archived: 23 - 29 Oct, 2005 Back Next
UPDATED: October 27, 2005
MYTHS & FACTS ABOUT
FITZGERALD INVESTIGATION
[Authored by
Allen L. Roland*]
“The unmasking of Valerie Plame was not an odd occurrence. It was part of a pattern of deliberate manipulation and disinformation. At the end of the day, American men and women have died because of this lie. It is up to the American people to hold the Bush administration accountable for these actions:” -- Larry Johnson/ former Intelligence analyst.
What goes around, comes around and the flagrant abuse of power that has been an ongoing trademark of the Cheney/Bush administration is now coming around to haunt them, if not indict them.
Already Cheney/Bush apologists like Bill Kristol and Fox News are screaming conspiracy and the new code word "criminalizing conservatives," but it won't fly in light of the fact that Fitzgerald was hand-selected by the Bush administration to lead the investigation.
At times like this I turn to the Center for American Progress to separate the myths from the facts and they are more than up to the task.
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*Allen L. Roland served five years as a Navy fighter pilot and ten years as a stockbroker. He has earned a masters degree in psychology and now works as a therapist with an active private counseling practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Roland has a wonderful website, Allen L. Roland's Radio Weblog. He also publishes a newsletter that is TPJ recommended. You may subscribe here: Newsletter
The Center for American Progress article that Roland references may be found here: MYTHS & FACTS ABOUT FITZGERALD INVESTIGATION
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UPDATED: October 25, 2005
8 TRILLION AND COUNTING
The Republican Party has reached another milestone – pushing the national deficit to 8 Trillion Dollars for the first time in American history. That amount is $27,000 for every American.
Republicans respond in typical fashion – calling for cuts in health care spending while giving tax cuts to the wealthy. The Republican plan:
Sources in the House of Representatives said it likely would be mid-week before Republican leaders know whether they have enough support for spending reductions, including cuts in health programs for the elderly and poor, that go beyond the $35 billion sketched out last spring.
Congress is also debating a Republican-backed plan for more tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy. – Washington Post
The Republican plan will actually drive deficits higher:
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget [advises that] Congress should put off passing $106 billion in tax cuts over five years while maintaining efforts to further cut federal spending.
The group, which boasts former budget officials from Republican and Democratic ranks, complained that the Republican-passed budget plan "would allow for an increase in the deficit of $167 billion over the next five years." – Washington Post
Of the 8 Trillion Dollar deficit, the Bush administration has amassed 2 Trillion of that amount. Recall that during the Clinton administration, the US was running budget surpluses:
Reducing the level of annual government budget deficits was one of the Clinton Administration’s greatest achievements. It ran four consecutive budget surpluses. In May 2000 Clinton announced the largest pay down on the national debt in US history. The national debt was US$2.4 trillion lower than it was projected to be when he entered office in 1992. He said that the US could “pay off the entire national debt by 2013 for the first time since Andrew Jackson was president”.
But that optimism has now gone. President George W Bush has increased the annual government deficits by both introducing tax cuts and raising defense expenditure. The War on Terrorism and the cost of rebuilding Iraq are adding to the national debt. The US government is now back with record government budget deficits.
We hear a lot about the Third World’s “debt crisis”. But the real crisis is the US’s own national debt. China – the emerging economic super power and an American creditor – may have to instruct the US to stop living on credit and start living responsibly. – Online Opinion
The Republican Party is simply mortgaging America’s future – a fact that Democrats should be telling every American.
Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, continues his assault on the Bush administration. Following his speech last week (see the TPJ article below), Wilkerson has authored an op-ed piece for the LA Times.
Wilkerson adds these new perspectives to Bush’s war in Iraq:
I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.
Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.
The implications of Wilkerson’s statements are indeed profound. He is directly asserting that the “cabal,” led by Cheney and Rumsfeld were operating not only outside of the normal chains of command but also without the full knowledge and authorization of the President. Wilkerson, a man who has spent a career in diplomacy choosing his words carefully, employs the term “dictatorship.” The obvious implication is that Wilkerson believes that Cheney and Rumsfeld had actually hijacked the normal operation and power structures of the Government.
Recall that in his speech last week, Wilkerson resurrected President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex:
God bless Eisenhower – in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex – and don’t you think they aren’t among us today – in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled.
And for the threat that Wilkerson sees from the “cabal” they produced a war in Iraq, a war for which even Wilkerson does not know the reasons:
I can go through all the things we listed, from WMD to human rights to – I can go through it – terrorism, but I really can’t sit here and tell you . . . why we went to war in Iraq.
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FABRICATING WAR
Larry Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell, stunned Americans with his revelations of the decisions leading to war in Iraq:
What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
“Cabal” makes a great headline and is true. The headline, however, belies much more critical messages that Wilkerson conveyed. Consider these stunning excerpts the mainstream media did not cover:
On the other hand, as a practitioner and as a citizen of this great republic, I kind of believe that I have an obligation to say some of these things, and I believe furthermore that the people’s representatives over on the Hill in that other branch of government have truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities in this regard and have let things atrophy to the point that if we don’t do something about it, it’s going to get – it’s going to get even more dangerous than it already is. . . .
How often does America get brilliant leaders? Put them down on paper. I can count them myself on one hand. You can perhaps count them on two hands and make persuasive arguments for the additions. I prefer one hand. . . .
So we need a system of checks and balances and institutional fabric that can withstand anybody – or at least nearly so. (Laughter.) You know, you laugh, but I’m not trying to solicit your laughter. I think it’s a real problem in our democracy. You have to have a system that is so elastic, so resilient, so able to take punches that at one time one branch can supplant another, or one branch can come up and check another. It’s the old business of checks and balances. . . .
And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran. Generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita – and I could go on back – we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it sometimes again. I just use it for a tutoring class for my students down in the District of Columbia. It forced me to read it really closely because we’re doing metaphors and similes and antonyms and synonyms and so forth, and read in there what the founders say in a very different language than we use today. Read in there what they say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do. And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together. . . .
But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world. He was. (Laughter.) Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. (Laughter.) And yet – and yet – and yet, after the secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that’s not making excuses for the State Department; that’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. . . .
In so many ways I wanted to believe for four years that what I was seeing – as an academic now – what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security advisor, and an extremely powerful vice president, and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him secretary of Defense – remember, a vice president who has been secretary of Defense too and obviously has an inclination that way, and also has known the secretary of Defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about – God bless Eisenhower – in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex – and don’t you think they aren’t among us today – in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. . . .
I can go through all the things we listed, from WMD to human rights to – I can go through it – terrorism, but I really can’t sit here and tell you . . . why we went to war in Iraq. And there are so many decisions. Why did we wait three years to talk to the North Koreans? Why did we wait four-plus years to say we at least back the EU-3 approach to Iran? Why did we create the national director of intelligence and add further to the bureaucracy, which was what caused the problem in the first place? . . .
[The Bush administration] made decisions in secret, and now I think it is paying the consequences of having made those decisions in secret. But far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences. You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences, whether it is a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or whether it is the situation in Iraq, which still goes unexplained. You know, if I had the time I could stand up here today I think and make a strategic case for why we are in Iraq and why we have to stay there and we have to get it right. As Winston Churchill said, “America will always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities.” (Laughter.) Well, we need to get busy and exhaust them and do the right thing. . . .
And I’ll finish just by bringing it down screechingly to the ground and tell you that the detainee abuse issue is just such a concrete example of what I’ve just described to you, that 10 years from now or so when it’s really, really put to the acid test, ironed out and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen. I don’t know how many people saw the “Frontline” documentary last night – very well done, I thought, but didn’t get anywhere near the specifics that need to be shown, that need to come out, that need to say to the American people, this is not us, this is not the way we do business in the world. Of course we have criminals, of course we have people who violate the law of war, of course we had My Lai, of course we had problems in the Korean War and in World War II. My father-in-law was involved in the Malmédy massacre and the retaliation of U.S. troops in Belgium. He told me some stories before he died that made my blood curdle about American troops killing Germans.
But these are not -- I won’t say isolated incidents; these are incidents that are understandable and that ultimately, at one time or another, we came to deal with. I don’t think, in our history, we’ve ever had a presidential involvement, a secretarial involvement, a vice-presidential involvement, an attorney general involvement in telling our troops essentially carte blanche is the way you should feel.
So I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we make a radical change in the nature of America. But that’s what we did, and we did it in private. We did it in such privacy that the secretary of State had to open the door into my office one day – we had adjoining offices and he liked to do that, and I never objected – he came through the door and he said, Larry, Larry, get everything, get all the paperwork, get the ICRC reports, get everything; I think this is going to be a real mess. And Will Taft, his lawyer, got the same instruction from a legal point of view. And Will and I worked together for almost a year as the ICRC reports began to build and come in, and Kellenberger even came in and visited with the secretary of State. And we knew that things weren’t the way they should be, and as former soldiers, we knew that you don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it – unless you’ve condoned it. And whether you did it explicitly or not is irrelevant. If you did it at all, indirectly, implicitly, tacitly – you pick the word – you’re in trouble because that slippery slope is truly slippery, and it will take years to reverse the situation, and we’ll probably have to grow a new military. . . .
Wilkerson’s observations are profound and a clear warning to Americans that Bush and the radical Republicans are threatening the principles underlying democracy in the United States. EVERY American should read Wilkerson’s remarks or readers can listen to his presentation by following this link: -- Wilkerson’s presentation.
Last Update: 03/27/2006