http://www.CopvCIA.com
=========================================================
7/1/03
BEYOND BUSH
Powers above the White House are deciding that it's time for
the Bush gang to go. As a Watergate-style take down is being meticulously put
into place, the question is not whether the Bush Administration will be removed
before or after the 2004 election. The important questions are whether Bush's
successor will address 9/11, Peak Oil, civil liberties, or any of the critical
issues. What is being done even now to control the challengers in the
Presidential election? A clandestine drama is unfolding and we'll help you
understand it. This special free series is a must-read going into 2004.
July 1, 2003 - PART I - The anatomy of
the coup against Bush. How it is being set-up as a form of damage control. How
the press is building to a climax that may break even after Bush has won (bought
or stolen) re-election. How the CIA is hanging Bush out to dry.
Coming in mid-July - PART II - The real
state of the world and why the coup is necessary for Wall Street and the power
brokers. How Bush's options in Iraq and everywhere else are being closed off by
American power brokers. FTW will question
spokespersons for every Democratic challenger to provide you with a detailed
analysis of who they are and what they stand for. We'll also talk about how
their campaigns are being influenced, guided and controlled. Don't get your
hopes up. The one chance for real change is to use the energy of the coup to
drag the secrets of 9/11 out into the open.
=========================================================
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070103_beyond_bush_1.html
BEYOND BUSH - Part I
by Michael
C. Ruppert
© Copyright 2003,
From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be
reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes
only.
There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush
administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so
many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious...But even
people who aren't partisan Republicans shy away from
confronting the administration's dishonest case for war, because they don't want
to face the implications...
After all, suppose a politician - or a journalist -
admits to himself that Mr. Bush bamboozled the nation into war. Well, launching
a war on false pretenses is, to say the least a breach of trust. So if you admit
to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to demand
accountability - and to do so in the face not only of a powerful, ruthless
political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to believe that its
leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain. It's a scary prospect.
Yet, if we can't find people willing to take the risk -
to face the truth and act on it - what will happen to our democracy?
-- Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June
24, 2003
July 1, 2003 1600 PDT (FTW) -- Let's
just suppose for a moment that George W. Bush was removed from the White House.
Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz and Rove too. What would that
leave us with? It would leave us stuck in hugely expensive, Vietnam-like
guerrilla wars in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan
. It would leave us with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and Total
Information Awareness snooping into every detail of our lives. It would leave us
with a government in violation of the 1st, 4th, 5th,
6th and 8th Amendments to the Constitution. It would leave
us with a massive cover-up of
US
complicity in the attacks of 9/11 that, if fully admitted, would show not
intelligence "failures" but intelligence crimes, approved and
ordered by the most powerful people in the country. It would leave us with a
government that now has the power to compel mass vaccinations on pain of
imprisonment or fine, and with no legal ability to sue the vaccine makers who
killed our friends or our children. It would leave us with two and half million
unemployed; the largest budget deficits in history; more than $3.3 trillion
missing from the Department of Defense; and state and local governments broke to
the point of having to cut back essential services like sewers, police, and
fire. It would leave us with a federal government that had hit the debt ceiling
and was unable to borrow any more money. And we would still be facing a looming
natural gas crisis of unimagined proportions, and living on a planet that is
slowly realizing that it is running out of oil with no "Plan B". Our
airports however, would be very safe, and shares of Halliburton, Lockheed and
DynCorp would be paying excellent dividends.
This is not good management.
Leaving all of these issues unaddressed is
not good management either.
And this is why, as I will demonstrate in
this article, the decision has already been made by corporate and financial
powers to remove George W. Bush, whether he wants to leave or not, and whether
he steals the next election or not. Before you start cheering, ask yourself
three questions: "If there is someone or something that can decide that
Bush will not return, nor remain for long, what is it? And if that thing is
powerful enough to remove Bush, was it not also powerful enough to have put him
there in the first place? And if that is the case, then isn't that what's really
responsible for the state of things? George W. Bush is just a hired CEO who is
about to be removed by the "Board of Directors". Who are they? Are
they going to choose his replacement? Are you going to help them?
What can change this Board of Directors and
the way the "Corporation" protects its interests? These are the only
issues that matter.
So now the honest question about the 2004
Presidential campaign is, "What do you really want out of it?" Do you
want the illusion that everything is a little better while it really gets worse?
Or are you ready yet to roll up your sleeves and make some very unpleasant but
necessary fixes?
The greatest test of the 2004 presidential
election campaign is not with the candidates. It is with the people. There are
strong signs that presidential election issues on the Democratic side are
already being manipulated by corporate and financial interests. And some naïve
and well-intentioned (and some not-so-naïve and not-so-well intentioned)
activists are already playing right into the Board's hands. There are many
disturbing signs that the only choice offered to the American people will be no
choice at all. Under the psychological rationale, "This is the way it has
to be done", campaign debates will likely address only half-truths and fail
to come to grips with - or even acknowledge - the most important issues that I
just described. In fact, only the least important issues will likely be
addressed in campaign 2004 at the usual expense of future generations who are
rapidly realizing that they are about to become the victims of the biggest
Holocaust in mankind's history. The final platforms for Election 2004 will
likely be manifestos of madness unless we dictate differently.
It is amazing to see such words of honesty
coming from The New York Times as those of Paul Krugman. I am not
referring to the recent scandals over falsified stories that brought down a
reporter and two editors at the Times. That particular drama was
overplayed by CNN, Fox and The Washington Post as punishment for the Times'
opposition to the invasion of
Iraq
. The most vicious dogs of war are sometimes armed with sharpened,
saliva-drenched keyboards. No, Paul Krugman's words represent the essence of
what From The Wilderness has stood for since
its very first issue. Unless people find the will to address scandals, lies, and
betrayals of trust that, by their very existence, reveal that the system itself
is corrupt and that the people controlling it - both in government, and in
America's corporations and financial institutions -- are criminals, there is no
chance to make anything better, only an absolute certainty that things will get
worse.
Already we can see the early signs of
delusional and dishonest behavior that is being willingly embraced by equally
delusional activists who have begun a sterile debate about which candidate to
support and why it is better to become involved on the side of one Democratic
Party candidate or another or why a vote for a Green Party candidate instead of
a Democrat is tantamount to treason. The Republicans, of course, are sharpening
up a campaign that will portray George W. Bush as the "Hero of 9/11",
"The Protector of the American Economy", "The Savior of the Free
World", "A Man Who Loves God", and "The Man Who Cut
Taxes". Electroshock therapy might be useful for these people.
But is it any less warranted for people who
believe that everything will be fine if there is better theme music in the
background, while none of the real offenses of the past two years are addressed
or undone?
Short Memories
Some on the Democratic side are already
positioning themselves to co-opt and control what happened on 9/11 into a
softer, less disturbing "Better this than nothing" strategy. This
attitude, that the only thing that matters is finding an electable Democrat, is
nothing more than a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Has everyone
suddenly forgotten that the 2000 election was stolen: first by using software
and political machinery to disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible voters,
then by open interference at polling places, and finally by an absolutely
illegal Supreme Court decision? Do these people believe that such a crime,
absolutely successful the first time, will never be attempted again?
And has everyone also forgotten that in the
2002 midterm elections the proprietary voting software, in many cases owned by
those affiliated with the Republican Party or - as in the case of Senator Chuck
Hagel of Nebraska - the candidates themselves, has been ruled by the Supreme
Court to be immune from public inspection. (Hagel won by a lopsided 83%
majority). Throughout the
United States
in 2002 there was abundant evidence that the so-called
"solution" to hanging chads did nothing more than enshrine the ability
to steal elections with immunity and also much less fuss afterwards? Who in
their right mind would trust such a system? Why have none of the candidates
mentioned it?
And, if all else fails, we can have more
Wellstone plane crashes. It has worked with three Democratic Senate candidates
in key races over the last thirty years. Maybe that's why no one in Congress is
talking about the election process. Plane crashes are part of that process too.
This is the process in which some are
urging us to place our trust? My publication, which recently ran a full-page ad
in The Washington Post, and is about to unleash a national ad campaign,
has already been unofficially approached by people from two Democratic
challengers seeking an endorsement. I have made it clear that FTW will
not endorse any candidate who does not make the life-and-death issues facing
mankind his or her number-one priority and address them openly.
Is the 2004 election already being rolled,
like soft cookie dough, away from the issues? Already there are signs that some
candidates who speak the truth are having their campaigns infiltrated by expert
managers who might dilute the message. There are signs that others, looked upon
as likely winners with strong progressive credentials, may be nothing more than
different dogs from the same kennel that brought us the Bush Wolf Pack.
But first let me convince you that the Bush
management team is actually on its way out and that this is not a reason to
breathe a sigh of relief. Don't get me wrong, I'll be glad to see the
mean-spirited and dishonest bastards go. I'll also acknowledge their healthy
severance package and I'll worry about the bastards that will likely replace
them who might be much harder to identify.
BUMPING BUSH
There is only one difference between the
evidence showing the Bush administration's criminal culpability in and
foreknowledge of the attacks of 9/11, and the evidence showing that the
administration deceived the American public about the threat posed by Saddam
Hussein. Both sets of evidence are thoroughly documented. They are irrefutable
and based upon government records and official statements and actions shown to
be false, misleading or dishonest. And both sets of evidence are unimpeachable.
The difference is that the evidence showing the Iraqi deception is being
seriously and widely investigated by the mainstream press, and actively by an
ever-increasing number of elected representatives. That's it.
It is the hard record of official
statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell on
Iraq
that will sink the administration, either before or after the election.
These guys are horrible managers and they have really botched things up, big
time - exactly as I said they would. There is no amount of spin anywhere that
can neutralize this record. As FTW predicted back in March, the biggest
and most obvious criminal action of the administration, a knowing lie (one of
many) used to deceive a nation into war, was the administration's assertion that
Iraq
had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and had recently attempted
to purchase uranium from the African country of
Niger
.
Just before the March 2003 Iraqi
invasion in our two-part series titled The Perfect Storm we wrote:
There are serious signs of a major
political revolt brewing in the
United States
- one that could end the Bush Presidency - George W. Bush still has
his finger on the trigger and he knows that his only hope for survival is to
pull it.
U.S.
and British intelligence agencies are leaking documents left and right
disputing White House "evidence" against
Iraq
that has repeatedly been shown to be falsified, plagiarized and
forged. Quiet meetings are being held in Washington between members of Congress
and attorneys like Ramsey Clark discussing Bush's impeachment. Leaders of the
World Trade Organization (WTO), as reported in a March 15 story in the
International Herald Tribune have said, "All international institutions
would suffer a loss of credibility if the one superpower appeared to be choosing
which rules to obey and which to ignore." And a Rockefeller has called for
an investigation of a Bush. On March 14, the Associated Press reported that W.
Va. Senator Jay Rockefeller has asked the FBI to investigate forged documents
which were presented first by
Britain
and then the
United States
showing that
Iraq
had been trying to purchase uranium from the African country of
Niger
for its weapons program. Of all the glaring falsehoods told by the
administration, the fact that these forgeries were noted by a Rockefeller may
make them the second-rate Watergate burglary of the 21st century...
There are few things more closely
connected to or identified with Bush family power than globalization and the
Rockefellers. He has most likely failed both of them and both have the power to
remove him...
In the meantime, there are increasing signs that the
U.S.
political and economic elites are laying the groundwork to make the
Bush administration, specifically Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Perle and
Wolfowitz, sacrificial scapegoats for a failed policy in time to consolidate
post 9-11 gains, regroup and move forward.
That prophecy is coming true with a
vengeance.
The Bush administration's gamble is that,
because it can raise more money than all the Democratic challengers put
together, it can still manage to re-elect itself in 2004. No doubt, the
administration will put up a good fight. But an impeachment, long sought after
by many - including University of Illinois
law Professor Francis Boyle -- will be waiting after the second inauguration
just as surely as it was for Richard Nixon in 1973.
My certainty is based upon a record that is
utterly damning and penetrates to almost every assertion made by the Bush
administration in its pursuit of Iraqi oil. Rather than digress into a lengthy
discussion of the offenses let me refer the reader to two examples that
exemplify how strong the case is and that it is being pursued.
Hard Work from the House
The legal groundwork for the Clinton
impeachment of 1998-9 was laid out quietly over a period of many months. The
same holds true now.
The foundation of the impeachment - or the
scandal that will prompt a regime change - was laid in a March 17 letter written
by California Congressman Henry Waxman who has been dogging the Bush
administration on its violations of law since it took office. Waxman's first
battle was over the refusal of the administration to release the mostly
still-secret records of Vice President Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force. It is
there that some of the biggest secrets of 9/11 lay buried. With respect to the
Iraqi invasion -- using the record of official statements made by Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld and Powel -- Waxman has already laid out and won the prima facie case
that the administration has lied, deceived the public and broken the public
trust. There can be no defense against this record once it gets into a legal
proceeding.
To read the full text of Waxman's March letter
please visit:
http://www.house.gov/reform/min/inves_admin/admin_nuclear_evidence.htm
This web page details Waxman's meticulous
compilation of evidence and - from a legal, as opposed to political standpoint -
is no doubt the core of any future impeachment case against Bush. It is damning
and Waxman has diligently continued to build, brick by brick, the wall into
which the administration could soon crash. An important historical novelty here
is that Waxman's compilation of irrefutable criminal activity also guarantees
that if Bush goes, so do Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell. What then?
Rebellion From Inside the Beltway
On June 26, a twenty-seven-year CIA veteran
analyst tied the pieces together and made it clear that, Bush is fighting a
battle he cannot win. Just as it was with Nixon, the intelligence agencies have
turned against him. Ray McGovern, affiliated with the watchdog group Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has been out front with criticisms
of the Bush administration's abuse of intelligence procedures for some time.
However, in his interview with William Rivers Pitt, writing for Truthout.org,
McGovern took Waxman's work several steps further. He was also critical of CIA
Director George Tenet's endorsements of intelligence abuses by Powell, Cheney
and Bush, yet he did not mention that Tenet had left a paper record showing that
the CIA had never trusted the forged
Niger
documents that the administration still - even after warnings -- sold to
the public and to the world as authentic.
McGovern also let Tenet off the hook for the biggest crime of the
administration, allowing and facilitating the attacks of 9/11, saying, "My
analysis is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet on as
Director, because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for months and months
before September 11, that something very bad was about to happen". Even
still McGovern let the Bush administration know that its conduct before the
attacks was a sword of Damocles hanging over Bush's head.
"On August 6, the title of the [Presidential] briefing was, ‘Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in the
US
,' and that briefing had the word ‘Hijacking' in it. That's all I know
about it, but that's quite enough. In September, Bush had to make a decision. Is
it feasible to let go of Tenet, whose agency flubbed the dub on this one? And
the answer was no, because Tenet knows too much about what Bush knew, and Bush
didn't know what to do about it. That's the bottom line for me."
I disagree with McGovern---there is a record showing that the CIA knew
about 9/11---but otherwise McGovern's analysis matched perfectly with FTW's
of three months ago. Here are some excerpts:
In the coming weeks, we're going to be seeing folks coming out and
coming forth with what they know, and it is going to be very embarrassing for
the Bush administration.
To be quite complete on this, it encourages me that the analysts at
the Defense Intelligence Agency - who share this ethic of trying to tell the
truth, even though they are under much greater pressure and have much less
career protection because they work for Rumsfeld - to their great credit, in
September of last year they put out a memo saying there is no reliable evidence
to suggest that the Iraqis have biological or chemical weapons, or that they are
producing them...
They looked around after Labor Day and said, "OK, if we're
going to have this war, we really need to persuade Congress to vote for it. How
are we going to do that? Well, let's do the al Qaeda-Iraq connection. That's the
traumatic one. 9/11 is still a traumatic thing for most Americans. Let's do
that."
But then they said, "Oh damn, those folks at CIA don't buy
that, they say there's no evidence, and we can't bring them around. We've tried
every which way and they won't relent. That won't work, because if we try that,
Congress is going to have these CIA wimps come down, and the next day they'll
undercut us. How about these chemical and biological weapons? We know they don't
have any nuclear weapons, so how about the chemical and biological stuff? Well,
damn. We have these other wimps at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and dammit,
they won't come around either. They say there's no reliable evidence of that, so
if we go up to Congress with that, the next day they'll call the DIA folks in,
and the DIA folks will undercut us."
So they said, "What have we got? We've got those aluminum
tubes!" The aluminum tubes, you will remember, were something that came out
in late September, the 24th of September. The British and we front-paged it.
These were aluminum tubes that were said by Condoleezza Rice as soon as the
report came out to be only suitable for use in a nuclear application. This is
hardware that they had the dimensions of. So they got that report, and the
British played it up, and we played it up. It was front page in the New York
Times. Condoleezza Rice said, "Ah ha! These aluminum tubes are suitable
only for uranium-enrichment centrifuges."
Then they gave the tubes to the Department of Energy labs, and to a
person, each one of those nuclear scientists and engineers said, "Well, if
Iraq thinks it can use these dimensions and these specifications of aluminum
tubes to build a nuclear program, let ‘em do it!
Let ‘em do it. It'll
never work, and we can't believe they are so stupid. These must be for
conventional rockets."
And, of course, that's what they were for, and that's what the UN
determined they were for. So, after Condoleezza Rice's initial foray into this
scientific area, they knew that they couldn't make that stick, either. So what
else did they have?
Well, somebody said, "How about those reports earlier this year
that
Iraq
was trying to get Uranium from
Niger
? Yeah...that was pretty good." But of course if George Tenet were
there, he would have said, "But we looked at the evidence, and they're
forgeries, they stink to high heaven." So the question became, "How
long would it take for someone to find out they were forgeries?" The answer
was about a day or two. The next question was, "When do we have to show
people this stuff?" The answer was that the IAEA had been after us for a
couple of months now to give it to them, but we can probably put them off for
three or four months.
So there it was. "What's the problem? We'll take these reports,
we'll use them to brief Congress and to raise the specter of a mushroom cloud.
You'll recall that the President on the 7th of October said, "Our smoking
gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Condoleezza Rice said
exactly the same thing the next day. Victoria Clarke said exactly the same thing
on the 9th of October, and of course the vote came on the 11th of October...
The most important and clear-cut scandal, of course, has to do with
the forgery of those
Niger
nuclear documents that were used as proof. The very cold calculation
was that Congress could be deceived, we could have our war, we could win it, and
then no one would care that part of the evidence for war was forged. That may
still prove to be the case, but the most encouraging thing I've seen over the
last four weeks now is that the
US
press has sort of woken from its slumber and is interested. I've asked
people in the press how they account for their lack of interest before the war,
and now they seem to be interested. I guess the simple answer is that they don't
like to be lied to...
I think the real difference is that no one knew, or very few people
knew, before the war that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq
. Now they know. It's an unavoidable fact. No one likes to be conned,
no one likes to be lied to, and no one particularly likes that 190
US
servicemen and women have been killed in this effort, not to mention
the five or six thousand Iraqi civilians.
There's a difference in tone. If the press does not succumb to the
argument put out by folks like Tom Friedman, who says it doesn't really matter
that there are no weapons in Iraq, if it does become a quagmire which I believe
it will be, and we have a few servicemen killed every week, then there is a
prospect that the American people will wake up and say, "Tell me again why
my son was killed? Why did we have to make this war on
Iraq
?"
So I do think that there is some hope now that the truth will come
out. It won't come out through the Congressional committees. That's really a
joke, a sick joke...
It doesn't take a crackerjack analyst. Take Pat Roberts, the
Republican Senator from Kansas, who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee. When the Niger forgery was unearthed and when Colin Powell admitted,
well shucks, it was a forgery, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on
that committee, went to Pat Roberts and said they really needed the FBI to take
a look at this. After all, this was known to be a forgery and was still used on
Congressmen and Senators. We'd better get the Bureau in on this. Pat Roberts
said no, that would be inappropriate. So Rockefeller
drafted his own letter, and went back to Roberts and said he was going to send
the letter to FBI Director Mueller, and asked if Roberts would sign on to it.
Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate...
What the FBI Director eventually got was a letter from one Minority
member saying pretty please, would you maybe take a look at what happened here,
because we think there may have been some skullduggery. The answer he got from
the Bureau was a brush-off. Why do I mention all that? This is the same Pat
Roberts who is going to lead the investigation into what happened with this
issue.
All I'm saying is that you've got Porter Goss on the House
side, you've got Pat Roberts on the Senate side, you've got John Warner who's a
piece with Pat Roberts. I'm very reluctant to be so unequivocal, but in this
case I can say nothing is going to come out of those hearings but a lot of
smoke...
What I'm saying is that this needs to be investigated. We know that
it was Dick Cheney who sent the former
US
ambassador to
Niger
to investigate. We know he was told in early March of last year that
the documents were forgeries. And yet these same documents were used in that
application. That is something that needs to be uncovered. We need to pursue why
the Vice President allowed that to happen. To have global reporters like Walter
Pincus quoting senior administration officials that Vice President Cheney was
not told by CIA about the findings of this former
US
ambassador strains credulity well beyond the breaking point. Cheney
commissioned this trip, and when the fellow came back, he said, "Don't tell
me, I don't want to know what happened." That's just ridiculous.
I strongly recommend a full reading of the McGovern interview, which
can be read at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/062603B.shtml.
McGovern's reference to Walter Pincus
echoes an observation made by FTW in March:
FTW has previously noted strong signals
in the form of published remarks by powerful figures such as Senator Jay
Rockefeller and news stories by media powerhouses such as James Risen and Walter
Pincus that quiet moves were underway to remove the Bush administration from
power. In a harsh and stunning public statement to the BBC three days ago,
former Bush I Secretary of State and Henry Kissinger business partner Lawrence
Eagleburger smacked ol' "W" right between
the eyes with a two-by-four.
The shocking
April 14 Eagleburger statement revealed the depth of dissatisfaction in the real
halls of power with the Bush team:
If George Bush [Jr.] decided he was
going to turn the troops loose on
Syria
and
Iran
after that he would last in office for about 15 minutes. In fact if
President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be
impeached. You can't get away with that sort of thing in this democracy.
The Military's Silent Mutiny - A
"Full Scale Rebellion"
In his interview with Pitt, retired CIA
analyst McGovern hinted at what appears to be a growing but quiet dissent within
the ranks of the
US
military at the totalitarian management style of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, and the fact that the administration seems unconcerned with the facts.
He said:
To be quite complete on this, it
encourages me that the analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency - who share
this ethic of trying to tell the truth, even though they are under much greater
pressure and have much less career protection because they work for Rumsfeld -
to their great credit, in September of last year they put out a memo saying
there is no reliable evidence to suggest that the Iraqis have biological or
chemical weapons, or that they are producing them.
Indeed the multitude of leaks of
intelligence estimates, reports, memos and other records from within the
military and intelligence communities suggests a deep dissatisfaction with the
Bush regime. But perhaps nothing is as telling as a recent report from
Washington journalist and frequent FTW contributor Wayne Madsen who is
also a former US Naval officer and a veteran of the National Security Agency.
In a recent article for the Online Journal
(www.onlinejournal.com)
Madsen noted,
Other effects of Weaponsgate are already
apparent. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the majordomo of the neocons
within the Pentagon, cannot find anyone to take the place of outgoing Army Chief
of Staff General Eric Shinseki. General Tommy Franks and Shinseki's vice chief,
General John "Jack" Keane, want no part of the job. After winning a
lightning war against
Iraq
, Franks suddenly announced his retirement. He and Keane witnessed how
Rumsfeld and his coterie of advisers and consultants, who never once lifted a
weapon in the defense of their country, constantly
ignored and publicly abused Shinseki. Army Secretary and retired General Tom
White resigned after a number of clashes with Rumsfeld and his cabal.
Curious as to whether this indicated a no-confidence vote in the Bush
administration by career, professional military officers I e-mailed Madsen and
asked for further comment.
His reply was straight to the point.
Senior Pentagon officers have told me that Rumsfeld and his
political advisers take no criticism from the military or the career civil
servants, to complain publicly though is to sign a death warrant for your
career. The "cabal" as they call themselves are
extremely vindictive but there remains a full-scale rebellion within the
Pentagon, especially the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as the CIA and
State over the cooking of the books on the non-existent Iraqi WMDs. The people
who have been dissed by Rumsfeld and his gang know
WMDs are their weak point and even Richard Perle is worried that the wheels are
coming off their charade.
As casualties continue to mount in the worsening guerrilla war in Iraq,
and as growing casualties in Afghanistan are beginning to attract notice, it is
a certainty that career military leaders are going to become more restive as
they watch their troops die in attacks that remind us all of Vietnam and as the
world continues to disintegrate. The power of the military, rarely discussed in
the news media, is substantial. And if the military has no confidence in the
White House, it will shake both Washington and Wall Street to the core. Without
the military, Wall Street cannot function. This is especially true as conflicts
continue to erupt all over Africa and
instability mounts in
Iran
and
Saudi Arabia
. That instability was created by an administration that is increasingly
demonstrating zero management competence.
THE MEDIA MASSES - THE
MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS
Not since the Watergate scandal of 1972-4
has a crescendo of press stories been more carefully crafted. And it is because
of this that we can see many historical connections to Watergate - a coup
that took down a President who believed he was invincible.
A Media Sampling
What follows is a partial list of recent
articles, reports, letters and editorials in the mainstream press focusing the
administration's fraudulent case for the invasion of
Iraq
:
June 6 - In a story
published at the hugely influential FindLaw.com, former Nixon counsel
John Dean - the witness who broke Watergate wide open - publishes a lengthy
article comparing the current scandal to Watergate. He states bluntly, "If
Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he
is cooked."
June 12 - Follow up
letter by Henry Waxman to Condoleezza Rice asking why he has received no
response to previous inquiries;
June 13 - US News and
World Report states that in November 2002 "the Defense Intelligence
Agency issued a report stating that there was ‘no reliable information'
showing that
Iraq
was actually producing or stockpiling chemical weapons."
June 15 - Retired NATO
Commander Wesley Clark tells Meet the Press that the administration had
asked him to talk about Iraqi weapons and that he refused because there was no
evidence supporting the claim;
June 18 - USA Today
quotes former CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner as saying that the
administration stretched the facts on
Iraq
.
June 18 - The
Associated Press quotes Democratic candidates John Kerry and Howard Dean as
saying that the administration has misled Americans.
June 19 - The Los
Angeles Times calls for open hearings on the Iraqi evidence;
June 20 - The Boston
Globe runs a widely reprinted Op-Ed by Derrick Jackson saying that without
WMDs Iraq must be about oil.
June 22 - The
Observer (
UK
) quotes Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow, retired General
William Nash saying that the administration has distorted intelligence.
June 22 - Washington
Times/UPI correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave raises serious
questions about the administration's conduct.
June 22 - The
Washington Post, a front-page major story by Walter Pincus.
June 24 - The
Christian Science Monitor runs an editorial titled, "Bush Credibility
Gap - a Slow, Quiet Crumble".
June 25 - The New
York Times, James Risen and Douglas Jehl report that a top State Department
expert has told Congress he was pressed by the White House to distort evidence.
June 25 - Newsweek correspondent Michael
Isikoff in a lengthy article titled "Distorted Intelligence" reveals
that intelligence documents from
Germany
(in Newsweek's possession) and
Qatar
blow distinct holes in the administration's
claims of an Iraq-Al Qaeda alliance. This constitutes a clear message to Bush
that the media case against the administration is tight.
June 29 - Denver Post Columnist Diane Carman
publishes a column titled, "Scandal Lurks in the Shadow of Iraq
Evidence".
June 29 - Time Magazine publishes a story
titled "Who Lost the WMD?" that summarized many of the major points of
the scandal including direct interference with CIA analysis by Dick Cheney
during "working visits" to CIA headquarters. It contains the telling
statement, "And as Bush's allies and enemies alike on
Capitol Hill begin to pick apart some 19 volumes of prewar intelligence
and examine them one document at a time, the cohesive Bush team is starting to
come apart."
But who (and what) is the media serving?
Of all of these stories, it is the June 22 front-page Washington
Post story by Walter Pincus that tells me that Bush is cooked. Pincus is a
CIA mouthpiece who wrote a 1967 column titled, "How I traveled the world on
a CIA stipend." He was the major damage control spokesman when Pulitzer
Prize winner Gary Webb's 1996 stories blew the lid off of CIA connections to
Contra-connected cocaine being smuggled into Los Angeles. If any journalist is a
weathervane for the tides of political fortune in a scandal like this it is
Pincus. His role, though likely to be shared with other press organizations,
will be the same as Woodward and Bernstein's in Watergate.
In that article, titled, "Report Cast Doubt on Iraq- Al Qaeda
Connection" Pincus created a virtual airtight separation of the CIA from
the White House. It was, in effect, a warning to Bush that if he sought an
escape by blaming the Agency, it would backfire. He wrote:
In a nationally televised address last October in which he sought to
rally congressional support for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq,
President Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein posed an immediate
threat to the United States by outlining what he said was evidence pointing to
its ongoing ties with al Qaeda.
A still-classified national intelligence report circulating within
the Bush administration at the time, however, portrayed a far less clear picture
about the link between
Iraq
and al Qaeda than the one presented by the president, according to
U.S.
intelligence analysts and congressional sources who have read the
report.
The National Intelligence Estimate on
Iraq
, which represented the consensus of the
U.S.
intelligence community, contained cautionary language about
Iraq
's connections with al Qaeda and warnings about the reliability of
conflicting reports by Iraqi defectors and captured al Qaeda members about the
ties, the sources said...
Similar questions have been raised about Bush's statement in
his State of the Union address last January that the British had reported Iraq
was attempting to buy uranium in Africa, which the president used to back up his
assertion that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In that case,
senior
U.S.
officials said, the CIA 10 months earlier sent a former senior
American diplomat to visit
Niger
who reported that country's officials said they had not made any
agreement to aid the sale of uranium to
Iraq
and indicated documents alleging that were forged. Details of that CIA
Niger inquiry were not shared with the White House, although the agency
succeeded in deleting that allegation from other administration statements...
The presidential address crystallized the assertion that had been
made by senior administration officials for months that the combination of
Iraq
's chemical and biological weapons and a terrorist organization, such
as al Qaeda, committed to attacking the
United States
posed a grave and imminent threat. Within four days, the House and
Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution granting the president authority to
go to war.
The handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programs and
its links to al Qaeda has come under increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with
some leading Democrats charging that the administration exaggerated the case
against Hussein by publicizing intelligence that supported its policy and
keeping contradictory information under wraps. The House intelligence committee
opened a closed-door review into the matter last week; its Senate counterpart is
planning similar hearings. The Senate Armed Services Committee is also
investigating the issue...
Questions about the reliability of the intelligence that Bush cited
in his Cincinnati address were raised shortly after the speech by ranking
Democrats on the Senate intelligence and armed services panel. They pressed the
CIA to declassify more of the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate than a
28-page "white paper" on
Iraq
distributed on Capitol Hill on Oct. 4.
In one of the more notable statements made by the president, Bush
said that "
Iraq
could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical
weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," and added:
"Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack
America
without leaving any fingerprints."
Bush did not indicate that the consensus of
U.S.
intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack
against the
United States
only if he thought he could not stop the
United States
from invading
Iraq
. The intelligence report had said that the Iraqi president might
decide to give chemical or biological agents to terrorists, such as al Qaeda,
for use against the
United States
only as a "last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large
number of victims with him." And it said this would be an "extreme
step" by Hussein...
These conclusions in the report were contained in a letter CIA
Director George J. Tenet sent to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.),
then the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, the day of Bush's speech.
While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had
"high-level contacts that go back a decade," the president did not say
-- as the classified intelligence report asserted -- that the contacts occurred
in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in
Sudan and his organization was in its infancy. At the time, the report said, bin
Laden and Hussein were united primarily by their common hostility to the Saudi
Arabian monarchy, according to sources. Bush also did not refer to the report's
conclusion that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing
high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources
said.
On Oct. 4, three days before the president's speech, at the urging
of members of Congress, the CIA released its declassified excerpts from the
intelligence report as a "white paper" on
Iraq
's weapons programs and al Qaeda links...
"Senator Graham felt that they declassified only things that
supported their position and left classified what did not support that
policy," said Bob Philippone, Graham's deputy chief of staff. Graham, now a
candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, opposed the war
resolution.
When the white paper appeared, Graham and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.),
an intelligence panel member and at that time chairman of the Armed Services
Committee, asked to have additional portions of the intelligence estimate as
well as portions of the testimony at the Oct. 2 hearing made public.
On the day of Bush's speech, Tenet sent a letter to Graham with some
of the additional information. The letter drew attention because it seemed to
contradict Bush's statements that Hussein would give weapons to al Qaeda.
Tenet released a statement on Oct. 8 that said, "There is no
inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as
expressed by the president in his speech." He went on to say, however, that
the chance that the Iraqi leader would turn weapons over to al Qaeda was
"low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he
possesses" weapons of mass destruction.
On Oct. 9, the CIA sent a letter to Graham and Levin informing them
that no additional portions of the intelligence report would be made public...
Why would Tenet refuse to declassify
additional portions of the report? Because, as I am sure he will ultimately
testify, he was ordered not to by President Bush himself. That would close the
case for obstruction of justice in a manner similar to the way that Richard
Nixon's coup de grace was an 18-minute gap on a tape recording of Oval Office
deliberations. That would follow the pattern set in the joint 9/11 intelligence
hearings when Staff Director Eleanor Hill objected to the fact that - even
though some of it was already a matter of public record and previously
documented in FTW's 9/11 reporting - the CIA had classified details as to
what information about impending attacks the President had received before the
attacks.
Just as with Watergate, every time the
administration wiggles now, it will only be drawing the noose tighter. And this
is what the "Board of Directors" intends. The Bush administration will
be controlled as it is being eased out. Business and finance cannot afford any
more militarism and this is all that the Neocons know.
The biggest challenge for those who run the
country---who select, remove and replace presidents---will be to oust the Bush
administration and yet keep the darkest secrets of 9/11 from being publicly
acknowledged.
It will be my biggest challenge to see to
it that they fail.
Coming in Part II -
What is the real state of the world and why is it necessary for the Board to
remove the Neocons? Why doesn't the administration just plant the WMD evidence
to get off the hook? At this critical juncture, which of the critical issues
facing
America
have the Democratic challengers really addressed and are there warning
signs of infiltration and manipulation? Have any suspicious characters turned up
in any of the campaigns?