just a few years ago, was relatively strong, is riven with social, political, economic and moral disease. The cancer, barely noticed by most Americans, was growing slowly all this time, away from direct public scrutiny, building its support network, infiltrating into various organs of power (the media, think tanks, propaganda ministries, electoral systems, education), and then, after decades, when the moment was ripe, the cancer erupted in the highest halls of power, in the White House.

The remedy of tumor removal/amputation -- via the surgery of impeachment -- could begin the process of healing. But this cancer is notoriously aggressive in maintaining itself in the face of assaults -- in this, it's reminiscent of an organized criminal enterprise -- mainly by growing and spreading into new areas where it attempts to control the situation.

At moments, when it appears to be cornered, it exudes a toxic slime over its most notable critics and opponents. Examples: Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, John McCain, John Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, et al. A new candidate for those crosshairs is Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor who potentially could indict much of the inner circle of the Bush Administration in the Plamegate/Iraq War scandals.

There is also the possibility that the body politic, so turned off by the outrageous aggressiveness of the bullying cancer -- and the high costs of supporting its foreign wars abroad with blood and treasure -- will create enough antibodies to drive out the malignancy in a periodic election in, say, 2006 and/or 2008. (This assumes that the agents of the cancer no longer will be controlling the voting machines and computerized vote-counting processes.)

CANCER CELLS GROW WILD WITH POWER

If we've learned anything about cancer, it is that it must be confronted and dealt with. You can't deny its existence, or wish it away, or play nice with it and hope it will ease up on you. Cancers are cells gone wild with their power. When such a malignancy shows up in a human body, you cut it out, and then drive a symbolic stake through its heart through chemo and radiation.

When a malignant tumor shows up in the polity, you follow the same protocol. When the costs of denial become too great, when so much damage and death and destruction is done in your name, then the cancer finally has to be faced and dealt with. Society must mobilize itself for radical surgery, and then through symbolic chemo/radiation -- reforms, re-asserting the primacy of the rule of law and Constitutional protections, re-establishing the checks-and-balances established by our Founding Fathers -- try to ensure that one-party rule, authoritarian leadership, police-state measures, "pre-emptive" wars, torture as state policy, incipient native fascism, etc., do not have an easy chance to re-assert themselves again.

But in order to reach this Restoration-of-Constitutional-Rule era, there first must be a general consensus on the nature of the disease, indeed on the fact that there is a malignancy on the loose, and thus a willingness to combat it. In the past two Presidential elections, it would appear that more than half the population voted for someone other than the cancer-party candidate, but the "official" election results (counted by corporations in lockstep with those in power) said otherwise.

IMPEACHMENT IN THE CARDS?

According to the latest polls, the American population has lost any faith that the Bush Administration knows what it's doing in Iraq, and increasingly they believe that the war -- which, as the top-secret, leaked Downing Street Memos verify, was based on gross lies and deceptions -- wasn't worth it.

The public is a bit more willing to grant Bush a break in terms of fighting terrorism, though it believes his imperial adventures abroad are making it more, not less, likely that terrorists will attack the U.S. again. But with the corporate-owned mass media more or less serving as a propaganda arm for the Administration, and with Rove and his cohorts constantly playing the fright card, the American public, but by a smaller percentage all the time, tends to acquiesce to Bush&Co.'s anti-terror line.

If Bush's war in Iraq continues its disastrous slide into catastrophe, or if a huge number of Bush indictments come down from the Plamegate grand jury (especially if Rove, Cheney and Bush are either indicted outright or listed as unindicted co-conspirators), critical mass may be achieved to demand impeachment hearings in the Congress, especially if the Republicans were to lose their majority in the House.

As a way of aiding that critical mass grow, it seems appropriate to close this piece with the insights of the fellow that opened it: John W. Dean. If there's anyone who appreciates what can happen to our democratic republic when an arrogant president thinks he's above the law, it is Dean. He wrote a book that examines the Bush presidency in that light, "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush" (Little, Brown).

Dean's reputation is that of a relatively circumspect, mild-mannered traditional Republican, but what he has seen firsthand and learned from others about the Bush-Cheney White House revolts his stomach. Check out these excerpts:

DEAN: "WORSE THAN WATERGATE"

"Their secrecy is extreme -- not merely unjustified and excessive but
obsessive... It has given us a presidency that operates on hidden agendas. To protect their secrets, Bush and Cheney dissemble as a matter of policy... Cheney openly declares that he wants to turn the clock back to the pre-Watergate years -- a time of an unaccountable and extra-constitutional imperial presidency. To say that their secret presidency is undemocratic is an understatement."

"Cheney formed what is, in effect, a shadow NSC [National Security
Council]...It is a secret government -- beyond the reach of Congress, and everyone else as well...Cheney knew that terrorism was the perfect excuse, an ideal raison d'etre, for his 'let's rule the world' philosophy. Politically, it would be much easier to be seen as shooting back instead of shooting first, given the caliber of weapon Cheney sought to wield. But he and his team did far worse than simply waiting for an attack that would kill a sufficient number of Americans...It is reasonable to believe that they planned to exploit terrorism before 9/11 handed them the issue ready-made for exploitation -- a fact they obviously want to keep buried."

"Not since Lyndon Johnson hoodwinked Congress into issuing the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution, which authorizes sending American troops to Vietnam, has a president so deceived Congress about a matter of such grave national importance. ...Bush and Cheney took this nation to war on their hunches, their unreliable beliefs, and their unsubstantiated intelligence -- and used deception with Congress both before and after launching the war. ...The evidence is overwhelming, certainly sufficient for a prima facie case, that George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have engaged in deceit and deception over going to war in Iraq. This is an impeachable offense."

"Their secrecy helps corporations and industries that are major
contributors. But with a deadly difference. Bush and Cheney have, from the outset of their presidency, shown utter disregard for the human consequences of their actions, both at home and abroad. ... What Bush and Cheney are doing to the environment to curry favor with their contributors is far worse than anything Nixon's 'responsiveness program' ever did. The Bush-Cheney presidency is engaged in crimes against nature, not to mention failing to faithfully execute the laws of the land."

ENDANGERING OUR DEMOCRACY

"The Bush-Cheney secrecy and style of governing carries with it
potential consequences that are far worse than any political scandal. Their secret presidency is a dangerous threat to democracy in an age of terrorism. ...Bush and Cheney have picked up where Nixon left presidential power. They seek to free the presidency of all restraints. They want to implement their policies -- a radical wisdom they believe serves the greater good -- unencumbered by those who view the world differently."

"When the moment comes and terrorists surprise America with an even
greater spirit-shattering attack than 9/11, Bush and Cheney will simply push aside the Constitution they have sworn to uphold, inflame public passions with tough talk to rally support...and take this country to a place it has only been once. For eleven weeks during the outset of the Civil War, President Lincoln became what scholars have euphemistically called a constitutional dictator. But with terrorism it will likely not be so brief. Bush once quipped, 'If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.' George Bush, however, is no Abraham Lincoln."

In short, the time has long since passed when the political scalpels need to excise the malignant tumor that had lodged itself into our public life. If we don't act, and soon, that cancer might well destroy us all.

Copyright 2005, by Bernard Weiner

Twenty Things We Now Know
Four Years After 9/11

By Bernard Weiner

posted Semtember 16, 2005
published August 30, 2005

It's been four years since the awful events symbolized by the date "9/11." Time for our annual list of what we've learned from that tragedy and what followed from it.

Much new information has been revealed this year, with corroborating documents verifying aspects of the story we only surmised previously. So without further ado, below are the twenty things we now know four years after 9/11, based mainly on documented evidence found in the Bush-friendly mainstream media.

A general assessment before we begin the numbered list: There now is a widely-accepted foreign and domestic judgment that the Bush Administration is composed of bumbling, dangerous, close-minded ideologues. You can see it in the polls (as I write this, Bush has only a 40% approval rating, amazingly low) and, particularly, in how many conservative/traditional Republicans and former military officers are expressing remorse at having supported this guy in the 2004 election. Bush these days still has his true-believer base of about 30%, but he's extremely vulnerable politically, which is why Rove and his minions are so desperate right now and are ratcheting up the rhetoric and smear-tactics against their political enemies. And the desperation helps us understand why Bush keeps returning to 9/11, the one talisman that he thinks still may work for him, that singular moment in his history when many Americans thought he looked good.

1. THE 9/11 ATTACK & COVERUP

We know that 9/11, regardless of the degree of complicity you believe the Bush Administration was guilty of, was seized on by Bush&Co. as the event that would be used to justify all that would follow domestically and in foreign/military affairs. The evidence indicates that, at the least, the highest circles in the White House knew a spectacular attack was in the works in the days and weeks preceding 9/11 -- warnings were coming into the White House from a host of foreign leaders and intelligence agencies -- but chose to do nothing, presumably to make use of those events in the service of their hidden agenda.

Similarly, nothing was done as a result of the government's own intelligence warnings. The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," talked about al-Qaida wanting to hit the nation's capital, preparations for airline hijackings, casing of buildings in New York, terrorists in the U.S. with explosives, etc. Bush went to ground in Texas, the FBI told Ashcroft to stop flying commercial jets, etc. The attacks finally came about a month later, and the Bush forces were ready to make their moves.

The key neo-con leaders in charge of U.S. foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American Century; in one of their key reports, they noted that the far-right should expect their revolution to take a long time, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." Enter 9/11. (See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer.)

The neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling luster, as was the case with Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever with the "unpatriotic" brush, and their political opposition marginalized. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until relatively recently, when occasionally they remember they have spines in their bodies and stand up and fight as an opposition party should.

2. OIL & THE POLITICS OF PNAC

We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government supporters in Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that destitute country -- and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing -- and thus no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that did have oil, and lots of it, and could be taken easily by U.S. forces; thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in the Middle East: If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a massive dose of "shock&awe": You will be overthrown, replaced by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S.

The neo-cons -- most from PNAC and similar organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute -- had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998, but he demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden, and those terrorists like him, actually were successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.

But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal dictator. Among their other recommendations: "pre-emptively" attacking countries devoid of imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating agreed-upon treaties when they conflict with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or organization, such as the United Nations) can ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, using tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

3. SEXING UP THE INTEL

We know that given the extreme nature of the neo-con agenda, the Bush Administration had their work cut out for them in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Therefore, among the first move by Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror attacks. The various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, that it was an al-Qaida operation, but that was merely a bothersome impediment. Since the CIA and the other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump intelligence agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion, and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel straight to Cheney and others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, Cheney, Rice and others in the White House Iraq Group went big-time with the WMD scare and the melding of Saddam Hussein with the events of 9/11.

Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the U.S., drone planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast, huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq, etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most believable of the bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to make the case, which he did, reluctantly, by presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and concocted facts. The world didn't buy it, and the opposition to the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10 million citizens throughout the world hit the streets to protest, former allies publicly criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the Bush war-plan with large numbers of troops dispatched -- as it turned out, over the legal, moral and political objections of many of his closest aides and advisers.

4. THE DOWNING STREET REVELATIONS

We know that those advisers warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral and probably unwinnable war -- which would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we know about these inner workings of the Blair government? Because a few months ago, someone from inside that body leaked the top-secret minutes from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called Downing Street Memos.

We also learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on Iraq as early as the Spring of 2002 -- the intelligence, they decided, would be "fixed around the policy" to go to war -- despite their telling their legislative bodies and their citizens that no decisions had been made. In fact, the Bush Administration had decided to go to war a year before the invasion. "Fuck Saddam,? Bush told three U.S. Senators in March of 2002. "We're taking him out."

5. BUSH RACES TO WAR

We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD argument rested on shaky ground, and that the legality of the war was in question without specific authorization from the United Nations Security Council. But the Bush Administration rushed to war anyway -- in haste because the U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD stockpiles -- without proper planning and with no workable plan to secure the peace and reconstruct the country after the major fighting.

6. THE BIG LIE TECHNIQUE ON WMD

We know (thanks to the Downing Street Memos) that both the U.S. and U.K. were well aware that Iraq was a military paper tiger, with no significant WMD stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust of Bush&Co.'s justification for going to war was based on these non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique -- repeating the same falsehoods over and over and over -- drummed those lies into our heads day after day, month after month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the primary reason for making war because they couldn't agree on anything else the citizenry would accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone airplanes and the like would work like a charm. And so they did, convincing the American people and Congress that an attack was justified. It wasn't.

7. PUSHING IRAQ TOWARDS IRAN

We know that the real reasons for invading Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, Islamist terrorists coming from inside that country, installing democracy, and the like; there were no WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did not tolerate religious or political zealotry of any stripe. No, the reasons had more to do with American geopolitical goals in the region involving oil, control, support for its ally Israel, hardened military bases and keeping Iran from having free rein in the region.

As it turned out, by invading and occupying Iraq, it pushed that country and Iran into a far closer religious and political alliance than would have been the case if Saddam had been permitted to remain in power. Bush may have sacrificed thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and more than 100,000 Iraqis as "collateral damage" -- and now Bush&Co. quietly are willing to accept an Islamist government more attuned to Teheran than to Washington, one with precious little regard for human rights, especially involving women. That is one royal FUBAR.

8. IRAQ AS A DISASTER ZONE

We know that Bush's war has been a thorough disaster -- built on a foundation of lies, and incompetently managed from the start. As a result, the Occupation has provided a magnet for jihadists from other countries, billions have been wasted or lost in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting that ostensibly is designed to speed up Iraq's "reconstruction," etc. etc. Indeed, so much has Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the Administration know they must get out as quickly as possible if they are to have any hope of exercising their considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East.

9. WHERE WILL THE BODIES COME FROM?

We know that Bush's Middle East agenda also is suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the desertion rates are high, soldiers are not re-upping at the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and illegal scams are being used to lure youngsters into signing up -- in short, there are no military forces to spare on the ground. Either a military draft will be instituted or all future attacks will have to come from air power or from missiles, which will merely deliver a message, making the bombed populations even angrier at America, and with no guarantee of success in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic" governments in Iran, Syria, et al. In short, we are witnessing the limits of imperial power in the modern world.

10. HIDING THE TRUTH FROM THE PUBLIC

We know that Bush&Co. made sure that there would be no full-scale, independent investigations of their role in using and abusing the intelligence that led to war on Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Republican Pat Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower down the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI level, and promised there would be followup hearings on any White House manipulation of intelligence. But, election over, Roberts says no purpose would be served in launching such an investigation. Likewise, the 9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush Administration misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. Bush sent an October 5, 2001 memo to Rumsfeld, Powell, O'Neill, Ashcroft, and the heads of the CIA and the FBI restricting their talking to Congress about 9/11 and other "national-security" matters; the only Democrats who could receive these "sensitive" briefings -- meaning they were forbidden to make them public -- were the Senate and House Minority Leaders, and the ranking members of the Intelligence Committees. Nobody else was to be in the loop. In short, this secretive administration made sure that everything was done to head off at the pass any investigations whatsoever. Cheney and Bush told the minority and majority leaders in Congress that there should be no 9/11 hearings, for "national security" reasons. Bush&Co. fought tooth and nail against an independent 9/11 Commission, and against the families who pushed for it.

11. THE ROAD TO DICTATORSHIP

We know that Bush has no great love of legitimate democratic processes, certainly not inside the United States. He much prefers to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he had to invent legal justifications that granted him the requisite power. So he had his longtime lawyer-toady, Alberto Gonzales, devise a legal philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty much what he wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens into military prisons, authorize torture, etc. -- whenever Bush says he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."

And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terrorism," from which there is no end, Bush is home free. There always will be terrorists trying to do anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside America, and the "commander-in-chief" will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush is above the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. (Bush&Co. also made sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be subject to indictment by any international court or war-crimes tribunal.)

Neither Gonzales, nor Bush, has disavowed this legal philosophy of a dictator-like President being beyond the reach of the law. No doubt, the issue ultimately will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Bush has nominated Judge John Roberts, who would be the key swing vote. Roberts, as author Chris Floyd has noted, recently upheld Bush's sovereign right to dispose of "enemy combatants" any way he pleases. In a chilling decision, the appeals panel, of which Roberts was a member, ruled that the Commander-in-Chief's arbitrarily-designated "enemies" are non-persons, with no legal rights. Bush now feels free to subject anyone he likes to the "military tribunal" system he has concocted.

The fact that Roberts did not recuse himself from ruling on this issue while he was in the process of being interviewed for the Supreme Court appointment by the employer being sued in the case, would seem to be an open-and-shut case of conflict-of-interest. If the Democrats have any balls, this egregious ethical lapse should serve as an "extraordinary" reason for a filibuster of his nomination.

12. TORTURE AS OFFICIAL STATE POLICY

We know that Gonzales, then Bush's White House Counsel, and Pentagon lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld, devised legal rationales that make torture of suspects official state policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers also greatly widened the definition of what is acceptable interrogation practice -- basically anything this side of death or terminally abusing internal organs. They also authorized the sending of key suspects to countries specializing in extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld professed shock, shock!, that those under their command would wind up torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the Administration made sure to stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the endemic torture. The buck never stops on Bush's desk -- if something goes wrong (and he never will admit to mistakes), it's always someone else's fault.

13. MAKING THE BILL OF RIGHTS "QUAINT"

We know that the Bush Administration has been able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in its self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the understandable fright of the American people. The so-called Patriot Act -- composed of many honorable initiatives, and many clearly unconstitutional provisions, cobbled together from those submitted over the years by GOP hardliners and rejected as too extreme by Congress -- was presented almost immediately to a House and Senate frightened by the 9/11 attacks and by the anthrax introduced into their chambers by someone still not discovered. Ridge and Ashcroft emerged periodically to manipulate the public's fright by announcing another "terror" threat, based on "credible" but unverified evidence; Ridge, who has since resigned, recently admitted that there were no good reasons for many of those supposed "alerts." Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you, Democrats!) recently made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent! Unless those can be repealed, that vote will be a nail into the coffin housing the remains of the Bill of Rights.

14. THE OUTING OF COVERT AGENTS

The Bush Administration, for its own crass political reasons, compromised American national security by outing two key intelligence operatives -- one, CIA agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction (outed by "senior Administration officials," apparently in retaliation for her husband's political comments); revealing the identity of a CIA agent can be a felony. The other, apparently to show off how successful they were in their anti-terrorism hunt, was a high-ranking mole close to bin Laden's inner circle, who could have kept the U.S. informed as to ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's our war-on-terrorism government at work.

It's now clear who at least two of the "senior administration officials" were who leaked Plame's identity: Karl Rove, Bush's guru, now deputy chief of staff, and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to unseal indictments in this case sometime this Fall that either could focus narrowly on perjury involving Plame's outing, or could be expanded to the broader issue of the manipulative lies emanating from the machinations of the White House Iraq Group (Cheney/Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al.) in taking this nation to war. It is possible that Bush and Cheney and Bolton, among others, could be charged or listed an unindicted co-conspirators.

15. PROTECTING THE VOTE

We know that America's voting-machine system -- and more importantly, vote-counting system -- is corruptible and likely has been corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis along with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the 2004 election results were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. These companies are owned by far-right Republican supporters. But the same objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies. There are no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private corporations -- who refuse to permit inspection of their proprietary software, and whose technicians have behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000 in Florida, in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004. And we haven't even mentioned the GOP dirty-tricks department whose function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential Democrat voters, especially minority voters. Note: Unless the vote-counting system can be changed soon -- and the vote-tallying scandal will not be adequately dealt with by voter-verified receipts -- the integrity of our elections will be suspect into the far future. Even if all the other reforms were implemented, they would mean nothing without the guarantee of honest elections.

16. NO ECONOMIC PLAN

We know that the Bush Administration paid off its backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for 10 years out, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In addition, corporate tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings. All this was done at a time when the U.S. economy was in recessionary doldrums and when the treasury deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even larger from Iraq war costs. So far as we know, the Bush Administration has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan (other than the discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the economy and creating well-paying jobs for skilled workers, so many of whom have had their positions outsourced to foreign lands.

17. STARVING THE GOVERNMENT

We know that the HardRight conservatives who control Bush policy don't really care what kind of debt and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the better. They want to decimate and starve popular social programs from the New Deal/Great Society eras, including, most visibly, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare (and real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare assistance, public education, etc. (Especially egregious is the education scam known as "No Child Left Behind.") Since these programs are so well-approved by the public, the destruction will be carried out stealthily with the magic words "privatization," "deregulation," "choice" and so on, and by going to the public and saying that they'd love to keep the programs intact but they have no alternative but to cut them, given the deficit, weak economy and "anti-terrorist" wars abroad. Bush's whirlwind tour trying to sell his Social Security "reform" plan has backfired badly, but he's still pushing a good many of those ideas, just in case he can slip it in somewhere, maybe by tying it somehow to Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

18. THE ENVIRONMENTAL GIVEAWAY

We know that Bush environmental policy -- dealing with air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national parks, and so on -- is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty much free rein to corporations whose bottom line does better when they don't have to pay attention to the public interest. It's the worst sort of grab-the-money-and-run scenario.

19. THE GREED OF POLITICAL POWER

We know from "insider" memoirs and reports by former Bush Administration officials -- Joseph DeIulio, Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, et al. -- that the public interest plays little role in the formulation of policy inside the Bush Administration. The motivating factors are mainly greed and ideological control and remaining in political power. Further, they say, there is little or no curiosity to think outside the political box, or even to hear other opinions.

20. FAITH- OR REALITY-BASED PROGRAMS

We know that this attitude ("my mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts") shows up most openly in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration (good example: global warming) in favor of faith-based thinking. Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in fundamentalist religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of science is designed as payback to his fundamentalist base, but the scary part is that a good share of the time he actually believes what he's saying, about evolution vs. intelligent-design, stem-cell research, abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of government scientific reports that differ from the Bush party line, cutbacks in research&development grants for the National Science Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a deeper level, why things aren't working out in Iraq.

AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?

In sum (although we could continue forever detailing the crimes and misdemeanors of this corrupt, incompetent Administration), we know that more and more the permanent-war policy abroad and police-state tactics at home (the shredding of Constitutional rights designed to protect citizens from a potential repressive government) are taking us into a kind of American fascism domestically and an imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from the top, with governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters, dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly, etc. happening regularly on both the local and federal levels. More and more, America is resembling Germany in the early 1930s, group pitted against group while the central government amasses more and more power and control of its put-upon citizens.

Bush has had a rough first year of his second term. It's as if the public blinders are starting to come off, and the true nature of this man and his regime are finally starting to hit home and he is seen for what he is: an insecure, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully who is endangering U.S. national interests abroad with his reckless war in Iraq, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and with his over-reaching in all areas.

If a Democrat president and vice president had behaved similarly to Bush and Cheney, they'd have been in the impeachment dock in a minute. If the Plame-Iraq indictments come down as expected, a momentum for impeachment of Bush and Cheney will be generated.

Our job now is to keep that political momentum building to get rid of these guys, while we try to organize a pro-democracy, anti-imperialist movement for change in this country that is inclusive, non-dogmatic, and capable of winning elections. That may or may not involve the Democratic Party.

Copyright 2005, by Bernard Weiner

Inside Rove's Diary:

How Do I Get Out of This One?

By Bernard Weiner

posted July 28, 2005

Dear Diary:

Oh shit!

It's been one badddddddd week. But I think Scooter and I and the others probably can finesse our way out of indictments for the Plame leak. However, Fitzgerald -- one of our guys! -- must have forgotten who butters his U.S. Attorney's bread as he seems hell-bent on charging fellow Republicans with some crime or another.

Looks like our vulnerability will be with what we said, or didn't say, in the early days of Fitz's investigation -- with perjury and/or obstruction charges possible. That damn memo circulating around Air Force One, with Plame's I.D. in it, sure has turned out to be a big problem.

Given who appointed Fitzgerald, our usual "it's-all-partisan-politics" mantra might not work. Won't stop us from trying it anyway. I use the tools I know how to use. Time to get creative here.

HOW THIS MIGHT PLAY OUT

As I see it, there are four possible scenarios:

1. We play the stretch-the-calendar game for as long as we can, hopefully until after the midterm election next year -- unless we can get the GOP-controlled Congress not to extend Fitzgerald's tenure after October, or make him real nervous by starting a Congressional investigation of his work. If no luck with either of those stratagems, we can hope that Fitz takes his investigation into 2006, and we delay and delay and file court cases and appeals.

In other words, get clear of any possibility of a Democrat-controlled House; if that were to happen, our enemies would have subpoena power and thus we'd be back in the perjury hole again. If we keep the House in 2006 (Note to Myself: Time to give Wally a call over at Diebold), the GOP still will be in control; we spin like crazy and hope to outlast those unpatriotic bastards who are out for our heads.

Sure wish we had a better attack dog than Ken Mehlman; everyone knows he's lying the minute he opens his mouth, and then when he talks, it only gets worse.

2. If we do get indicted and the case against us is strong, we fall on our swords -- admit it was us underlings behind the whole thing, we feel terrible, our deep devotion to country and freedom clouded our blahblahblahblah -- and protect Bush and Cheney at all costs. They knew nothing. If we have to, we resign. Take some of the heat off. (And if I'm no longer in the White House? Big deal. I direct the show from K Street.)

3. If Judith Miller decides to barter testimony for immunity, we're deeper in the doo-doo. At the least, she's a co-conspirator and can spill a lot of beans, not just about Plame. She knows where too many bodies are buried on the WMD front, and other foreign/war-policy hot potatoes. Of course, we know where her bodies are buried also, so she won't rat us out. Same with the Prez, but he won't cut me loose because nobody can do what I do for him. Think, for one.

4. If worse comes to worst, and if we can keep any criminal and impeachment liability away from The President, he pardons all of us preemptively -- that is, before we get indicted, or, if it's too late for that, before we have to take the Fifth in order to avoid giving depositions. If we have to plead the Fifth, I may just want to drink one.

(There's precedent for pre-emptive pardons. President Bush#1 gave out free passes during Iran-Contra, pardoning those who could talk and maybe implicate him, before they even were charged. Yeah, maybe it looked suspicious, but it cut off any further criminal investigation at the knees.)

A FAMILIAR ODOR IN THE AIR

This is starting to smell too much like Watergate, in the number of good Americans that possibly could get ensnared in the prosecutor's investigative web. Me, Scooter, Bush, Cheney, Condi, Hadley, Ari, Bolton, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Feith, Perle, Hughes, Tenet, Negropointe, et al., not to mention a whole slew of reporters and lower-type aides -- all of whom have done good work for us.

(We sure did piss off a lot of CIA agents when we blamed the agency for the intel that took us to war, and then when we outed one of their colleagues; they leaked all over us like a golden shower. Thank goodness they're ex-CIA agents now, and Boss Goss is purging the rest of those we can't count on to keep their mouths shut.)

We need to move expeditiously on Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court. No doubt, a lot of these criminal issues are going to come to the Supremes for adjudication, and, with that wishy-washy O'Connor gone and Roberts in her place, we probably can squeak by. He's a good little boy, who knows all about bread and butter. (And, if we're lucky, Rehnquist will die soon, and we get to appoint another sure-fire supporter.)

But as a result of our current difficulties, the Democrats and the journalistic sharks are circling. They smell blood and realize we're wounded and thus vulnerable. Even the New York Times and Washington Post are starting to pile on with front-page stories, along with the TV networks going big.

The ingrates! We knew reporters would sell their souls to the Scoop-Devil on a big story, but we counted on editors and news directors to subvert their efforts -- or to chop or water-down or bury their stories way back in the paper or toward the middle of the daily newscasts.

We thought by quickly moving up the Roberts' nomination by a few weeks, we could knock the leak story out of the daily news cycle, but, damn, by and large they're doing both Roberts and Plame! Roberts secrets, Plame secrets, scandals all over the lot -- we're dyin' here!

It will be payback time when all this quiets down, and rest assured that all those political and journalist traitors are going to wish they had never been born.

PROBE STOPS WITH PLAME, PERIOD.

I hope Fitz understands that this matter stops at Plame. No ifs, ands or buts. We don't want him digging into the WMD fibs, manipulations and suspicious documents that got us into Iraq. If that war and its origins blow up in our faces politically, years of work go down the tubes, and America will have lost our one big opportunity to lock up the oil and use Iraq's violent fate as a warning to those other Arab autocrats over there that they'd better do what we say.

If we Republicans go down, it'll open the floodgates for those namby-pamby liberals and their fellow-travelers to regain political power and start reversing so many of our initiatives. Over my dead body!

Domestically, we're already taking big poll losses on the WMD and Iraq disasters; the latest numbers are plummeting southwards, especially on the war and the issues of trust and truthfulness -- and we don't need that with all the fudging we're doing here on the Plame question.

And we definitely don't want Fitz probing into Jeff-Gannon, how and why he was given key interviews and scoops, his Plame-story connection, and who supplied him overnight passes into the White House. Any one of those, especially the passes, could be more than just embarrassing; if provable allegations along those lines were thrown into this scandal soup, we'd really be done for, as the religious types would abandon us in droves.

THAT PESKY "THIRD-RATE" PROBLEM

If we can't stanch the bleeding soon, the vague rumblings about the "I" word are going to be coming out in the open. The Dems, of course, already are salivating at the prospect of impeachment hearings in the House, and even some disgruntled conservative Republicans are starting to whisper about the possibility.

Sure do understand now how Nixon felt after that humongous landslide in '72 for his second term and then a "third-rate" burglary led to likely impeachment and the resignation that followed. We were riding so high after our 2004 second-term victory, and nobody paid any attention to the charges of vote-counting irregularities. It looked like we couldn't be stopped.

And now this -- it's not fair. A third-rate leak and here we go again.

Rove-Plame Scandal Leading to Deeper
White House Horrors?

By Bernard Weiner

Posted July 21, 2005

At long last, Plamegate -- the scandal surrounding the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson by two "senior administration officials" -- has exploded out of the D.C. beltway to become a major national news story.

It would appear that this scandal goes way beyond Karl Rove and who said what to whom when about Ms. Plame. It certainly is true, though, that turning over that slimy Rove-Plame rock was the way into the larger issues upon which Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and his grand jury apparently are focusing.

(Ain't it almost always so in Washington? The cover-up is always a greater problem for the perpetrators than the original crime, for inevitably even seamier scandals are unearthed one by one; see the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Iran-Contra, et al. The moral lesson -- admit your mistake early, bear the immediate hit, and move on unencumbered -- rarely seems to "take" among politicians, of whatever party.)

What's being covered up in the Plame/Rove case seems to revolve around the Bush Administration's orchestrated, and perhaps illegal, propaganda campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq. Valerie Plame and her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson -- who wrote the op-ed in the New York Times that got this whole thing going -- are just the tips of very large icebergs, and one of those icebergs has a name: the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which we'll examine below.

THE EIGHT BLACKED-OUT PAGES

One of the ruling judges on the case of the two reporters who refused to divulge their Plame-outing source was about to go easy on them when he read Fitzgerald's new information -- eight pages of which were redacted from the public -- and said that the national-security seriousness of what he read changed his mind. The court then ordered Time's Matthew Cooper and the New York Times' Judith Miller to testify or else; Cooper finally did, and Miller is in jail for contempt of court.

We don't know what is in those eight blacked-out pages -- and, if they really do involve national-security matters, we may never be permitted to know precisely. But apparently they provide the locus around which Fitzgerald is building a case that could result in perjury indictments, at the least, for a number of Administration officials and perhaps journalists as well.

(Another judge said that the prosecutor's classified filing -- those missing eight pages -- "decides the case." In other words, to quote Lawrence O'Donnell: "All the judges who have seen the prosecutors secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment.")

Further, depending on what Bush and Cheney knew and when they knew it -- and what they did or covered-up in the possible light of such knowledge -- there may be plenty of ammunition for likely impeachment hearings. (Note: Bush hired a private attorney last summer for this CIA-leak case. )

And the two journalists in question, Cooper and Miller, have their own attorneys. It's defense-attorney heaven in the nation's capital these days.

PERSONAL REASONS MILLER NOT TESTIFYING?

Why Judith Miller is not testifying apparently goes to the heart of Fitzgerald's case. There are reasonable grounds for wondering whether Miller might have been aiding, inadvertently or consciously, Rove and the rest of the WHIG to help move the country toward war with Iraq. For example, she may have been told by Administration officials about Plame and her CIA job, and helped spread that word to other journalists, who then contacted Rove and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Cooper over the weekend revealed that it was Libby who was the second of the "two senior administration officials" who leaked Plame's identity.

The New York Times already has apologized for running several of Miller's pre-Iraq War stories that were based on faulty weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence; much of that concocted intel was provided by Ahmed Chalabi, the sleazy Iraqi exile leader who hitched his wagon to the Pentagon neo-cons to get his forces back into Iraq in the wake of a U.S. invasion. Those Miller stories helped provide the imprimatur of New York Times prestige that other media outlets then picked up on, helping create a nationwide zeitgeist of imminent threat from Iraq.

Indeed, Dick Cheney squared the circle by using Miller's stories as "evidence" that even the hallowed New York Times had determined that Iraq had, or soon would have, nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

"The day The Times story ran," wrote Amy and David Goodman in their invaluable book "The Exception to the Rulers...," Cheney "made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to advance the administration's bogus claims. On NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney declared that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium. It didn't matter that the IAEA refuted the charge both before and after it was made. But Cheney didn't want viewers just to take his word for it. 'There's a story in The New York Times this morning,' he said smugly. 'And I want to attribute The Times.' This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks a lie to The Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling expose, and then the White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of The Times."

WHO GETS THE HOT POT?

What we are witnessing right now is a grand-scale game of political/legal "hot potato." Nobody wants to be holding the various hot pots around the Plame case when the grand jury finally settles on its various indictments, which could come in the next several months.

Rove these days, through an anonymous source (probably his attorney), is trying to deflect blame and attention to others, especially journalists, by throwing out one bizarre scenario after another to escape legal culpability. (Not surprisingly, even though Bush and Press Secretary Scott McClellan say the Administration will refuse to comment because there's an "official investigation" going on, Rove, through his surrogate, feels free to continue his attempts to comment on and shape the case.)

But, from what Fitzgerald has suggested, he and the grand jury long ago determined who the leakers were. That's not what is at issue now. The investigation is all tied in with the national-security matters talked about on those blacked-out eight pages.

And, a reasonable guess is that those pages deal in some fashion with the actions -- legal or illegal, overt or covert, actual or covered-up -- of the members of an inner council of Administration heavies called the White House Iraq Group.

Just one example of the WHIG's function and influence: "The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago [in 2002], including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud' into the debate, coincided with the formation of ... WHIG, a task force assigned to 'educate the public' about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it." (This quote comes from a groundbreaking 2003 article by investigative reporters Barton Gelman and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.)

EENY MEENIE HUNT FOR WAR JUSTIFICATION

How did we get to Cheney and Rice scaring the population with talk of "mushroom clouds" and wild tales of Iraqi WMD that might be made available to al-Qaida terrorists?

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. It was 2002. The Administration already had decided to bomb and invade Iraq, but was having trouble figuring out how to manipulate the propaganda so as to fool Congress, the American people, and the international community into giving them permission to do so.

It was not smooth sailing. Not only were the Democrats and leakers within the CIA beating up on Bush's plans for war, but prestigious conservative Republican leaders, such as Gen. Brent Scowcroft, James Baker III, Dick Army, and Trent Lott also were warning against an invasion of Iraq. Something had to be done.

The disinformation campaign was launched by the WHIG and others inside and outside the White House. (We ordinary citizens learned about Bush's pre-9/11 obsession about attacking Iraq both from memoirs by former Cabinet members, such as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and National Security Council official Richard Clarke, and most recently verified by the Downing Street Memos leaked from inside the Blair Cabinet.)

REASONS BEHIND THE INVASION

Bush&Co. realized they couldn't come right out and tell everyone what their true motives were -- to depose the Saddam Hussein regime in order to control the world's second largest oil reserve, to set up permanent military bases there, and to use the presence of those bases and the "shock&awe" example of overthrowing a dictator as a warning to other autocratic regimes in the Greater Middle East to bow to U.S. wishes. Those wishes involved oil, Israel, nuclear reactors, terrorism, and the like. So, a convenient reason -- one simple enough for the masses to comprehend -- had to be found that would justify war.

As the Downing Street Memos and other internal British and U.S. documents make clear, it was well-known that Iraq by the mid-1990s was a paper tiger: Its economy, as a result of the embargo, was in tatters; Saddam had control only of the central part of the country (Britain and the U.S. controlled the skies over the so-called "no-fly" zones in the South and the North); its standing army was easily defeatable; and, most important, its major weapons systems and research facilities had been effectively destroyed during the first Gulf War or in the years immediately after. In short, there were no WMD worth mentioning, even though the lying, exaggerating Iraqi exiles kept insisting that the U.S. military would find huge stockpiles of such when they got to Iraq.

But, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz later said, the Administration settled on WMD ("for bureaucratic reasons"), apparently realizing that it would be the most effective, frightening, and thus acceptable justification. And so the WMD scare campaign began, with nightmarish tales of biological and chemical agents (which senators were told could be delivered by a drone Iraqi air force over East Coast cities), huge missile armadas, and, most tellingly, nuclear weapons. Of course, none of this was true.

Cheney and Rice and Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the whole lot, spent months peddling their scare stories to the public and to members of Congress, and even sent poor Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council with a sorry, embarrassing hodge-podge of non-existent "evidence" -- and, damn, it worked.

Thanks to those lies and the stenography of the mainstream media when it came to the Administration's peddling of them, both the Congress and the public bought into Bushthink with regard to the war. That was especially so when the campaign added the laughable suggestion that somehow Saddam Hussein was tied to the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. (yet another example of the Big Lie Technique used by Rove and his forces). The war was on.

THE WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP

But someone, or some entity, within the Administration had to coordinate these concerted propaganda campaigns. That was the bailiwick and job-assignment of the WHIG, chaired by Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card, the regular members of which were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's Chief of Staff. In other words, WHIG included the key decision makers (Rove, Rice, Card, Cheney-via Libby), and the key propaganda specialists (Hughes, Matalin, et al.).

They waited a month to launch their first public-relations bombardment. Why September? Andy Card let slip the reason in an interview with the New York Times: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.

They soon determined that the public was most frightened of a possible nuclear attack by al-Qaida, and so, the day after publication of Card's marketing quote, the Bush Administration heavies began dropping their Iraq-as-nuclear-menace grenades into the public airwaves. They attempted to back up their claims by quoting from reports by international nuclear energy agencies supposedly saying that Iraq was about to become a nuclear power -- but no such reports existed.

But the lack of believable evidence about WMD didn't stop them, and the fright campaign continued. Some of that history may well have been in Fitzgerald's classified showing before the court.

FITZGERALD MIGHT HAVE TO WATCH OUT

In sum, the White House Iraq Group was tasked to come up with propaganda campaigns that would work on the Congress and American people -- no matter how great the fib; indeed, the bigger the lie, the easier it seemed to be to sell it. And their mission included coordinating those campaigns through the various stages, and denouncing and destroying the reputations of those who dared to confront their lies and deceptions.

The WHIG played the public like masters, thanks in no doubt to their stooges and ideological supporters in the mainstream media, who joined in the fool-the-public campaign in major, influential ways. Those who chose not to play the deception game, such as Ambassador Wilson, they decided, would be made to pay the price for their perfidy -- and would serve as a warning to any others inside the Administration who might want to blow some truth-whistles. Interestingly, the trash-Joe-Wilson campaign continues until this day.

To their chagrin, Wilson appears to be a man of great character and courage, and refuses to back down. And why should he? He's been speaking the truth about the Bush Administration's lack of evidence of Iraqi WMD for more than two years, while the Administration's lies have been exposed time and time again on the ground in Iraq and by official agencies and reports.

Again, it's not totally clear how far Special Counsel/U.S Attorney Fitzgerald is willing to go to clear out this nest of Administration vipers. He could choose to stick close to the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson case itself, or he could keep heading in the direction of indicting a good many Administration officials -- perhaps with Bush and Cheney as unindicted co-conspirators -- for their part in lying about classified national-security matters to the Congress and American people. A wild card: If Judith Miller were to trade immunity for prosecution and decide to testify about Rove/Libby/Cheney, anything could happen.

WOUNDED, CORNERED ANIMALS ARE DANGEROUS

If and when the above scenarios start to unfold, it's not outside the realm of possibility that Rove would get desperate enough to try to question the motives and character of the Special Counsel himself, as BuzzFlash puts it, "to try to sink the investigation through an ad hominem attack. This is Rove's pathological gutter tactic. He doesn't know how NOT to use it when backed into a corner." Or Rove/Bush conceivably could do a Nixon and order Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to fire Fitzgerald.

Anything is possible as the Bush Administration paints itself further into the scandal corner, and, desperate to avoid criminal proceedings and/or impeachment, lashes out at its perceived enemies.

Stay tuned. The fun is just beginning.

Copyright 2005, by Bernard Weiner

A Powerful Man Glimpses His Demons

By Bernard Weiner

July 16, 2005

"We're under confidentiality here, right? You can't ever tell anyone what I say to you, doctor/patient relationship, yes?"

"That's correct. Under normal circumstances, I cannot be forced to reveal anything you say to me. Only if you're about to do imminent harm to yourself or others am I allowed to break that vow of silence."

"I mean I've got to know that what we say here is totally private. A close friend of mine told something to newspaper reporters and now is in big trouble because he thought that was confidential, too."

"So, tell me why you are here."

"My wife said I had to come. She thinks I'm starting to doubt myself, get real moody, not enjoying myself like usual. In trouble, you know."

"What kind of 'trouble'?"

"I've been having bad dreams. Plus I'm under such pressure these days that I feel like I want to start drinking and blowing stuff up my nose again. In short, I feel like a piece of shit. Is that good enough for you?"

"That is very honest. And brave to make those admissions to me. Now tell me about those bad dreams."

"I keep getting the same one over and over, night after night, and sometimes even in naps during the day. I'm swimming in a huge ocean that is covered in sticky black stuff, like molasses; I can hardly move. Then the molasses or whatever suddenly starts turning red, and I hear moans of agony all around me. I realize that I'm crying red tears. It occurs to me that the ocean is made up of my tears. And that's when I wake up, covered in sweat."

"Why do you think you are crying in the dream?"

"If I knew the answer that, I wouldn't be paying you, doc! (pause) The images from this dream keep coming back to me during the day, and it's interfering with my work. I can't concentrate. And I'm getting facial tics and drooping mouth on one side again."

THE TEARS OF RESPONSIBILITY

"Well, let's think this one through. People usually cry because they're in great pain or depression. In the dream, you don't seem to be in pain, or depressed, just frustrated by having to swim so slowly in the black sticky stuff. Are you crying because of that difficulty?"

"No, I don't think so."

"People also cry because of happiness, which doesn't seem to be the case here. Or sometimes they cry because they're inflicting unhappiness or pain on other people, and that makes them feel terribly sad. You say in the dream you hear the moans of agony all around you."

"Yes, I think I do feel sad like that. I don't like it when people don't like me."

"Now that's an interesting thing to say. I didn't even mention that one. Tell me more about that."

"I'm always smiling and joking, trying to make people like me. And hardly anybody does. My whole life has been like that. Doesn't matter how much I try to be jolly and joshing, it always seems to come out wrong and people guess that I'm just play-acting, insincere."

"Did your parents think that of you when you were growing up?"

"I don't see any reason why shrinks always want to be talking about parents. They don't have anything to do with this dream."

"Often, how we felt when we were young stays with us, and when we are under a great deal of stress those feelings from childhood are re-activated. Your job is filled with constant pressure, and perhaps some of those childhood feelings are returning and making you sad."

"Well, OK. (pause) I always tried to please my parents -- who I thought were ashamed of me, always measuring me against my brothers and others -- and that did make me sad."

"Angry, too?"

THE LIMITS OF POWER

"Yes, angry. Maybe that's what people see when I'm horsing around, that anger just beneath the surface. I like it that they're afraid of me, I like that kind of power over people, but I also wish they'd appreciate me more, that they'd see how hard I'm working, and would like me."

"When you felt this way as a youth and as a young man, what did you do with this anger? Did you ever confont your parents? Or did you just hold it all inside?"

"Mostly, I held it in, though I did torture some animals, frogs mainly. But I did things that I knew would embarrass my parents, and make them angry at me. I guess I didn't think all that much of myself at the time, and engaged in self-destructive behaviors like drinking and drugs and getting arrested for DUIs and things like that."

"I'm guessing that that type of behavior didn't really help you."

"Only for the moment. It went on for many years. Even my wife, who I love, couldn't snap me out of it. I knew I was in trouble. Jesus turned me around."

"But you still seem, on so many occasions in public and in private, to be having problems with your anger. Maybe you went from relying on intoxicants to relying on religion, as if you're still in an addictive pattern, so to speak, but with a different crutch helping you out."

CHECKING ON ONE'S ANGER

"I don't like your disrespecting my religious beliefs; my trust in Jesus is real, not a crutch. You're crossing over the line, fella! You better watch what you say. (long pause) I wasn't sure, doc: Did you mean maybe the anger is still driving me and nothing I do to hide it or keep it in check is going to work? Is that what you're saying?"

"Actually, YOU just said that, and it's very wise. It sounds as if you realize that you have some major issues to work on, and maybe that's why, after all these years, you knew your wife was right that you should see a therapist."

"I never admit weakness or uncertainty. I believe God is beside me, helping me to make my decisions, that I'm speaking for The Lord. That's just who I am. I make a lot of decisions, and my political enemies would crush me if they spotted any opening, any sign of weakness. But my wife is right. She knows how awful I'm feeling these days. Those damn dreams won't let go of me."

"Dreams and depression often are wake-up calls. So let's spend some more time on the images in that dream. We know that you were sad because of all the voices moaning in agony. Let's try to figure out other things. What does the black sticky stuff remind you of, for example?"

"Well, it probably wasn't really blackstrap molasses. You're talking to a former oil man. I know what that stuff in my dream was; I've had in on my hands many times."

"Oceans are often a symbol of the unconscious. Here, in this dream, you're in an ocean -- wondering if it is made up of your tears -- and that water is covered in this oily substance. What does the former oil man make of that?"

HARD DEALING WITH HARM'S WAY

"Well, maybe the war. I started that war for, among other reasons, to make sure we rather than bad guys controlled the oil in a region that is fast running out of the stuff. (pause) Hey, I just had this thought right now: Maybe the red that comes into the dream, into that oil, is the blood of those who have died in that war."

"Could your dream be suggesting that maybe, like a father, you feel deep sadness and maybe even some responsibility for the deaths of the young people you've sent to help control that oil, and the civilians caught up in the war also, and that's why you're crying those red tears? And that few people appreciate what you're doing, indeed you feel they don't like your war and you much at all, which reminds you of how you were treated by your parents when you were younger? No wonder this dream makes you sad, and wakes you up in a cold sweat."

"I think you're on to something there, doc. A person in my position accepts a terrible burden when sending young men and women into harm's way; you know many of them won't come back, but that's the price -- a necessary price -- a nation has to pay to maintain its position in the world."

"I wasn't talking about a nation. You are my client. I was suggesting that your dream seems to be indicating that you, the one who is crying bloody tears, may feel some guilt for having sent off troops, maybe for mistaken reasons, in order to control the oil reserves."

"I don't like that kind of talk. They told me you were one of my supporters, that you voted for me and gave big money to my campaign. Why are you trying to make me feel bad, make me doubt myself? Are you really a Democrat?"

PRICE OF THE DEAD IS WORTH IT

"I am a life-long Republican, who happens to believe you are capable of being one of America's great leaders. But in this room during a therapy session, I have no political opinions. I am concerned only with helping the person who happens to be sitting in the chair opposite me. Actually, all I am doing is feeding back to you what you told me, what your dream was telling you. If you are willing to think about the possibility of sharing some guilt about mistakenly sending off soldiers to fight for oil, then we have to deal with that. If those images don't resonate with you, then we move on to something else."

"I told you, there is a terrible burden that comes with sending off troops. But I and my advisers believe that the price of the dead is worth it, if we can keep evil people from getting their hands on the world's oil reserves, and if we can defeat terrorists, and if we can bring democracy and free markets to those living under autocratic regimes in the Middle East and thus change the geopolitical situation in that region. That's a lot to control, but I don't lose sleep over my decisions, let me tell you."

"You have told me quite something else. You said that these nightmare images are interfering with your ability to do your job, are waking you up in the middle of the night, and even invading your thoughts during daytime hours, and are causing you some bothersome physical and mental symptoms. Sounds to me like you don't wish to talk about where your dream is taking you."

"That's enough! Everything you've said in our session is taking me down, attacking me, bringing my parents into this, giving aid and comfort to our enemies, besmirching the honor of our good, grave soldiers. I want you to leave."

"Did you just hear what you said? You referred to our troops as 'our good, grave soldiers'."

"I meant brave. It's just a slip of the tongue, and you're trying to make a federal case out of it. You're outta here! Right now! You'll get your check in the mail."

"You're doing it again, sir. A quick fix -- another drink, another toot, a one-off session with a shrink -- so that you won't have to deal with the shadow matter underneath, the stuff that drags you down and makes you feel bad about yourself and others. If you're really serious about wanting to heal yourself, and stop these kind of nightmares, you're going to have to deal with those demons at some point, and my experience teaches me that it's always better to deal with them now than wait until they're in total control and you're in nervous-breakdown stage. You've demonstrated just in a first session today that you have good insights about what you're thinking underneath all that power and feigned jollity. I'd recommend that we keep at it for awhile, and see where it takes you."

"Just get the fuck out of my house. And don't ever come back -- unless you want a one-way ticket to a nice governmental resort in Cuba."

"I'm sorry you feel that way, sir. But I understand: Therapy often frightens people; they're opening doors that long have been sealed off, for good reason. So take your time processing what we spoke about today, and if and when you want to talk some more -- I'll be available. Goodbye." (Exits, door closes)

"Goddamn loser. Fuck 'im, I've got a war to win!"

Copyright 2005, by Bernard Weiner

15 Things Learned About Bush&Co.:

An Impeachment List

By Bernard Weiner

July 5, 2005

Though my degrees are in government and international relations, I hadn't been part of the political arena in an activist way since "The Sixties" -- roughly the Civil Rights Movement late-'50s through the anti-Vietnam War mid-'70s. Instead, after years of college teaching, I found myself more engaged in cultural work as a playwright, poet and newspaper reporter, and, for nearly two decades, as a theater critic.

When 9/11 arrived, something snapped open in me, as it did for many Americans. The world indeed had changed, not just the fact that the U.S. was attacked in such a horrific way and had to respond but also, and perhaps more significantly, in the brazen, power-hungry way the Bush Administration had chosen to use those multiple terror-murders.

My political instincts and intuitions were re-activated, along with a desire to talk about what I saw happening, and I began writing political analyses for a wide variety of internet websites. If one examined those early columns, one could see a moderate progressive struggling, along with everyone else, in trying to make sense of what was going on politically, socially, economically.

After a year or so of writing for other publications, co-activist philosopher Ernest Partridge and I in November of 2002 founded our own website The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org), where we not only would publish our political analyses but also link to the best writing we found out there on the Web, and help the fledgling resistance gain momentum.

Two years later, just prior to the 2004 election, we found we were receiving close to a half-million hits a month. We were able to share our own ideas and stimulate our readers' thoughts about the Bush Administration, the "war on terrorism," the various scandals, the torture policy established from the top, and, especially, the unwise, dishonorable, illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, etc.

CLARIFYING THE CRIMES

Below is a quick list of fifteen things that I -- and maybe half of my fellow Americans -- have learned since George Bush first moved into the Oval Office four-plus years ago. Don't know about you, but making such lists helps me sum-up and clarify my thoughts, giving me something to chew on when figuring out what to do next, including the possibility of moving on some of these items as grounds for impeachment. See what you think.

1. I've learned that while many of us in the late-'80s and early-'90s were celebrating the implosion of Soviet-style communism and the end of the Cold War, others already had been drafting aggressive plans to exploit the fact that the U.S. was now the sole Superpower on the planet. If you want to know why America is in Iraq, you need look no further than the theoretical writings of the neo-cons associated with The Project for The New American Century, who essentially run Bush Administration foreign/military policy. Among the founding members: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Paul Wolfowitz. For an introductory primer, see How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle.

2. I've learned that these neo-cons realized their aggressive views were way out of the mainstream and thus that their goal of assuming "global hegemony" would have to be put on hold "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." Their wish came true on September 11, 2001; then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said 9/11 presented the Bush Administration with "an enormous opportunity" for the implementation of its agenda in the world. (Note: All the words inside quotation marks are theirs, not made up by me.)

By the way, it seems overwhelmingly apparent that Rice, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., were quite aware weeks ahead of 9/11 that a spectacular terrorist attack was coming from Al Qaida, but, for their own reasons, chose to look the other way and do little or nothing to prepare themselves or the country for what was about to come down.

3. I've learned that Karl Rove, et al., taking note of how so many presidents (especially Bush the Elder) plunged in the polls after successful foreign adventures, realized that while Americans rally around a president during wartime, other concerns often take precedence once the hostilities cease. So Rove and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz decided to make sure that hostilities never cease.

They reacted to 9/11 by declaring a never-ending "war on terrorism," thereby ensuring that the U.S. would be kept on a permanent war footing, and Bush would be a "wartime president" during his entire residency in the White House. (Note: There definitely are bad guys out there anxious to do more damage to the U.S., and those murderous thugs need to be dealt with, but what we're talking about here are the reckless, imperial measures chosen by the Bush Administration that just happen to coincide with fulfilling their agenda.)

TORTURE AS STATE POLICY

4. I've learned that Bush toady Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel, used this "permanent war" rationale as a justification for instituting the closest thing to a dictatorship in the U.S. since Richard Nixon, except that the Bush Administration makes Nixon's crimes look fairly puny in comparison. According to the twisted legal philosophy Gonzales and his aides came up with, Bush can do whatever he likes whenever he says he is acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime." Since it's a permanent war they say we're in, it follows that under the guise of "national security" and "the war on terrorism," Bush can do pretty much what he chooses to do. It is permissible for Bush to make his own law, or to ignore a law on the books, because his authority to do so is "inherent in the President," the Gonzales theory claims. Astounding!

The Supreme Court shot down Nixon when he tried to assert something similar -- that when the President takes an action, it is ipso facto legal because he's the President. We shall have to wait to see how the current Supreme Court will deal with this much more expansive interpretation, especially if Bush can appoint a few more HardRightists to it. The Supremes already fired a warning shot across his bow, telling Bush last year that though the President is granted extra powers during "wartime," he went way beyond the Constitutional pale by refusing prisoners in U.S. care access to the legal system. But Bush simply continues to delay implementation of the high court's ruling, or tries to go around the decision.

5. I've learned that Gonzales and Pentagon lawyers, using the "commander-in-chief-during-wartime" rationale, have attempted to legally justify use of "harsh interrogation techniques" (read: torture) on those terror suspects by inventing a new term, "enemy combatants," not used in the Geneva Conventions Against Torture of Prisoners of War. Various watchdog groups, including the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, have expressed grave reservations about the treatment by U.S. forces of their detainees; indeed, Amnesty International urged governments around the world to consider bringing war-crimes charges against American officials.

6. I've learned that among the first actions taken by the Bush Administration in early-2001 were those eliminating legal liability for U.S. officials or soldiers from domestic criminal laws and international conventions regarding the torture of prisoners in U.S. care. We didn't fully understand why the Administration was taking these steps until a year or two later, when the extent of U.S. abuse (and deaths) of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and elsewhere become evident. The Administration made sure that only lower-level guards and officers were charged with the deaths and abuse crimes, even though the orders and "atmosphere" that winked at anti-torture laws had come down the chain of command from the White House and Pentagon authorizing the use of "harsh interrogation methods" of terrorist suspects.

"RENDERING" AND AMERICA'S SHAME

7. I've learned that the hardest prisoners to crack were either "ghosted" -- i.e., kept off the rolls so that the International Red Cross would not know they existed to check up on their interrogations and care -- or were "rendered" to countries abroad (such as Uzbekistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, et al.) where they could be severely tortured without running afoul of U.S. laws and military regulations. The CIA uses special planes for flying these high-profile prisoners to the severe-torture countries. Such behavior makes me ashamed for my country. Note: Bush has never ordered an end to all torture and "rendering" activities.

8. I've learned that torture and permanent war abroad have been linked to police-state tactics at home -- mainly in controversial sections of the so-called USA Patriot Act, barely read (if read at all) and passed in great haste and fear after 9/11. The result is the creation of a militarist, neo-fascist atmosphere within America. Those opposing this, or other policies of this Administration are smeared with accusations of giving aid and comfort to the enemy (Ashcroft), or being soft on terrorism (Rove/Cheney).

9. I've learned that much of the corporate-owned mass-media -- newspapers, network news, cable pundits, radio talk-shows -- support the Bush Administration, out of fear of reprisal or because they are ideologically or economic ally in tune. This means that the broad base of the American population, in a state of constantly-hyped fear, does not have adequate information to counter the massive lies and propaganda barrage of the Administration. Though there are a few voices of rationality and truth-telling in the mainstream media, in general citizens must seek out foreign news outlets and/or progressive websites to access alternative points of view. Note: Currently, the Administration is moving to neuter even moderate alternative voices, such as might be found on NPR/PBS, and is devising ways of reining in critics on the internet.

10. I've learned that the HardRightists are not content to control the Legislative and Executive Branches, and much of the Judicial Branch and most of the news media. They are moving to obtain near-total control of the Judiciary by packing the important appellate courts with extreme rightwing judges, and Bush is hoping to nominate at least two FarRight justices to the Supreme Court during this second term, which could alter American jurisprudence for decades to come.

REALITY-BASED VS. SELF-DELUSION

11. I've learned that this is an Administration that appears to be severely allergic to fact and truth. For example: To delay the inevitable, Bush appointed his own scientific panel to investigate the issue of global warming; when those supposedly Administration-friendly scientists reported that the situation was even worse than other scientists had thought and that immediate remedial action was called for, Bush called their report the product of "government bureaucracy" -- as if that epithet ended the discussion right there -- and continued on his merry way. When confronted by truths in Iraq and elsewhere -- for instance, that the war is not going well on the ground -- the Bush Administration just ups the decibel level on its lies and continues on with rosy-colored optimism as if the truth on the ground just doesn't matter. Or, it denounces the media that report what's really going on militarily in Iraq. In short, Bush and his dozen or so most-trusted aides exhibit a bunker mentality, letting nothing in that will interfere with their fantasies and delusions and constructs of deception.

12. I've learned that the Bush Administration, which does everything to ease law-enforcement pressure on polluting corporations, has the worst environmental record in modern times. It permits the polluters effectively to write the regulations of their industries; it opens up once-protected natural areas to more logging, mining, mineral extraction; it even lied to residents of lower Manhattan in the days and weeks after the 9/11 attacks about how it was safe for them to return to their homes, schools and businesses. It wasn't until two years later (!) that the EPA revealed it knowingly had withheld the truth about how bad the air was; thousands of New York citizens now face long-term health consequences as a result of this mendacity.

DEMOCRATS AS AN "OPPOSITION PARTY"

13. I've learned that the Democrats in the Senate and House too often are complicit in helping Bush&Co. implement their plans and programs by rolling over in the face of the Republicans' smash-mouth politics. The Dems are a bit better now than they were in Bush's first term, but they still haven't figured out that being an Opposition Party means acting like one, not trying to play patty-cake with the Republicans, who mainly want to politically slash their throats and eliminate them as an obstacle to seizing full control over everything.

It is not too soon to seriously start thinking, and organizing, a broad alternative party -- perhaps the Greens in association with a new entity (maybe a reconstituted Progressive Democrats of America) -- if the Democratic Party doesn't start developing a consistent spine in Congress. At the very least, it would be good to have this new party gaining electoral ground on the local and state levels, building the infrastructure and street-smart leaders for the future, even if a national candidate is not put forward in 2008.

14. I've learned that America's voting system is thoroughly corruptible and cannot be trusted to yield the actual results. It's not that I object because Republican companies manufacture the voting machines and control the secret software that counts the votes; I would feel the same way if Democrat companies were in charge. We simply cannot have a privatized voting system, with secret software, and with no certified way of checking that the votes are honestly cast and fairly counted. And, even if the companies are not manipulating the tallies -- and there are indications that they may have done just that -- it's been demonstrated many times how absolutely easy it is for hackers (or company technicians) to enter the vote-counting system, alter the numbers and exit without anyone being the wiser.

Our country simply has to return to paper ballots, hand-counted, if we want to be taken seriously as a nation dedicated to fair and honest elections. Right now, even with (or because of) our high-tech computer systems, we're just about on par with the most corrupt third-world country in terms of a transparent, honest vote-counting system.

THE WHITE HOUSE HORRORS: IRAQ

15. Finally, there is Iraq, which (as was the case with Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam) will be the death of Bush's legacy and which potentially could get him impeached during his term, or put on trial domestically and in The Hague after he leaves office. Thanks to insiders who have left the Administration, the demonstrable facts, and now the so-called Downing Street Memos from England, I have learned, we all have learned, that there were immense immoralities and crimes perpetrated by our own government (and the Blair regime) in preparing for, launching, and carrying out this war and occupation. And those crimes continue to this day.

Bush-Blair/Cheney/Rumsfeld, et al. tried to maintain that they went to war against Iraq only because Saddam forced them to do so because of his supposed stockpiles of deadly WMD about to be used against America and Britain and Iraq's neighbors. However, it has long since been clear, and now is verified by the leaked top-secret Downing Street Memos, that both governments were lying through their teeth, about the supposed WMD and that Saddam "didn't allow U.N. weapons inspectors in," and much more. (Here are the actual texts of these top-secret minutes and memoranda.)

Both the Brit and the American governments knew that Iraq was a paper tiger, devoid of imminent threat and any major weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam had no connection to 9/11; he was contained and, for the foreseeable future, was going nowhere. But the desire of Bush and the neo-cons to attack Iraq had been an obsession long before 9/11, because of their plans to control the oil and to use Iraq as a base for altering the geo-political landscape of the Middle East. Bush and Blair, in order to justify the war to their respective populations, and to the international community, had to find "intelligence and facts" that could be "fixed" around the already-agreed-to policy of war.

Both in England and in the States, there were no such intelligence and facts; in this country, as hard as Cheney leaned on them, CIA and State Department analysts were unable to supply believable facts and intelligence to the White House. The political window for attack was about to close. So Rumsfeld set up his own "intelligence" unit, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion, and, surprise, got the "intelligence" the neo-cons wanted, stovepiped it directly to the White House (thus not having to run it by the professional analysts), and the war was green-lighted.

The American and British peoples were simply lied to. The British were told that chemical shells could hit U.K. bases within 45 minutes, Rice and Cheney and others warned about mushroom clouds over U.S. cities, U.S. Senators were told Iraq could launch drone planes to drop toxins along the East Coast, and so on. (Note: Lying to Congress is a serious crime, an impeachable one.) Colin Powell was dispatched to the United Nations and told some laughable whoppers based supposedly on "incontrovertible" intelligence. The Congress, and the mass-media, bought in to the lies; the U.N. Security Council, first wanting to hear the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, didn't.

Ten million people in countries around the world demonstrated to try to stop the coming war, convinced that it was illegal, that it was based on lies and deceptions, and that it would open a Pandora's box of increased Islamist terrorism around the world. Bush paid no attention; he began bombing Iraq long before the invasion, in mid-2002, nine months before he received authorization from Congress to launch a war as a last-resort. The "shock&awe" ground invasion began in March of 2003. To date, more than 1700 U.S. troops are known to have died in combat there (if that government figure is the correct total; how can we be sure?), with tens of thousands of our soldiers maimed; maybe as many as 100,000 Iraqis have died, most of those innocent civilians -- "collateral damage."

FORCED ENTRY & NO EXIT PLAN

Because of its Iraq invasion, occupation and tortures, the U.S. is a hated pariah in most of the world, morally isolated, economically vulnerable, anathema to Muslims worldwide (many of whom have not forgotten that Bush initially used the term "crusade" to describe his mission), a magnet target for terrorists everywhere. Our already-stretched-thin troops are bogged down in a bloody quagmire in Iraq now and presumably will be for years to come; Rumsfeld the other day said a dozen years is not out of the question.

Bush and Rumsfeld, who have botched the Occupation from day one, have no plan other than to keep repeating the mantra that the U.S. will "stay the course." Clearly, to stay is to prolong the agony for all concerned; there needs to be a major adjustment to "the course," but we see no evidence of any thinking along those lines in the White House.

Well, I could go on and on with things learned since 9/11 about this arrogant, greedy, power-hungry, bullying, ideologically blinded crew. But let's stop here. The American people -- especially moderate Republicans, appalled at how their once-proud party has been hijacked by extremists -- are waking up, shaking off their political torpor and their real and manufactured fear. (Tom Ridge, for example, admitted recently that he had been sent out regularly by the White House to announce phony "terror"-alerts.) As recent polls indicate, the American citizenry is voicing a demonstrable lack of faith in, and support for, Bush and his cronies, and their disastrous, reckless policies.

Perhaps this list -- and ones you will devise on your own, and pass around to your friends -- can be helpful in keeping that momentum building. It's time to get America back on its track. And to do that, one way or another, Bush&Co. must go. This nightmare must end -- before they take us all down with them.

If they resign right now, I say let's pardon them all. Anything. Just go!

Copyright 2005, by Bernard Weiner

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