riverrun

So, Guest User.

The Native American Chumash, now largely disappeared from California, referred to the Los Angeles basin as "the land of smokes and shadows."

And so it remains.

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We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

—Jimmy Carter






And counting.

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A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

—Oscar Wilde

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A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.

—William Ralph Inge

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Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

—George Washington

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Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

—Benito Mussolini

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The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

—H. L. Mencken

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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction
is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

—Mahatma Gandhi

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George W. Bush: Keeping America Afraid.

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"Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign," (Scott McClellan) writes, "a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin. Governing has become an appendage of politics rather than the other way around, with the electoral victory and the control of power as the sole measures of success."

Mr. McClellan's book landed like a bombshell on Washington not because of any startling revelations or staggering new insights, but because he was an insider who wrote unflatteringly about his boss.

Forget that this is supposed to be a government of, by and for the people, and that the truth is supposed to matter. Mr. McClellan is being denounced as a traitor by those who readily accept the culture of deception, and who believe that a government official's primary loyalty is not to the people, but to power itself -- in this case, to the president.

It's exactly that kind of thinking that begets unnecessary wars.

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At the top of the list of no-brainers in Washington should be Senator Jim Webb's proposed expansion of education benefits for the men and women who have served in the armed forces since Sept. 11, 2001.

It's awfully hard to make the case that these young people who have sacrificed so much don't deserve a shot at a better future once their wartime service has ended.

Senator Webb, a Virginia Democrat, has been the guiding force behind this legislation, which has been dubbed the new G.I. bill. The measure is decidedly bipartisan. Mr. Webb's principal co-sponsors include Republican Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Warner of Virginia, and Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey.

(All four senators are veterans of wartime service -- Senators Webb and Hagel in Vietnam, Warner in World War II and Korea and Lautenberg in World War II.)

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are on board, as are Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House.

Who wouldn't support an effort to pay for college for G.I.'s who have willingly suited up and put their lives on the line, who in many cases have served multiple tours in combat zones and in some cases have been wounded?

We did it for those who served in World War II. Why not now?

Well, you might be surprised at who is not supporting this effort. The Bush administration opposes it, and so does Senator John McCain.

Reinvigorating the G.I. bill is one of the best things this nation could do. The original G.I. Bill of Rights, signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, paid the full load of a returning veteran's education at a college or technical school and provided a monthly stipend. It was an investment that paid astounding dividends. Millions of veterans benefited, and they helped transform the nation. College would no longer be the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and those who crowned themselves the intellectual elite.

Politicians tend to talk very, very big about supporting our men and women in uniform. But time and again -- whether it's about providing armor for their safety or an education for their future -- we find that talk to be very, very cheap.

—Bob Herbert, "Doing the Troops Wrong," The New York Times, May 6, 2008

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The Democrats Play Trivial Pursuit

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama tells an amusing story about his first tour through downstate Illinois, when he had the audacity to order Dijon mustard on his cheeseburger at a TGI Friday's. His political aide hastily informed the waitress that Obama didn't want Dijon at all, and thrust a yellow bottle of ordinary-American heartland-values mustard at him instead. The perplexed waitress informed Obama that she had Dijon if he wanted. He smiled and said thanks. "As the waitress walked away, I leaned over and whispered that I didn't think there were any photographers around," Obama recalled.

—Michael Grunwald, The Democrats Play Trivial Pursuit, Time, April 17, 2008, as referenced in War in Context, an extremely informative site.

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It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party's nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.

By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.

As a veteran of red telephone ads and "where's the beef" cleverness, I am keenly aware that sharp elbows get thrown by those trailing in the fourth quarter (and sometimes even earlier). "Politics ain't beanbag," is the old slogan. But that does not mean that it must also be rule-or-ruin, me-first-and-only-me, my way or the highway. That is not politics. That is raw, unrestrained ambition for power that cannot accept the will of the voters.

Senator Obama is right to say the issue is judgment not years in Washington. If Mrs. Clinton loses the nomination, her failure will be traced to the date she voted to empower George W. Bush to invade Iraq. That is not the kind of judgment, or wisdom, required by the leader answering the phone in the night. For her now to claim that Senator Obama is not qualified to answer the crisis phone is the height of irony if not chutzpah, and calls into question whether her primary loyalty is to the Democratic party and the nation or to her own ambition.

—Gary Hart, The Huffington Post, March 7, 2008

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It is impossible to keep up with all the Bush regime's lies. There are simply too many. Among the recent crop, one of the biggest is that the "surge" is working.

Launched last year, the "surge" was the extra 20,000-30,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq. These few extra troops, Americans were told, would finally supply the necessary forces to pacify Iraq.

This claim never made any sense. The extra troops didn't raise the total number of U.S. soldiers to more than one-third the number every expert has said is necessary in order to successfully occupy Iraq.

The real purpose of the "surge" was to hide another deception. The Bush regime is paying Sunni insurgents $800,000 a day not to attack U.S. forces. That's right, 80,000 members of an "Awakening group," the "Sons of Iraq," a newly formed "U.S.-allied security force" consisting of Sunni insurgents, are being paid $10 a day each not to attack U.S. troops. Allegedly, the Sons of Iraq are now at work fighting al-Qaeda.

This is a much cheaper way to fight a war. We can only wonder why Bush didn't figure it out sooner.

—Paul Craig Roberts, Paying Insurgents Not to Fight, Antwar.com, February 19, 2008.

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There is a surge of excitement running through Democratic voters and public officials in this election cycle that has seldom been seen in recent decades.

This is the stuff of which overconfidence is made.

Anyone who thinks the Democrats are a lock to win in November has somehow forgotten about Karl Rove, the right-wing radio network, the hanging chads of 2000, the Swift boat debacle, the intimidation of black voters in Florida, the long lines of Democratic voters standing forlornly in the rain in Ohio, and on and on.

Those who may think that a woman named Clinton or a black man named Obama will have an easy time winning the White House this year should switch to something less disorienting than whatever it is they're smoking.

—Bob Herbert, The New York Times, February 2, 2008

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The Society of Illustrators in collaboration with The Nation present:

ARTISTS AGAINST THE WAR

This show is the expression of over 60 of the top graphic artists and illustrators working in the United States and abroad whose anguish has compelled them to produce works that challenge the self-destructive ignorance, indifference, incompetence and corruption that is the result of US Middle East foreign policy. These works of art will give a voice to those whose views are not represented by the mainstream media. (This forum will be used) as a way to support those most directly affected by the harsh consequences of military combat--the brave men and women who serve their country as well as their family members who must live with the affects of war long after the parades are over.

January 3-January 26, 2008

See the online show here...

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"This little boy and girl, their father was shot by the Americans. Who will take care of this family? Who will watch over these children? Who will feed them now? Who? Why did they kill my brother? What is the reason? Nobody told me. He was a truck driver. What is his crime? Why did they shoot him? They shot him with 150 bullets! Did they kill him just because they wanted to shoot a man? That's it? This is the reason? Why didn't anyone talk to me and tell me why they have killed my brother? Is killing people a normal thing now, happening every day? This is our future? This is the future that the United States promised Iraq?"

My life as an independent reporter in his country was just beginning and his questions felt like so many blows to the gut. Of course, I was the only American reporter there to hear him and I was then writing for an email audience of under 200. This is what it means, in Pentagon terms, to dominate not only the battlefield, but the media landscape in which that battlefield is reported. And that sort of domination was, it turned out, very much on Pentagon minds in that period.

Within days of the incident, for instance, the New York Times published an article about how the Pentagon had awarded a contract to SAIC, a private company, which was to investigate ways the Department of Defense could use propaganda for more "effective strategic influence" in the "war on terror." The Pentagon referred to this potential propaganda blitz (which would eventually come back to haunt Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) as a "tactical perception management campaign." The title of the document SAIC produced was "Winning the War of Ideas."

On December 2, 2005, the U.S. military would admit that the Lincoln Group, which described itself as "a strategic communications & pubic relations firm providing insight & influence in challenging & hostile environments," had been hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-American good-news articles in the new Iraqi "free" press that the Bush administration was just then touting. This was exposed during a briefing with Senator John Warner of Virginia, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The admission would not, as one might have expected, prove a step towards deterrence. Not only did the Lincoln Group get further contracts, but a wide range of similar tactics continue to be employed by the military in Iraq today with even greater impunity. In Iraq, the propaganda and misinformation have, in fact, been continual and on a massive scale. And, of course, the regular announcements of Iraqi "insurgent" or "criminal" deaths in American operations have never stopped, nor have the announcements of "investigations," when those claims are seriously challenged on the ground - investigations which, except in a few cases, are never heard of again. All this is a reminder of something George W. Bush once said: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

Whether it was "incidents" involving helicopter strikes in which those on the ground who died were assumed to be enemy and evil, or the wholesale destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004, or the massacre at Haditha, or a slaughtered wedding party in the western desert of Iraq that was also caught on video tape (Marine Major General James Mattis: "How many people go to the middle of the desert.... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive."), or killings at U.S. checkpoints; or even the initial invasion of Iraq itself, we find the same propaganda techniques deployed: Demonize an "enemy"; report only "fighters" being killed; stick to the story despite evidence to the contrary; if under pressure, launch an investigation; if still under pressure, bring only low-level troops up on charges; convict a few of them; sentence them lightly; repeat drill.

At the time of this writing, the group Just Foreign Policy has offered an estimate of Iraqis killed since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. Their number: 1,118,846. Consider that possibility in the context of the latest round of news from Iraq about lessening violence.

The estimate is based on figures from a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, and published in October 2006 in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, which found 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation. The report methodology has been called "robust" and "close to best practice" by Sir Roy Anderson, the chief scientific advisor to Britain's Ministry of Defense. Since that time, in addition to Just Foreign Policy, the British research polling agency Opinion Research Business has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq. Based on this, veteran Australian born journalist John Pilger wrote recently, "The scale of death caused by the British and U.S. governments may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century."

It is an indication of the success of an effective Pentagon "tactical perception management campaign," of the way the Bush administration has continued to "catapult propaganda," and of the dehumanization of Iraqis that has gone with it, that the possibility of the number of dead Iraqis being in this range has largely been dismissed (or remained generally undealt with) in the mainstream media in the United States. Add to that the refusal of the U.S. military to bring justice to those charged with some of these heinous crimes, the lack of accountability, and an establishment media which has regularly camouflaged the true nature of the occupation, and we have the perfect setting for a continuance of industrial-scale slaughter in Iraq, even while the news highlights the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and their adventures in various rehab clinics.

In what could reasonably serve as a summary of the American occupation of Iraq, the eighteenth century philosopher Voltaire wrote, "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

—Dahr Jamail, How to Control the Story, Pentagon Style, TomDispatch.com, November 26, 2007.

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of the just-published "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq" (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey over the last four years. He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com, Inter Press Service, Asia Times, and Foreign Policy in Focus. He has contributed to The Sunday Herald, The Independent, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications. He maintains a website, Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches, with all his writing.

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And so the president, firm in his resolve against "Al Qaeda in Iraq," heads toward another August break in Crawford while Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan remains determined to strike in America. No one can doubt Mr. Bush's triumph in the P.R. war: There are more American troops than ever mired in Iraq, sent there by a fresh round of White House fictions. And the real war? The enemy that did attack us six years ago, sad to say, is likely to persist in its nasty habit of operating in the reality-based world that our president disdains.

—Frank Rich, "Shuffling Off to Crawford, 2007 Edition," The New York Times, August 12, 2007.

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What shall we do? Impeachment hearings are one way to go.... In the meantime, those of us in public television have an obligation to make sure viewers like you stay in the loop. I wish we had carried the congressional debate this week in full - all of it - in prime time. When we broadcast teach-ins on the Vietnam war, and the Watergate hearings during the trial of Richard Nixon, it was a real public service - the reason PBS was created. We should keep Iraq in prime time every week - the fighting and dying, the suffering, the debate, the politics - the extraordinary costs. It's months until September. This war is killing us now, body and soul.

—Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, July 13, 2007.

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As for Libby, I have no strong opinion on whether his sentence of thirty months in prison was, as President Bush judged in commuting it, excessive. As Bush undoubtedly knows in more detail than we do, Libby was only carrying out, routinely, the wishes and orders-manifestly illegal as they were-of his bosses. If this were confirmed by the Congressional investigation that should be forthcoming on the deceptions and violations of law and the Constitution that led us into war (and may do so again in Iran), it should lead to impeachment and then to criminal prosecution of Richard Cheney and/or George Bush. But a damper on such an effort is the now-certainty that conviction of either Cheney or his superior would be nullified by presidential pardon. It may not be true, as Richard Nixon declared, that "If the president does it, it is not illegal." But whatever "it" is, if done or ordered by the president or vice president, it appears to be unpunishable.

—Daniel Ellsberg, When the Crimes of the White House are Unpunishable, Counterpunch, July 6, 2007

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No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.
—Edward R. Murrow

And so it goes. The 4th of July is here with its parades and "what America means to me" essays, and picnics and fireworks, and all those pretty speeches about freedom and democracy and the true meaning of Independence Day. But it is all a facade. A lie.

Modern America now spies on its citizens, conducts warrantless wiretaps, suspends habeas corpus, creates "free speech zones" to corral protestors out of sight of sensitive royal eyes, and politicizes the very justice system meant to protect people's rights by turning it into a fraternity of God-fearing Republican conservatism. Neocon America rewards hate speech with celebrity, reviles the very immigration that built this country, and sells out to the highest lobbyist while poisoning its people. Preemptive war trumps truth, and death is glorified by those who never have to sacrifice an ounce of flesh. America has become the personal ATM machine of Bush and the GOP while their corporate cronies line their pockets with the lives of our loved ones.

Washington is no longer that "shining city on the hill," but rather a dismal swamp cloud of shadows that slink about in swirls of deception. The people's house is a piceous cavern of razor black secrets that shred the Constitution with every breath. And those charged with defending the Constitution - defending the Bill of Rights - scurry around in frantic search for the cheese of compromise and campaign contributions.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Americans have become orphans of the great silence.

Democrat and Republican alike have forsaken representation of the people and the people's will. The latest polls show that 77 percent of Americans want the troops home from Iraq. And still the politicians argue for more time, maybe more money, maybe there is a way to support the troops without confronting the GOP machine. Congressional approval is at the same depressing nadir as that of George Bush. The people voted for change and got nothing but wimpy words and bluster and more political petulance - and more death and destruction.

America needs leadership, not Congressional co-conspirators or senatorial somnambulists. We need inspiration, not desperation. Edward R. Murrow said: "We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply."

I'm not a smart guy, nor educated in the fine political arts, but here's the deal: it's time to wake up and step up, dear Democrats. Plan all you want to take Congressional seats in the '08 elections - but be prepared to pay the price for inaction today. Nothing is off the table. Nothing. Ever.

Push the subpoenas to this White House. Don't fold. Don't whine. Don't run. And while you push the subpoenas to find the truth, fashion your spending bill that America supports, the one with the timetable for bringing our loved ones home. And then push that the day after you push the subpoenas. And when Bush vetoes the spending bill, shout it from the nearest blog and rooftop, that George Bush just vetoed America. Vetoed the will of the American people. And push for another vote.

And then generate the bill to bring back the Draft. That's right, the Draft. If Bush's war is so damned patriotic that he keeps recycling the troops over and over - then it is the patriotic duty of every American son and daughter to be drafted and serve. And when Bush vetoes that, remind America that the war is not all that patriotic, and certainly not for everyone - just those that Bush picks to die in the sandbox of incompetence and violence that is Iraq.

And then you start impeachment procedures against Bush and Cheney and Rove. You push the hearings that must be shown to all the American people - the voters - the ones who live and die at the hands of these ruthless, greedy thugs and power-hungry politicians.

And when you are called un-American and unpatriotic, point your finger at Bush and Cheney and remind everyone of Ronald Reagan, who said: "Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty." And that, my Democratic friends, is all the bipartisanship this country needs. The words of Dr. King should be your comfort. "When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative."

It is the 4th of July. Celebrate Independence Day by repeating the words of George Bush when he addressed the UN Assembly on September 21, 2004. "The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way."

Any other choice and we become a story that begins, "Once upon America there used to be democracy and freedom."

—John Cory, Once Upon America, truthout, July 4, 2007.

John Cory is a Vietnam veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V device.
This is him walking the walk.

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Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam's nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president's own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.

Last week The Washington Post ran a first-rate investigative series on the entire Cheney vice presidency. Readers posting comments were largely enthusiastic, but a few griped. "Six and a half years too late," said one. "Four years late and billions of dollars short," said another. Such complaints reflect the bitter legacy of much of the Washington press's failure to penetrate the hyping of prewar intelligence and, later, the import of the Fitzgerald investigation.

We're still playing catch-up. In a week in which the C.I.A. belatedly released severely censored secrets about agency scandals dating back a half-century, you have to wonder what else was done behind the shield of an executive order signed just after the Ides of March four years ago. Another half-century could pass before Americans learn the full story of the secrets buried by Mr. Cheney and his boss to cover up their deceitful path to war.

—Frank Rich, "When the Vice President Does It, That Means It's Not Illegal," The New York Times, July 1, 2007

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Here's the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a "movement" that "has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us," he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of "Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda" wants to "bring down the West," he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn't in Iraq, will "follow us home" if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren't, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people's children to graves at Arlington.

—Paul Krugman, "Trust and Betrayal" The New York Times, May 28, 2007

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Paul Wolfowitz's overdue and well-deserved demise as President of the World Bank means yet another morally-flawed appointee of President George W. Bush bites the dust.

Another one down. Too many more still to go.

No administration in recent history has produced such an overwhelming number of corrupt, unethical, incompetent and/or downright criminal appointees. Bush's long, and growing, list of merry men and women who have resigned in disgrace, arrested for criminal conduct or removed from office stands as monumental evidence of a flawed and corrupt Presidential administration.

Wolfowitz, the architect of Bush's failed Iraq war and the man who helped build a sand castle of lies to sell the war to a blindly obedient Congress and asleep-at-the-wheel media, should have been fired as soon as evidence surfaced that he had used his position to advance the career, and income, of a World Bank employee he was screwing at home.

Bush, as he always does, stood by his corrupt buddy until the pressure overwhelmed him. The President continues to stand by another fatally-flawed appointee - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales - as more and more evidence of incompetence, corruption, criminal activity and baseline stupidity emerge.

That's the problem with Bush. He's a flawed, ethically-lapsed man who surrounds himself with corrupt men and women who share his absence of morality and lust for power. It may be someone with absolutely no qualifications for a job (like former and failed FEMA director Michael Brown), a criminal who bilks a store with a phony refund scheme (like former domestic policy advisor Claude Allen) or power-mad despots like Dick Cheney who trample the Constitution into the dirt.

There's no doubt that Gonzales broke the law by politicizing the Justice Department and illegally firing U.S. Attorneys. There's no doubt that he repeatedly lied to Congress. Yet Bush, who promised "the most ethical administration in history," stands by his sleazy prosecutor with Godfather-style protection.

What else should we expect from Bush, who openly lies to the American people, Congress and our allies? The man is, without question, the most corrupt occupant of the White House in decades - a serial liar, lawbreaker and destroyer of the Constitution. If there was any real justice in the world, the man would be taken from the White House in shackles, flown to Gitmo, and given the same "aggressive interrogation" tactics deployed on other Americans imprisoned in that illegal hellhole.

—Doug Thompson, Another One Down, Too Many More to Go, Capitol Hill Blue, May 18, 2007.

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You want straight talk? "I was wrong." That's what John Edwards said about his vote to authorize the president to go to war in Iraq. "The world desperately needs moral leadership from America," he said, as he acknowledged his contribution to the debacle, "and the foundation for moral leadership is telling the truth."

The war goes on, and fate has dealt the Edwards family another devastating blow. The rest of us can help invest the absurdity of their tragedy with meaning by paying closer attention to the issues that are important to them. Whether one ends up agreeing with them or not, it's a way of opening the door to a more thoughtful, rational way of selecting our presidents.

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While serving as President Bush's White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales advised Bush that the president's wartime powers permitted Bush to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and to use the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on U.S. citizens without obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by law. Under an order signed by Bush in 2002, NSA illegally spied on Americans without warrants.

By spying on Americans without obtaining warrants, Bush committed felonies under FISA. Moreover, there is strong, indeed overwhelming, evidence that justice was obstructed when Bush and Gonzales blocked a 2006 Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales acted properly as attorney general in approving and overseeing the Bush administration's program of spying on U.S. citizens. Also at issue is whether Gonzales acted properly in advising Bush to kill an investigation of Gonzales' professional actions with regard to the NSA spy program.

We are faced with the almost certain fact that the two highest law enforcement officials of the United States are criminals.

A criminal political administration has no choice but to keep everyone on a short leash in order to keep its illegal acts under wraps. Americans have never experienced an administration so replete with crimes as the Bush regime.

This criminal regime must now be brought to an end. Impeachments of Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales, followed by felony indictments and trials, are imperative if the rule of law in the United States is to be preserved.

—Paul Craig Roberts, Crimeblotter: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, ANTIWAR.COM, March 18, 2007

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The World Agrees: Stop Him

Stop him before he kills again. That is the judgment of the American people, and indeed of the entire world, as to the performance of our president, and no State of the Union address can erase that dismal verdict.

President Bush has accomplished what Osama bin Laden only dreamed of by disgracing the model of American democracy in the eyes of the world. According to an exhaustive BBC poll, nearly three-quarters of those polled in 25 countries oppose the Bush policy on Iraq, and more than two-thirds believe the U.S. presence in the Middle East destabilizes the region.

In other words, the almost universal support the United States enjoyed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been completely squandered, as a majority of the world's people now believe that our role in the entire world is negative.

"The thing that comes up repeatedly is not just anger about Iraq," said Steven Kull, the director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which helped conduct the global poll. "The common theme is hypocrisy. The reaction tends to be: `You were a champion of a certain set of rules. Now you are breaking your own rules, so you are being hypocritical.' "

But it is not just our failure in that all-important region that disgraces us. Those around the world who still believe we play a positive global role has dropped to a miserable 29 percent, strikingly similar to Bush's overall performance numbers at home, according to the most recent CBS poll. So it's true: Bush is "a uniter, not a divider"--uniting people across the world in their opposition to his policies.

Americans understand in their gut that the long-term consequences of disillusionment with democracy, here and abroad, would be disastrous. In the same way Congress repudiated an out-of-control president three decades ago, the House and Senate must show the world today that our celebrated system of checks and balances is not just a fanciful mirage.

Spreading the ideal of democracy throughout the world remains a compelling obligation of those who enjoy freedom, making this an excellent occasion to demonstrate that we still possess a system capable of holding a deceitful and egomaniacal leader accountable.

—Robert Scheer, truthdig.com, January 24, 2007

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But perhaps it's no more complicated than this: In a world in which self-determination and nationalism are bedrock values, once you've tried to occupy a country, whether under the banner of anti-Communism or anti-Islamo-fascism, whether claiming to be in support of the "Free World" or "freedom" itself, it may no longer matter which counterinsurgency tactics you use or strategies you adopt, or whether you count bodies or not. Once you've taken such a path -- as long as you don't make the decision to withdraw -- you may always find yourself in that limited land of options that we like to call "Vietnam."

—Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, January 21, 2007.

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It is over. What we need to face now are the consequence of the folly of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice in launching this unnecessary and unprovoked war, the folly of the neocon snake oil salesmen who bamboozled the media into believing in this insane crusade to bring democracy to Baghdad in the belly of Bradley fighting vehicles and the folly of the Democratic establishment in handing Bush a blank check for war out of political fear of being called unpatriotic.

—Patrick J. Buchanan, See the Superpower Run, ANTIWAR.com, January 19, 2007.

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The Bush administration cannot just be dismissed as a political aberration. After all Bush got re-elected! This is not simply an administration that got highjacked by a cabal of neoconservatives with a twisted vision of the world. George Bush's superficiality and swagger, his parochiality and indifference to the well-being of others, and above all his unwillingness to question the basis of American grandiosity -- these are as much the failings of American culture as they are those of the president.

—Paul Woodward, Editor, The War in Context, a most informative website, worthy of your time.

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Regarding the lynching of Saddam Hussein:

The harsh fact is that the Shi'ite dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki, in its contemptible treatment of a man about to die, laid bare the dark truth of Bush's war. This is what revenge looks like, and revenge (not weapons of mass destruction, not democracy) drove the initial US attack on Saddam Hussein every bit as much as it snuffed out his life at the end. The hooded executioners took their cue from George W. Bush.

And why should they not have? Let's remember who this man is. As governor of Texas, he presided over the executions of 152 people, including the first woman put to death in Texas in a century. Her name was Karla Faye Tucker. Bush's response to the world-wide plea raised in her behalf was an astounding display of cruelty, a mocking imitation of the woman begging not to be killed.

Bush rejected appeals for clemency in every death penalty case that came before him. The Texas death chamber, with its lethal injection gurney, is a place of decorum. And savagery. That executions defined the main public distinction that Bush brought to the US presidency sums up the national disgrace, while suggesting also how little surprise there should be that America is presided over now by an executioner-in-chief.

Capital punishment is to individuals what aggressive war is to nations. The 20th century, for all its brutality (or because of it), marked the watershed era when world opinion shifted against both. Once, princes exercised life-and-death power over subjects with unchallenged authority. Once, the only check on a state's freedom to attack another state was its power to do so.

These two absolutes of realpolitik have changed. From the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 to principles laid down at the Nuremberg tribunals to the United Nations itself, wars of aggression stand condemned. The force of state violence is to be exercised only in self-defense or in defense of a victim people, in circumstances defined by international agreement. Similarly, nation after nation has abolished the death penalty, understanding the absurdity of defending human life by destroying human life. If killing can ever be justified, individually or communally, it is only as an absolute last resort. In sum, an international moral consensus has taken shape against unnecessary violence, whether targeting a criminal or a rogue state.

George W. Bush is the impresario of unnecessary violence. America has followed him into the death chamber of this war, and now he wants us to believe that the way out is through more death.

—James Carroll, The Lynching of Iraq, The Boston Globe, January 8, 2007.

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Someone has to say it: The hanging of Saddam Hussein was an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of President Bush's claim it was "an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy."

Instead, the rushed, illegal and unruly execution of a former U.S. ally after his conviction in a kangaroo court blurred the line between terrorist and terrorized as effectively as Saddam's own evil propaganda ever did.

Fittingly, U.S. officials appeared in this spectacle as hapless Keystone Kops, morally implicated by their tepid support of a lynch mob. It perfectly mirrors decades of U.S. meddling in the history of Iraq, beginning with U.S. support for Saddam's Baath Party when it overthrew Iraqi nationalist Abdul Karim Qassem because we feared he was tilting ever so slightly to the Soviets. In fact, Saddam, like Osama bin Laden and the other Islamist fanatics our CIA recruited and helped to wage holy war against the Soviets, was a monster at least partially of our creation.

Those deeply unsavory connections between Saddam and the United States would have been exposed in any honest trial. Presumably, this is the real reason why the Bush administration so assiduously undermined any equitable judicial accounting of Saddam's criminality, right through his shamefully and illegally rushed execution.

—Robert Scheer, A Monster of Our Creation, January 2, 2007.

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3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.

Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.

Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?

—Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman who's been blogging from the center of the catastrophe for too many years now.

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It is, however, impossible to argue that the United States is better off. Although initiated to protect the United States from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a rogue state, the Iraq War has left the United States more vulnerable to potential Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons. And because of the administration's planning failures, looters had free access to a wide range of dangerous materials from Iraq's defunct nuclear and biological weapons programs. Some of these materials may have ended up in Iran or in the hands of terrorists, leaving the U.S. more at risk from Iraqi WMD-related materials than it was before the war.

By enabling clerical Iran to achieve its historic ambitions in the Shiite Arab world, the war is a major strategic setback for the United States in the Middle East. The only 'democratic fallout' from the Iraq War has been the elections of hard-line extremists in Palestine and Iran. American prestige in the Arab world is at an all-time low with polls in some Arab countries showing Osama bin Laden viewed more favorably than President Bush. The war has damaged U.S. relations with its closest allies in Europe. No American president in living memory is as poorly regarded in Europe as George W. Bush.

The Iraq War has failed to serve a single major U.S. foreign policy objective. It has not made the United States safer; it has not advanced the war on terror; it has not made Iraq a stable state; it has not spread democracy to the Middle East; and it has not enhanced U.S. access to oil. It has been costly.

—Peter Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, Simon & Schuster, 2006

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The weakening of George W. Bush, in short, has opened the door for an alumnus of the Iran/Contra scandal, Robert Gates, to gain control of the Pentagon - his nomination, as yet, has met with little Congressional resistance. This process was managed by James Baker, whose Carlyle Group made billions off the Iraq occupation and whose fealty to the American people has all too often taken a back seat to the needs and desires of the royal family of Saudi Arabia. These two, along with Hamilton, have been instrumental in crafting, by way of the Iraq Survey Group, what by all accounts will soon be America's foreign policy lynchpin in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.

Behind it all is George H.W. Bush, former employee of Carlyle, who has somehow managed to refashion his reputation into that of a grandfatherly, level-headed, steady hand, a foreign policy "realist" whose mere presence will soothe and calm the troubled waters we sail in. Unfortunately, his "realism" is a significant reason the United States finds itself in its current mess - until the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was a boon confederate of both the Reagan and Bush administrations in their fight against Iran - and the team of experts he has brought with him have done more to undermine the national security of the country than any other three people one could name.

The winner in all this, of course, is the Carlyle Group. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

—William Rivers Pitt, November 14, 2006, The Carlyle White House, truthout.org.

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Despite the election, more Americans and Iraqis are destined to die in the administration's foolish, unnecessary war. But Nov. 7 is the beginning of the end for the warmongers. The War Party has run aground. Now it's critical to ensure that the end comes sooner rather than later, and that never again does a small cabal of ideological extremists grab control of America's national security apparatus to inaugurate a disastrous war of choice.

—Doug Bandow, Foreign Follies: The Wreck of the War Party, antiwar.com, November 10, 2006.

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The Current Occupant, who is two years and three months away from retirement, was quoted last week as saying, "They can say what they want about me, but at least I know who I am, and I know who my friends are."

A pathetic admission of defeat for one who has owned all three branches of government for the past six years - did he seek power so that he could attain self-knowledge? If so, the price is too high. The beloved country endures a government that merges blithering corruption with murderous incompetence.

Congress, which once spent an entire year investigating a married man's attempt to cover up an illicit act of oral sex, has shown no curiosity whatsoever about a war that the administration elected to wage that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands and led our own people to commit war crimes and squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and degenerated into civil war.

The contrast is deafening. Republicans haven't tolerated much dissent in their ranks, the voice of conscience has not been welcome, and now the herd finds itself on the wrong side of the river. It's discouraging seeing so many people go so wrong all at once. It makes you question the idea that each of us has unlimited potential for good.

Washington is a city where a bill to relax air-pollution standards would be called the Clean Air Act and a bill to protect government officials from war-crimes prosecution would be called the Military Commissions Act, and so a man's statement that he knows who he is and who his friends are needs to be taken as meaning the opposite, a cry for help.

You come to office as a uniter and you wind up doing the opposite. You stand for American values and you wind up defending torture and waste of resources. Knowing who you are is a minimal adult requirement, and you don't get there by being an object of attention. Retirement is recommended.

The sooner the better.

Garrison Keillor, The Salt Lake City Tribune, November 6, 2006.

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At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush's character. To put it bluntly, he's an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood -- and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself "pleased with the progress we're making" in Iraq.

In other words, he's the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous.

—Paul Krugman, November 6, 2006, The New York Times.

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As he rationalizes the horrendous death toll in Iraq - estimated at about 655,000 dead by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health - Bush doesn't see a disaster of historic proportions. In his world, the bloodshed is simply another reaffirmation of his decision to invade.

"I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence," Bush said. "I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to - that there's a level of violence that they tolerate."

It's difficult to envision any rational person making such a statement. If anything, the level of killing in Iraq is a combination of sectarian violence and the determination of many Iraqis to drive out what they see as the American invaders. But in Bush world, such realities never intrude.

Still, perhaps, the greatest danger from Bush's delusions is that they will come to supplant any American notion of reality and spell the doom of the United States as a democratic Republic based on an informed electorate.

—Robert Parry, Consortium News via t r u t h o u t, October 12, 2006.

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KHALDIYA, Oct 12 (IPS) - The bomb went off just outside the school as the IPS correspondent stood speaking to children and teachers within.*

The headmaster smiled. "You will hear many of these every day if you stay here another day or two," he said. "The resistance will not stop until the last American leaves."

The children too took no notice of the blast, which shook the doors and windows of the half-destroyed school in this town near Fallujah, 70km west of Baghdad.

The children are growing up in occupied Iraq -- and they are resisting it.

"Americans are bad," said 11-year-old Mustafa. "They killed my family." The family were killed in Operation Phantom Fury of November 2004 as they tried to flee the city, teachers said. That operation killed thousands and destroyed much of Fallujah and towns around it.

"God will send all Americans to hellfire," cried another child in the classroom. Attempts to suggest that not everyone they thought American was bad proved fruitless.

"How can we teach them forgiveness when they see Americans killing their family members every day," the teacher in the classroom who gave her name as Shyamaa told IPS. "Words cannot cover the stream of blood and these signs of destruction, and words cannot hide the daily raids they see."

For the headmaster, the idea of a clash of civilisations is not just an idea.

"The gap between civilisations is widening thanks to the U.S. administration's crimes against humanity all over the world," he said. "They seem determined to tear the world apart, and their footprints cannot be removed for the coming generations."

Get the Facts, unspun.

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—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, September 30, 2006, in his review of Bob Woodward's latest book on the tragedy of the Bush Administration, State of Denial, Bush at War, Part III.

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Addressing the use of torture Wednesday, President George W. Bush played to the baser instincts of Americans as he strained to turn his violation of national and international law into Exhibit A on how "tough" he is on terrorists. His tour de force brought to mind the charge the Athenians leveled at Socrates - making the worse case appear the better. Bush's remarks made it abundantly clear, though, that he is not about to take the hemlock.

As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches and with the midterm elections just two months away, the president's speechwriters succeeded in making a silk purse out of the sow's ear of torture. And the artful offensive will succeed if - but only if - the mainstream media is as cowed, and the American people as dumb, as the president apparently thinks we are. Arguably a war criminal under international law and a capital-crime felon under US criminal law, Bush is in even more serious legal jeopardy than when he deserted in time of war (Vietnam). And this time, his father's friends will not be able to fix it.

—Ray McGovern, truthout, September 9, 2006

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Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush have insulted the people of this nation. They have sullied our honor, lied to us and given nearly 2,700 American soldiers and countless thousands of civilians over to death. They have used our fears for their own political gain, deliberately and with intent. They are the shame of a generation, and their falsehoods will echo long down the corridors of history.

—William Rivers Pitt, truthout, September 1, 2006.

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