HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


THE TORTURE-IRAQ CONNECTION

Release of the Bush administration's memos justifying "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding has provoked considerable chatter among the pundit and political class. Right-wingers make the astonishing claim that releasing the memos has endangered U. S. national security. We hear the argument that it would be just a terrible precedent to prosecute officials from previous administrations for acting in "good faith" to protect the country. What they're saying is that criminals, if they're high enough in the government, should get a free pass.

Torture is contrary to everything we're supposed to represent. When we torture it takes away any credibility we have in arguing for human rights in repressive regimes around the world. It means that our enemies can torture and we really can't say much about it. The fact that torture does not elicit reliable information is another point, but certainly not the most important argument. In this commentary Frank Rich points out that the Bush administration was far less interested in protecting the country than in finding some justification for their filthy war in Iraq. The column is at www.nytimes.com:

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

May 25, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TOO MUCH SUPERSTITION IN THE U. S.

Years after the Scopes Monkey Trial a new Gallup poll shows that one in three Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God. The interesting paradox is that so many Bible believers really can't tell you much about the Bible. People are hard pressed to name the four Gospels, for instance, or the Ten Commandments. If you just take a little time to read the Bible and the history of the Bible it becomes pretty apparent it can't be the literal word of any God. But we have some people who would like to impose a Taliban-like society based on their interpretation of the Bible. This article is from www.editorandpublisher.com:

NEW YORK About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word, a new Gallup poll reveals. This percentage is only slightly lower than several decades ago.

Gallup reports that the majority of those "who don't believe that the Bible is literally true believe that it is the inspired word of God but that not everything it in should be taken literally." Finally, about one in five Americans believe the Bible is merely an ancient book of "fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man."

There is also a strong relationship between education and belief in a literal Bible, Gallup explains, with such belief becoming much less prevalent as schooling continues.

Those who believe in the literal Bible amount to 31% of adult Americans. This is a decline of about 7% compared with Gallup polls taken in the 1970s and 1980s. It is strongest in the South.

CIA WARNED BUSH

Among the plethora of excuses the Bush administration has offered, there is the one about "bad intelligence" on Iraq. Supposedly, the administration believed in weapons of mass destruction based on CIA intelligence. They believed there would be a short and happy war and smooth transition into democracy. But the CIA warned the administration in the leadup to the war that toppling Saddam Hussein could lead to dangerous instability and create a haven for terrorists. This article by Lisa Myers and Robert Windrem is at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18854414/:

In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.

Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored.

In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community's think tank — the National Intelligence Council — issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was “a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”

April 28, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


TENET BOOK BLASTS ADMINISTRATION

Former CIA Director George Tenet joins other former administration insiders like Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke in showing how the Bush administration rushed pell mell into the Iraq war regardless of the consequences. We've heard a variety of rationales for starting this war. Initially, it was the big lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or was going to acquire weapons. Then there were phony claims of connections between Hussein and terrorists. We also heard the claim about "bad intelligence." We haven't heard the real explanation: arrogance and the desire to control the region. This article by Scott Lindlaw is at www.chicagotribune.com:

The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the United States could face a thicket of bad consequences, starting with "anarchy and the territorial breakup" of the country, former CIA Director George Tenet writes in a new book.

Agency analysts wrote the warning at the start of August 2002 and inserted it into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush's national security team at Camp David, Tenet writes.

The CIA analysis painted what Tenet calls additional "worst-case" scenarios: "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States"; "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states"; and "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance."

THE CORROSIVE ACID OF CONSERVATISM

The last few years have been a lesson in Conservative Government 101. Just when you think things can't get worse they do. Conservative politics is mostly about a big military and big inequality. They like to cut and cut taxes for the rich and dump the expense of running the country on the middle class. That's going to become more difficult, of course, because they're destroying the middle class. They deregulate industries, leaving us to the dog-eat-dog antics of the free market. You got tainted food and got sick or died? Tough! That's the free market. You got shafted on your mortgage deal? It's your own fault! You make lousy wages because investors get all the goodies and the workers get nothing? Too bad! The "risk takers" deserve all the goodies. You're worried about pollution and global warming? Don't you know global warming is just a myth, or if it's not a myth it's a conspiracy to destroy the U. S. economy! These people should never be in power. In this article Rick Perlstein looks at some items in USA Today and the corrosive impact of conservative government across the nation. The article is at www.tompaine.com:

OK. So we know what conservative government has destroyed—a nation in which we can count on our reservoirs holding and our streets not swallowing up our cars, one where budgeting is based on something other than fantasies about the magic of tax cuts for the rich. But what has it built?

Come with me, dear reader, to Vermont, where USA Today's "Across the USA" page for April 25 takes us to the state's flagship college campus:

VERMONT: Burlington - A dozen University of Vermont students are staging a hunger strike to seek higher wages for the university's lowest paid employees. Based on year-old figures, 256 UVM employees were paid less than $12.28 an hour, the amount considered a livable wage in Burlington. The students, who began the hunger strike Monday, are promising to consume only water and fruit juices. UVM President Dan Fogel says the school offers some of the best wages and benefits in Vermont.

Don't you just love the flacking? Some people at the university get good wages, so that negates the fact that others receive so little they can't survive. It's hard to write about how badly conservative governance has degraded us as a nation because, well, it has so degraded us as a nation: They have managed to make us forget once-sturdy pillars of our national morality. University presidents used to be high-minded civic leaders. Now they've become flacks like everyone else, all in service to a fatter bottom line.

March 20, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

WHAT WE SHOULD LEARN

There is not much good that will come of this war in Iraq. We're responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. We've sacrificed members of our own military senselessly. We've left countless others with wounds that they will suffer the rest of their lives. We've destabilized the Middle East. We've run massive deficits that threaten to cripple our economy. The only good that can come from this atrocity is what we can learn from it. Gary Hart writes about it in this article linked at www.huffingtonpost.com:

Do not manufacture justification for invasions. Plan for all eventualities, including the most unpleasant. Do not pay exiles to tell you what you want to hear. Deal honestly with Congress and the American people. Be candid about possible costs in lives and money. And an endless list of common sense, and Constitutional, dos and don'ts.

The second kind of lessons are less obvious and have to do with the new realities of the 21st century:

First, treat jihadist terrorism more like organized crime than traditional warfare. By declaring "war on terrorism" we made the fatal mistake that it could be crushed using conventional warfare and massed armies. We clearly had the legal and moral right to overturn the Taliban government in Afghanistan that harbored al Qaeda as it planned and carried out the 9.11 attacks. Even so, the democratization of an ancient tribal society is proving hugely more difficult than driving the Taliban out of Kabul. Indeed, it seems set on returning.
Instead, we should create NATO II, an organization combining the intelligence services, law enforcement agencies, and special forces of Western democracies to coordinate the crushing of jihadist cells.

SOME "FAMILY VALUES" PARTY

During the Clinton administration Republicans fought against an unpaid family leave bill. The bill allows people to take a certain amount of unpaid leave due to things like a family emergency. Republicans have fought against raising the minimum wage, or the existence of a minimum wage at all. Republicans opposed Social Security back when FDR proposed it. Now Republicans will fight a proposal for a national sick leave bill. The bill would mean sick leave for employees of any company that employees 15 or more people. We'll get the same old excuse from Republicans that it's harmful to small business. Their definition of "small business" might differ from yours and mine. This article by Bob Geiger is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The Kennedy bill, which applies to companies with 15 or more employees, is a logical follow-up to the minimum wage increase that was passed by the Democratic Congress in their first two months of controlling the agenda on Capitol Hill.

And despite the fact that almost half of all U.S. workers have no paid sick leave -- with 76 percent of the lowest-income workers having no ability to stay home sick without losing income -- Senate Republicans are already signaling that they're willing to fight this at least as strongly as they boycotted raising the minimum wage.

"To extend this type of leave requirement to businesses, as is contemplated by the Healthy Families Act, would be little more than an unfunded mandate on small businesses throughout the country," said Mike Enzi (R-WY), the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, in hearings last month. "In addition, this legislation represents only direct labor cost, and does not account for a myriad of other indirect costs."

January 18, 2007


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IMPEACH CHENEY

IRAQ: SUCH A WASTE

Poet Robert Frost once wrote about the "road not taken." What if George W. Bush had not launched this unnecessary and bloody war in Iraq? Even if you put aside the thousands upon thousands of deaths and maimings, just consider the monetary cost. Consider how that money could have been used productively. We could find cures for deadly diseases. We could do something serious about making education affordable for everyone. We could have health care for everyone. This article by David Leonhardt is at www.nytimes.com:

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

January 08, 2007


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IMPEACH CHENEY

POLICY DRIVEN BY EGO

It takes a tremendous ego to claim that God speaks to you, and that God wanted you to be president of the United States. It takes an enormous ego to deny reality because reality proves you desperately wrong. George W. Bush combines some pretty bad traits. He has boundless arrogance, no conscience, and no problem with causing the deaths of other people. Paul Krugman writes about it in this column linked at www.roziusunbound. blogspot.com:

Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

Of course, such gambling is easier when the lives at stake are those of other people’s children.

Well, we don’t have to settle the question. Either way, what’s clear is the enormous price our nation is paying for President Bush’s character flaws.

I began writing about the Bush administration’s infallibility complex, the president’s Captain Queeg-like inability to own up to mistakes, almost a year before the invasion of Iraq. When you put a man like that in a position of power — the kind of position where he can punish people who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, and base policy decisions on the advice of people who play to his vanity — it’s a recipe for disaster.