On December 8, 2006, George W. Bush became one of several U.S. presidents to face an impeachment action, when Rep. Cynthia McKinney brought a resolution to the House floor¹x¹⁹. Her impeachment resolution cited Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for cooking intelligence to support their policy of war against Iraq, and Bush for NSA domestic warrantless wiretapping. “Some will call this a partisan vendetta, others will say this is an unimportant distraction to the plans of the incoming Congress,” she said². “But this is not about political gamesmanship. This, instead, is about beginning the long road back to regaining the high standards of truth and democracy upon which our great country was founded.” The 109th Congress tabled McKinney’s stab at the direct route, but two other routes to impeachment may be taken in the new 110th Congress. One, described in the House Manual of Rules, comes from a state legislature that passes an impeachment petition, which is then carried to the House floor by a congressman³. Such a petition takes priority over all other business, and the House would at once debate the issue. Four states – Illinois, California, Vermont and Minnesota – have such petitions pending, and New Mexico, where Democrats hold a strong majority in both houses, will reportedly introduce one this week⁴x⁵x⁶x⁷x⁸. In addition to cooking intelligence and warrantless wiretapping, these resolutions all cite torture and imprisonment without charge as impeachment counts. Lastly, there is the conventional route to impeachment from the House Judiciary Committee. The current chairman of the committee, the long-serving John Conyers, sat there in 1974, when he helped vote articles of impeachment of President Nixon to the House floor¹⁰x¹¹. One week after that vote, Nixon resigned¹². In December 2005, Conyers brought forward a bill to form a select committee to investigate and, if warranted, recommend impeachment charges against Bush administration officials¹³. Asked why he did so, when the measure could hardly move forward in a Congress controlled by highly partisan Republicans, he said: “To take away the excuse that we didn’t know. So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, ‘Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government?’, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that ‘somehow it escaped our notice that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law¹⁴.’” Conyers later, in August 2006, issued an up-to-date 350-page report listing and documenting possible impeachable offenses¹⁵. If the Congress moved forward on impeachment, it would have the support of many citizens, some of whom have signed petitions, passed impeachment resolutions in last year’s elections, and had their town and city councils pass impeachment resolutions¹⁶x¹⁷. Just before last year’s national election, a Newsweek poll showed broad support for impeachment. Although Newsweek twisted the story to downplay it, a majority of citizens (51% – 44%) favored impeaching Bush¹⁸.

Scorecard

The table below shows the content of Congressional and state impeachment resolutions introduced, and impeachment resolutions passed as local ballot issues. It does not show the 24 resolutions passed by town and city councils across the nation (in CA, VT, NY, NC, NH, MA & WA). Letter codes show the civil officers to be impeached: B = Bush, C = Cheney, R = Rice, X = any indicated after investigation. Column numbers refer to the High Crimes and Misdemeanors in the following list:

• 1. NSA domestic warrantless wiretapping.
• 2. Cooking intelligence for Iraq war.
• 3. Torture.
• 4. Imprisonment without charge.
• 5. Thwarting Congress’ attempts to get info.
• 6. Retaliating against critics.
• 7. Outing Valerie Plame; leaking classified info to promote policy.
• 8. Intent to go to war without Congress’ approval.
• 9. Kidnappings and rendition for torture.
• 10. Negligent response to Hurricane Katrina.
• 11. Signing statements to exempt self from laws.
• 12. Illegal detention of non-citizens, ignoring court order.
• 13. Use of illegal weapons.
• 14. FBI spying on citizens.
• 15. Forming an illegal parallel legal system.
• 16. Violation of treaties.
• 17. Fake news reports & reporters.
• 18. Exceeding war authority given by Congress.
• 19. Illegally invading Iraq.
• 20. Federalizing the National Guard.

Click HERE to view html table.

Sources

¹ McKinney impeachment resolution – 2006-12-08 – pdf file

² Rep. McKinney’s floor statement on the impeachment of George W. Bush

³ ‘Impeachment: Methods For Your Madness’ – DailyKos.com, 2006-02-04

⁴ Illinois impeachment resolution

⁵ California impeachment resolution – pdf file

⁶ Vermont impeachment resolution

⁷ Minnesota impeachment resolution

⁸ ‘States to the fore!’ – GreenMountainDaily.com Contains New Mexico impeachment resolution

¹⁰ Articles of Impeachment Adopted by the Committee on the Judiciary, July 27, 1974

¹¹ Analysis of the Impeachment Votes of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives

¹² Watergate Chronology

¹³ Conyers resolution for select committee on impeachment – 2005-12-18”

¹⁴ ‘The Case for Impeachment’ by Lewis H. Lapham, Harper’s Magazine, March 2006 issue

¹⁵ Conyers’ Report Newly Updated: ‘Constitution in Crisis’ – 2006-08-01

¹⁶ ImpeachBush.org petition 847,694 signed as of 2007-01-21.

¹⁷ Resolutions Supporting Impeachment – List of Those Passed and Introduced

¹⁸ ‘Are the Faithful Losing Faith?’ – Newsweek, October, 2006

Newsweek should have reported simply that Americans favor impeaching Bush by 51% to 44%, and could have rightly made that the headline – Poll: Most Favor Impeaching Bush. Instead, Newsweek wrote:

Other parts of a potential Democratic agenda receive less support, especially calls to impeach Bush: 47 percent of Democrats say that should be a “top priority,” but only 28 percent of all Americans say it should be, 23 percent say it should be a lower priority and nearly half, 44 percent, say it should not be done.

¹⁹ McKinney’s addendum to impeachment resolution

²⁰ Berkeley, CA impeachment resolution – pdf file

²¹ San Francisco impeachment resolution – pdf file

²² Champaign, IL and Urbana, IL impeachment resolutions

* * *
By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Clayton Hall, 14, was bringing the baseball bat for a game in Minneola, Kansas, on “Black Sunday”, April 14, 1935, when the dust storm hit⁶¹: “I just got in the middle of the road, ... and all of a sudden, I couldn’t see. I thought, well I just got some dust in my eyes. I rubbed my eyes, and it didn’t do any good, I finally got down on the ground, ... put my nose to the ground, seen no more light.” Arthur Leonard was in Dodge City, also crossing a street when the black blizzard came and blocked his view to the other side⁶²: “It was so bad. When it came in, it rolled; it didn’t just dust. It rolled over and over and over and over and over when it came in, and it was coal black …” This one storm blew up twice as much dirt as was dug up to make the Panama Canal⁶³. The day started with a calm and clear sky, and persons in the Dust Bowl, parts of six states in the southern High Plains centered on No Man’s Land, used this break in the weather to unseal and open windows, and to shovel out the dust from prior storms that had gotten by the seals⁶⁴. In the Dust Bowl drifts covered fence posts, scarce rain sometimes fell as mud drops, and dust clogged the lungs of both farm animals and people, killing many⁶⁵. Dust storms discharged static electricity that shorted out cars, charred and killed garden plants and crops, and made barbed wire fences spark⁶⁶. During the 1930’s, dust storms stripped the sod from vast swaths of the High Plains⁶⁷. One storm in 1934 got up in the jet stream and went on to cover New York City in prairie dust⁶⁸.

For ages before, tough grasses had held the soil and fed the buffalo that, in turn, fed the Indians⁶⁹. But Americans whacked down that food chain: the Army vanquished the Comanches, Texans killed the last millions of the southern plains buffalo, and farmers plowed up the grass. The farmers were urged to move to the region by cattle ranch investors and the federal government. Unlike buffalo, cattle did not fare well on the southern High Plains, with its wind-whipped winters and harsh summer heat⁷⁰. So around 1900, when the market price of cattle dropped, owners divided the huge ranches into small sections to sell to farmers. Marketeers lured farmers with claims such as “rain follows the plow”, saying that the very act of farming would bring rain in that arid land⁷¹. The federal government wanted to populate the region. It gave farmers free train rides to No Man’s Land, and stated that the soil “is the one resource that cannot be … used up⁷²x⁷³.” Cowboys also had something to tell the sodbusters: “the best side is up, don’t plow it under⁷⁴.” Farmers used tractors and the disc plow to turn under the grass of 33 million acres, and many did well selling wheat, until the grain market crashed, not long after the stock market crash of 1929⁷⁵. About the same time a dry phase started in the Great Plains, and in 1930 the first dust storm of the period kicked up in western Kansas. The storm – black and rolling and crackling – was a curiosity. The weather bureau wrote it up and filed it away⁷⁶.

“I didn’t know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence,” said Hugh Hammond Bennett of the government’s claim that the soil cannot be used up. Bennett knew the country’s soil. He grew up farming in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains using contour plowing and terracing, studied land use in college, went to work as a scientist for the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and took soil surveys in every state in the country⁷⁷. In his field work he discovered sheet erosion, where each heavy rain takes a thin layer of uncovered soil. Few policy makers cared about soil erosion, but more took notice in 1928 when Bennett published a USDA report, “Soil Erosion: A National Menace”, which helped him get funding for a national soil erosion study⁷⁸. In 1933, the energetic, problem-tackling New Deal administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) came in, and Bennett became head of the new Soil Erosion Service. With over 150 Civilian Conservation Corps camps at his command, Bennett set up many large demonstration projects for erosion control, planting trees and cover crops, and building control structures. But Bennett wanted a permanent soil conservation agency, and, a few days after Black Sunday, he went to Capitol Hill to try to sell a Senate committee on creating one. Bennett knew that a dust storm was coming up the Ohio River Valley bound for D.C., so he stretched out his testimony. “Chapter by chapter, he annotated each dismal page with facts and figures from a reconnaissance he had just completed,” wrote a Bennett biographer, William Brink. “Out of one corner of his eye, he noted the polite stifling of a yawn, but Hugh Bennett continued deliberatively. ... Presently one of the senators remarked—off the record—’It is getting dark. Perhaps a rainstorm is brewing.’ Another ventured, ‘Maybe it’s dust.’ ‘I think you are correct,’ Bennett agreed. ‘Senator, it does look like dust.’ The group gathered at a window. The dust storm for which Hugh Bennett had been waiting rolled in like a vast steel-town pall, thick and repulsive. The skies took on a copper color. The sun went into hiding. The air became heavy with grit.” Before the month ended, FDR signed the Soil Conservation Act, creating the Soil Conservation Service. Bennett, as head of the new agency, created Soil Conservation Districts where the farmers in an area contract to use soil holding methods, and get federal guidance, equipment, seeds, supplies and labor for doing so⁷⁹. These Soil Conservation Districts kept another dust bowl from forming during similar droughts in later decades⁸⁰. The government also helped by turning parts of the Dust Bowl area back to its natural state, and today the Forest Service plans to bring buffalo back to the southern plains in these national grasslands⁸¹x⁸².

Black Sunday

Above 3 maps from Report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee, August 27, 1936

Reseeded prairie, Baca County, Colorado (from series compiled by R.E. Rosiere, Tarleton State University, Texas)

Sources

⁶¹ ‘Ford County Dust Bowl Oral History Project – Interview: Clayton Hall’ July 29, 1998

⁶² ‘Ford County Dust Bowl Oral History Project – Interview: Arthur W. Leonard’ June 23, 1998

⁶³ ‘The Worst Hard Time’ by Timothy Egan © 2006 P.8

⁶⁴ Ibid pp.198-199

⁶⁵ Ibid drifts P.158; mud drops P.264; death pp.5-6,173

... Dr. John H. Blue of Guymon, Oklahoma, said he treated fifty-six patients for dust pneumonia … He was blunt. The doctor had looked inside an otherwise healthy young farm hand, a man in his early twenties, and told him what he saw. “You are filled with dirt,” the doctor said. The young man died within a day. – P.173

⁶⁶ Ibid pp.180,195,236

⁶⁷ Ibid P.223

One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been “essentially destroyed” and could not be farmed again, Bennet said. Think about the size, Bennet said: an area stretching five hundred miles north to south and three hundred miles east to west was drifting and dusted; two thirds of the total area of the Great Plains had been damaged by severe wind erosion – an environmental disaster bigger than anything in American history.

⁶⁸ Ibid pp.150-2

⁶⁹ Ibid pp.16-17

⁷⁰ Ibid P.22

⁷¹ Ibid pp.24-5

⁷² Ibid P.37

⁷³ ‘Hugh Hammond Bennett: the Father of Soil Conservation’ by Maurice G. Cook, Emeritus Professor of Soil Science, North Carolina State University

Also in 1909, as a measure of the Bureau’s view of the perishability of soils, whether by erosion, by chemical or physical degradation, or by these factors in combination, the Bureau of Soils published its Bulletin 55. In this Bulletin, Professor Milton Whitney, Chief of the Bureau of Soils, argued that the soil was of inexhaustible and permanent fertility: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the Nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” At a later time, Bennett reacted to Whitneys statement: “I didn’t know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence.” While Whitney no longer censored discussions of erosion out of Bennett’s reports, he apparently intended to “cool” Bennett down by sending him on surveys and projects in Alaska and Cuba, and in South and Central America.

⁷⁴ ‘The Worst Hard Time’ by Timothy Egan © 2006 P.25

⁷⁵ Ibid 33 million acres P.101; tractor & plow P.47; did well selling wheat pp.42-43; market crash pp.101-102

⁷⁶ Ibid P.88

⁷⁷ ‘Hugh Hammond Bennett: the Father of Soil Conservation’ by Maurice G. Cook, Emeritus Professor of Soil Science, North Carolina State University

⁷⁸ Ibid

Soon after the publication of this circular, Bennett finally saw some federal funding approved for erosion research. This came about through his connection to A. B. Conner, Director of the Texas Experiment Station. According to a prearranged plan, Conner was to discuss erosion with Congressman Buchanan of Texas. When the congressman maintained, as they expected he would, that federal money was to be spent for defense, Conner would bring up the large expenditure for battleships, and then argue that protecting the soil that supports the citizenship protects the nation. This devious arrangement worked and, as a result, Bennett was soon asked to testify before Buchanan’s subcommittee. An amendment was attached to the 1929 appropriation for the Department of Agriculture authorizing $160,000 over four years for soil erosion research. This money was to be used by the USDA “to investigate the causes of soil erosion and the possibility of increasing the absorption of rainfall by the soil in the United States.”

⁷⁹ ‘Small Farms, Externalities, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s Gary D. Libecap University of Arizona National Bureau of Economic Research and Zeynep K. Hansen Washington University, St. Louis July 26, 2002 – PDF file

The government response was the organization of Soil Conservation Districts to coordinate erosion control efforts and to subsidize investments. Since the federal government did not have authority to regulate private land use via local government units, state legislation was required. 18 states enacted some variant of the law by June 1937 and all had by 1947. Once state legislation was enacted, farmers in a region could form a Soil Conservation District upon petition and favorable vote. In the Great Plains states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and North and South Dakota there were 39 districts by 1938 covering 18,248,000 acres and 568 covering 318,316,000 acres by 1950.39 Within the districts, individual farmers entered into contracts with the SCS to cooperate in reducing soil erosion for five years. The SCS would provide equipment, seeds, fencing, and personnel for erosion control. Erosion control ordinances imposing land use regulations on all farmers could be adopted upon a favorable vote of a majority of the farmers in a district. Under the statute, the district supervisors could occupy parts of farms and begin erosion control with the costs plus 5 percent levied by court order against the farmer. Further, farmers who did not comply were ineligible for SCS assistance.

⁸⁰ Ibid – PDF file

The Dust Bowl was one of the most severe environmental crises in North America in the 20th Century. Severe drought and damaging wind erosion hit in the Great Plains in 1930 and lasted through 1940. Sustained strong winds blew away an average of 480 tons per acre of topsoil. Although there were similarly severe droughts in the Great Plains earlier in the 19th century and later in the 1950s and 1970s, there were no comparable levels of wind erosion.7 Excessive cultivation in the 1930s is the standard explanation for the Dust Bowl. The issue to be explained is why cultivation was more extensive and use of erosion control techniques more limited in the 1930s than later in the twentieth century.

...

Beginning in 1937, the federal government promoted local soil conservation statutes and districts within each state to subsidize and often force adoption of erosion controls. These included use of strip cropping, certain types of
fallow, terracing, and the planting of trees for windbreaks or shelterbelts. Soil Conservation Districts were established throughout the Great Plains so that by December 1956, there were 827 Soil Conservation Districts in the Great Plains states. The Soil Conservation Districts generally encompassed entire counties or more, and hence, were much larger than individual farms and better able to internalize the externalities associated with soil erosion control and to coordinate anti-erosion efforts among the farmers in their districts. Further, by the 1950s, gradual consolidation increased farm size. As a result, by the 1950s use of wind erosion control techniques was much more prevalent in the Great Plains than in the 1930s.

⁸¹ ‘The Worst Hard Time’ by Timothy Egan © 2006 P.309

⁸² ‘The National Grasslands Story’ – USDA Forest Service

* * *
By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Robert Gates, who awaits the Senate to confirm him as United States Secretary of Defense, has been a public servant that often acted to break the public trust and harm the country. As a staffer on the National Security Council during President Carter’s term, Gates had a role in the October Surprise scandal⁵¹. In 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis and the U.S. presidential campaigns of Carter and Ronald Reagan, he met with Iranian officials to make a deal where they would hold the American hostages until after the election in exchange for arms once Reagan took office. In the 1980’s, as the head of the CIA’s analytic division, Gates crippled the agency’s ability to produce factual intelligence reports⁵². He restructured the analytic division to suppress objective reporting and produce reports skewed to what Reagan wanted to hear – over-stating the strength of the Soviet Union and under-playing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development. Also in the 1980’s, Gates had a major role in the Iraqgate scandal⁵³. During the Iran-Iraq War, he arranged for arms such as cluster bombs and material for chemical weapons to be secretly shipped from arms dealers to the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. As Deputy Director of the CIA, Gates lied to Congress about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal and the agency’s role in it⁵⁴. The CIA unconstitutionally ignored a ban by Congress and helped supply the Contras with weapons for use against Nicaragua. These acts by Gates have harmed the country by undercutting the government’s diplomacy and likely delaying the release of American hostages, involving the country in the use of chemical weapons and building up a dictator that the U.S. military would later fight, wasting billions in unneeded weaponry aimed at the Soviet Union⁵⁵, spreading the nuclear bomb to Pakistan and on to North Korea⁵⁶, and undermining the constitutional power of Congress. If minority Democratic Senators ask Gates pointed questions about these acts of his in the confirmation hearings set to begin Monday, a wave could rise for a filibuster to keep Gates from taking yet another office from which to breach the public trust and damage the republic⁵⁷.

Further Reading

‘Robert Gates-Gate’ By Ray McGovern, November 14, 2006

‘Reagan, Bushes, Cheney Poisoned U.S. Intelligence System’ by Quinn Hungeski, The Paragraph, 2006-02-26

Sources

⁵¹ ‘The Secret World of Robert Gates’ By Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 9, 2006

... the Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report, which meshed with information from witnesses who have alleged Gates’s involvement in the Iranian gambit.

Once in office, the Reagan administration did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel.

...

Ben-Menashe, who worked for Israeli military intelligence from 1977-87, first fingered Gates as an operative in the secret Iraq arms pipeline in August 1990 during an interview that I conducted with him for PBS Frontline.

...

In that interview and later under oath to Congress, Ben-Menashe said Gates joined in meetings between Republicans and senior Iranians in October 1980. Ben-Menashe said he also arranged Gates’s personal help in bringing a suitcase full of cash into Miami in early 1981 to pay off some of the participants in the hostage gambit.

⁵² Ibid

Before Gates’s rapid rise through the CIA’s ranks in the 1980s, the CIA’s tradition was to zealously protect the objectivity and scholarship of the intelligence. However, during the Reagan administration, that ethos collapsed.

At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Mel Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was chief of the analytical division and then deputy director.

The former intelligence officers said the ambitious Gates pressured the CIA’s analytical division to exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow’s behavior in the world faced pressure and career reprisals.

...

“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” [Carolyn McGiffert] Ekedahl [of the CIA’s Soviet office] said. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.”

...

Ekedahl said Gates, dissatisfied with the terrorism assessment, joined in rewriting the draft “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism and the text was altered by pulling up from the annex reports that overstated Soviet involvement.”

...

Soon, the hammer fell on the analysts who had prepared the Soviet-terrorism report. Ekedahl said many analysts were “replaced by people new to the subject who insisted on language emphasizing Soviet control of international terrorist activities.”

...

In a speech to the DI’s analysts and managers on Jan. 7, 1982, Gates berated the division for producing shoddy analysis that administration officials didn’t find helpful.

...

Gates’s message was that the DI, which had long operated as an “ivory tower” for academically oriented analysts committed to an ethos of objectivity, would take on more of a corporate culture with a product designed to fit the needs of those up the ladder both inside and outside the CIA.

“It was a kind of chilling speech,” recalled Peter Dickson, an analyst who concentrated on proliferation issues. “One of the things he wanted to do, he was going to shake up the DI. He was going to read every paper that came out. What that did was that everybody between the analyst and him had to get involved in the paper to a greater extent because their careers were going to be at stake.”

...

Gates soon was salting the analytical division with his allies, a group of managers who became known as the “Gates clones.”

...

One of the effects from the exaggerated intelligence about Soviet power and intentions was to make other potential risks – such as allowing development of a nuclear bomb in the Islamic world or training Islamic fundamentalists in techniques of sabotage – pale in comparison.

While worst-case scenarios were in order for the Soviet Union and other communist enemies, best-case scenarios were the order of the day for Reagan-Bush allies, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab extremists rushing to Afghanistan to wage a holy war against European invaders, in this case, the Russians.

As for the Pakistani drive to get a nuclear bomb, the Reagan-Bush administration turned to word games to avoid triggering anti-proliferation penalties that otherwise would be imposed on Pakistan.

⁵³ Ibid

Middle Eastern witnesses alleged that Gates worked on the secret Iraqi initiative, which included Saddam Hussein’s procurement of cluster bombs and chemicals used to produce chemical weapons for the war against Iran.

...

In a sworn affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, [Howard] Teicher[, one of Reagan’s National Security Council officials] stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring 1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam Hussein.

The effort to arm the Iraqis was “spearheaded” by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher’s affidavit. “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.

...

Teicher described Gates’s role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld’s. “Under CIA Director [William] Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.

⁵⁴ ‘Gates & the Iran-Contra Legacy’ By Ivan Eland, November 15, 2006

Although Gates was never indicted for the Iran-Contra affair, he was severely criticized for his actions by Judge Lawrence E. Walsh, the Republican Independent Counsel who investigated the Iran-Contra affair. In his report on the scandal, Walsh said that contrary to Gates’ sworn testimony before a grand jury and at a confirmation hearing, “evidence proves” that then-Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Gates knew about the unconstitutional diversion of profits from Iran-bound arms sales to the Contras sooner than he let on.

...

Walsh also concluded that the CIA continued to support Oliver North’s diversion of funds to the Contras without investigating or telling his bosses at the National Security Council. Finally, Walsh concluded that Gates participated in two briefings of congressional investigators which helped lull them into falsely believing the CIA was not involved in facilitating private flights to resupply the Contras.

Gates’ role in ignoring Congress’s specific ban on assisting the Contras—one of the most dangerous threats to constitutional government in American history—should not be dismissed as merely “old news.” ...

⁵⁵ ‘Why U.S. Intelligence Failed’ By Robert Parry October 22, 2003

Missing the Fall

The politicization of intelligence in the 1980s had other effects. Under pressure always to exaggerate the Soviet threat, analysts had no incentive to point out the truth, which was that the Soviet Union was a decaying, corrupt and inefficient regime tottering on the brink of collapse. To justify soaring military budgets and interventions in Third World conflicts, the Reagan administration wanted the Soviets always to be depicted as 10 feet tall.

Ironically, this systematic distortion of the CIA’s Soviet intelligence assessments turned out to be a political win-win for Reagan and his supporters.

Not only did Congress appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for military projects favored by the conservatives, the U.S. news media largely gave Reagan the credit when the Soviet Union “suddenly” collapsed in 1991. The CIA did take some lumps for “missing” one of the most significant political events of the century, but Reagan’s success in “winning the Cold War” is now solidly entrenched as conventional wisdom.

The accepted version of events goes this way: the Soviets were on the ascendance before Reagan took office, but thanks to Reagan’s strategic missile defense program and his support for right-wing insurgencies, such as arming contra rebels in Nicaragua and Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union fell apart.

A more realistic assessment would point out that the Soviets had been in decline for decades, largely from the devastation caused by World War II and the effective containment strategies followed by presidents from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. The rapid development of technology in the West and the lure of Western consumer goods accelerated this Soviet collapse.

But the U.S. news media never mounted a serious assessment of how the Cold War really was won. The conservative press corps naturally pressed its favored theme of Reagan turning the tide, while a complacent mainstream press offered little additional context.

⁵⁶ ‘The Secret World of Robert Gates’ By Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 9, 2006

Finally, the intelligence on the Pakistan Bomb grew too strong to continue denying the reality. But the delay in confronting Pakistan ultimately allowed the Muslim government in Islamabad to produce nuclear weapons. Pakistani scientists also shared their know-how with “rogue” states, such as North Korea and Libya.

⁵⁷ ‘The Cheney-Gates Cabal’ by Ray McGovern, TomPaine.com, November 09, 2006

All those quoted in the press yesterday and this morning regarding the Gates nomination seem blissfully unaware of this history—all, that is, but Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. Pointing out Gates’ reputation for putting pressure on analysts to shape their conclusions to fit administration policies, Holt told the press yesterday that the nomination is “deeply troubling,” and stressed that the confirmation hearings “should be thorough and probing.”

* * *
By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

During his term in office, President Bush has pressed for war and more war. On January 20, 2001, Bush came to office with the neo-con playbook, calling for knocking off hostile governments¹⁰¹x¹⁰². Days later, Bush’s National Security Council (NSC) discussed an attack on Iraq – around a map showing how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up afterwards¹⁰³.

On September 11th, 2001, after the terror attacks of that day (9-11), Bush said that he ordered an investigation “to find those folks who committed this act¹⁰⁴.” But in a speech nine days later, he announced a “war on terror” against not just the al-Qaeda organization, which he named as the likely 9-11 culprit, but also against “every terrorist group of global reach” and “nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism¹⁰⁵.”

In November, 2001, after the CIA led Afghan fighters and the U.S. military in a quick rout of al-Qaeda and the Taliban government, Bush told Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to make war plans for Iraq¹⁰⁶. In the 2002 state of the union speech, Bush named the militias of Hamas and Hezbollah, which are enemies of Israel, as targets of his “war on terror”, and named an “axis of evil” made up of North Korea, Iraq and Iran¹⁰⁷, even though Iran had helped topple the Taliban¹⁰⁸. In the summer of 2002 the U.S. began bombing Iraq to take out military communications and defenses¹⁰⁹, and Bush (unconstitutionally) took $700 million that Congress allotted to the war in Afghanistan and used it to prepare for war in Iraq¹¹⁰. In September a White House propaganda campaign using false claims of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) led Congress the next month to vote Bush war powers in Iraq¹¹¹x¹¹²x¹¹³. In March 2003, Bush forced out U.N. inspectors, who had reported the Iraq government was fully cooperating with their search for WMD¹¹⁴, and ordered an invasion of Iraq¹¹⁵.

Within weeks the U.S. military knocked out the Iraq government¹¹⁶, but U.S. leadership had not readied a plan to secure the country, and massive looting and chaos followed¹¹⁷x¹¹⁸. Through the next three years of high unemployment¹¹⁹, crippled infra-structure, the U.S. torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (started by Rumsfeld)x¹²⁰x¹²¹ and the sacking of Fallujah (ordered by Bush)x¹²², attacks on U.S. soldiers persisted and attacks between religious sects grew to the level of civil war¹²³. Today the great majority of Iraqis want the U.S. military to leave the country, and most support attacks on American soldiers¹²⁴. An April 2006 CIA report determined that the occupation of Iraq was “fueling the spread of the jihadist movement¹²⁵x¹²⁶.”

In July 2006, after finding Bush’s hint to attack Syria to be “nuts”x¹²⁷x¹²⁸, Israel instead attacked Lebanon. Bush refused to support a cease fire, until Israel was done with its attack, but the operation failed to take out its target, Hezbollah, and instead raised the militia’s standing within Lebanon¹²⁹.

After his short stint as the first U.S. administrator of Iraq, General Jay Garner visited the White House, and Bush asked him jokingly, “You want to do Iran for the next one¹³⁰?” Today some in the White House want to double the Iraq bet by attacking Iran – a move that would practically unite the Iranian and Arabian populations in rage against the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has said that he would find a way around any ban against attacking Iran that Congress might pass¹³¹.

During Bush’s term, few majority Republican Congressmen stood against his warring, but many Democratic Congressmen did – voting against giving Bush Iraq war powers, holding hearings about war profiteering, and pressing for the investigation of cooked intelligence reports during Bush’s campaign to sell war against Iraq¹³²x¹³³x¹³⁴x¹³⁵. This month Americans voted to put the Democrats, who in general campaigned on getting out of Iraq¹³⁶, in charge of Congress, which, by the U.S. Constitution, holds the sole power to declare and fund war – or not.

Sources

¹⁰¹ ‘Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President’ By Neil Mackay, Sunday Herald

‘The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.’ The PNAC document supports a ‘blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests’.

This ‘American grand strategy’ must be advanced for ‘as far into the future as possible’, the report says. It also calls for the US to ‘fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars’ as a ‘core mission’.

¹⁰² ‘Letter from PNAC to President Clinton’ January 26, 1998 “Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”

¹⁰³ ‘Bush’s Belated Accountability Moment’ By Nat Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 12, 2006

bq.In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill described the first NSC meeting at the White House only a few days into Bush’s presidency. An invasion of Iraq was already on the agenda, O’Neill said. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.

O’Neill said even at that early date, the goal of invading Iraq was clear. The message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, who was forced out of the administration in December 2002.

¹⁰⁴ ‘Bush puts government on highest alert’ By Tom Raum, Associated Press, 2006-09-11 “I’ve ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”

¹⁰⁵ ‘Speech by George W. Bush after September 11th’ – 2006-09-20

¹⁰⁶ ‘Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 – 6/21/03)’ date 11/21/2001 According to Bob Woodward’s “Plan of Attack”: “President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, ‘What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.”’ Woodward adds that, immediately after Rumsfeld and [General Tommy] Franks work out a deal under which Franks can spend any money he needs. “And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible.”

¹⁰⁷ ‘State of the Union, 2002’ – 2002-01-29

Our military has put the terror training camps of Afghanistan out of business, yet camps still exist in at least a dozen countries. A terrorist underworld—including groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Jaish-i-Mohammed—operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the centers of large cities.

...

...North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.

Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. ...

¹⁰⁸ ‘Iran helped overthrow Taliban, candidate says’ By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY, 2005-06-09 “James Dobbins, a former State Department official who worked with diplomats from Iran and other Afghan neighbors to create the first post-Taliban government, says the Iranians “were equipping and paying the Northern Alliance. Russia and India were also helping, but at the time, Iran was the most active.””

¹⁰⁹ ‘U.S. Attacked Iraqi Defenses Starting in 2002’ By Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, LAS VEGAS, July 19, 2003

American air war commanders carried out a comprehensive plan to disrupt Iraq’s military command and control system before the Iraq war, according to an internal briefing on the conflict by the senior allied air war commander.

Known as Southern Focus, the plan called for attacks on the network of fiber-optic cable that Saddam Hussein’s government used to transmit military communications, as well as airstrikes on key command centers, radars and other important military assets.

The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq. But Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government.

Indeed, one reason it was possible for the allies to begin the ground campaign to topple Mr. Hussein without preceding it with an extensive array of airstrikes was that 606 bombs had been dropped on 391 carefully selected targets under the plan, General Moseley said.

¹¹⁰ ‘Woodward Shares War Secrets’ CBS, April 18, 2004

”Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible,” says Woodward.

“Gets to a point where in July, the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn’t know and it is done. They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. …Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this.”

¹¹¹ ‘Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence’ By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writers, Sunday, August 10, 2003, Page A01 “The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term “mushroom cloud” into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to “educate the public” about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.”

¹¹² ‘Marketing Iraq: Why now?’ By William Schneider, CNN, September 12, 2002 “Why did the Administration wait until September to make its case against Iraq? White House chief of staff Andrew Card told The New York Times last week, ``From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.’’”

¹¹³ ‘Congressional Resolution on Iraq (Passed by House and Senate October 2002)’

¹¹⁴ Reality on the Ballot’ By Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, September 4, 2004

U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix said he was encouraged by the Iraqi cooperation as his inspectors checked out sites designated as suspicious by Washington but found nothing. According to Blix, the Bush administration then forced the U.N. inspectors to leave in mid-March 2003 so the invasion could proceed.

“Although the inspection organization was now operating at full strength and Iraq seemed determined to give it prompt access everywhere, the United States appeared as determined to replace our inspection force with an invasion army,” Blix wrote in his book, Disarming Iraq.

¹¹⁵ ‘George W. Bush: Initial Military Operations in Iraq’, 2003-03-19 “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign,” Bush said.”

¹¹⁶ ‘Iraq War’ – Aljazeera “Occupation forces managed to topple the government and capture the key cities of a large nation in only 28 days.”

¹¹⁷ ‘WAR AFTER THE WAR’ by GEORGE PACKER, The New Yorker, 2003-11-17

In the Pentagon’s scenario, the responsibility of managing Iraq would quickly be handed off to exiles, led by Chalabi—allowing the U.S. to retain control without having to commit more troops and invest a lot of money. “There was a desire by some in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it,” a senior Administration official told me. “The idea was to put our guy in there and he was going to be so compliant that he’d recognize Israel and all the problems in the Middle East would be solved. He would be our man in Baghdad. Everything would be hunky-dory.” The planning was so wishful that it bordered on self-deception. “It isn’t pragmatism, it isn’t Realpolitik, it isn’t conservatism, it isn’t liberalism,” the official said. “It’s theology.”

...

One day during the war, Albert Cevallos, at the time a contractor with the United States Agency for International Development, was standing with a group of civil-affairs officers at the Iraq-Kuwait border. One officer asked him, “What’s the plan for policing?”

Cevallos’s job was in the field of human rights. “I thought you knew the plan,” he said.

“No, we thought you knew.”

“Haven’t you talked to ORHA?”

“No, no one talked to us.”

Cevallos wanted to run away. “It was like a Laurel and Hardy routine,” he said. “What happened to the plans? This is
like the million-dollar question that I can’t figure out.”

...

The economic cost of the looting was estimated at twelve billion dollars. The ruined buildings, the lost equipment, the destroyed records, and the damaged infrastructure continue to hamper the reconstruction. But on a more profound level the looting meant that Iraqis’ first experience of freedom was disorder and violence. The arrival of the Americans therefore unleashed new fears, even as it brought an end to political terror.

¹¹⁸ ‘’Sense of lawlessness’ pervades Baghdad’ – CNN, Friday, April 11, 2003

[CNN correspondent Martin Savidge] said the scattered attacks on the Marines point to a “sense of lawlessness” that hangs over Baghdad despite the massive presence of coalition troops in the capital.

Looting continued, Savidge said, though it was not clear whether there was much left to take after two days of residents ransacking government offices, presidential palaces, homes of former ruling Baath Party officials and other sites, including hospitals.

...

The tremendous amount of weaponry remaining in Baghdad is keeping disposal teams occupied.

”[There are] mortars, bombs, [rocket-propelled grenades], rockets of all sorts and tons and tons of ammunition,” Savidge said. “Literally, you can find it lying in the streets.”

According to Savidge, disposal is haphazard, usually taking place in the afternoon and marked by loud booms.

¹¹⁹ ‘Iraq War Results & Statistics as of November 15, 2006’ From Deborah White, About.com

QUALITY OF LIFE INDICATORS

• Iraqi Unemployment Rate – 27 to 60%, where curfew not in effect

• Consumer Price Inflation in 2005 – 20%

• Iraqi Children Suffering from Chronic Malnutrition – 25% in May 2006

• Internally Displaced Persons in Iraq, 2003 – 100,000

• Internally Displaced Persons in Iraq, as of Aug 2006 – 500,000

• Percent of professionals who have left Iraq since 2003 – 40%

• Iraqi Physicians Before 2003 Invasion – 34,000

• Iraqi Physicians Who Have Left Iraq Since 2005 Invasion – 12,000

• Iraqi Physicians Murdered Since 2003 Invasion – 2,000

• Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity – 12.1

• Average Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity – 8.6

• Number of Iraqi Homes Connected to Sewer Systems – 37%

• Percentage of Iraqi Homes with Access to Piped Water – 78%

• Water Treatment Plants Rehabilitated – 22%

¹²⁰ ‘Rumsfeld okayed abuses says former U.S. general’ – Reuters, Saturday, November 25, 2006; 11:45 AM

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

“The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: “Make sure this is accomplished,”” she told Saturday’s El Pais.

...

Rumsfeld also authorized the army to break the Geneva Conventions by not registering all prisoners, Karpinski said, explaining how she raised the case of one unregistered inmate with an aide to former U.S. commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

“We received a message from the Pentagon, from the Defense Secretary, ordering us to hold the prisoner without registering him. I now know this happened on various occasions.”

¹²¹ ‘TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB’ by SEYMOUR M. HERSH, Issue of 2004-05-10, Posted 2004-04-30

Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.

¹²² ‘Bush’s Bloody Flip-Flop’ By Robert Parry, September 14, 2004 “A flip-flop by George W. Bush worsened the military-political debacle in Fallujah last April when the Bush administration overruled the Marine commanding general twice, first ordering him to undertake a retaliatory assault against the rebellious Iraqi city and then abruptly reversing direction three days later.”

¹²³ ‘Iraq closer to civil war as insurgents entrench’ – CTV.ca News, Updated Sat. Nov. 25 2006 11:53 PM ET

The threat of civil war lurched closer in Iraq Saturday as a suicide bomb killed four people … Insurgents suspected to be Sunni killed 215 people in the attack on the Shiite slum, as mortars and five car bombs were deployed in the deadliest attack so far in the war. ... A suicide car bomber attacked a checkpoint near Fallujah on Saturday, killing a U.S. soldier and three Iraqi civilians. Nine civilians and an American service member were wounded, the coalition said. ... “A U.S. marine also died Saturday from wounds received in a fight in Anbar province on Friday. ... At least 72 insurgents and two American officers were killed in more than 40 hours of fighting during a pitched battle last week in Turki, in Diyala Province, near the border with Iran. ... Police said that gunmen forced their way into two Shiite homes and killed 21 men in front of their families. In fights in the same region, U.S. and Iraqi forces killed 58 insurgents. ... Police said that they killed 36 insurgents and wounded dozens of others in clashes elsewhere in Diyala Saturday. U.S. and Iraqi forces killed 22 insurgents and a civilian in raids north of Baghdad Saturday, and destroyed a factory churning out roadside bombs, the military said. According to police and witnesses, insurgents bombed and burned four mosques and torched several homes in Baghdad’s mostly Shiite neighbourhood of Hurriyah Friday, killing as many as 25 Sunnis. The U.S. military said Saturday that Iraqi soldiers who secured the town found only one burned mosque, however. They were unable to confirm accounts that six Sunni Arabs were dragged from Friday prayers and burned to death.

¹²⁴ ‘New Survey: Iraqis Want a Speedy U.S. Exit—and Back Attacks on Our Forces’ By E&P Staff, November 21, 2006 10:20 AM ET

The survey by much-respected World Public Opinion (WPO), taken in September, found that 74% of Shiites and 91% of Sunnis in Iraq want us to leave within a year.

By a wide margin, both groups believe U.S. forces are provoking more violence than they’re preventing—and that day-to-day security would improve if we left.

Support for attacks on U.S. forces now commands majority support among both Shiites and Sunnis. The report states: “Support for attacks on U.S.-led forces has grown to a majority position—now six in ten. Support appears to be related to widespread perception, held by all ethnic groups, that the U.S. government plans to have permanent military bases in Iraq and would not withdraw its forces from Iraq even if the Iraqi government asked it to. If the U.S. were to commit to withdraw, more than half of those who approve of attacks on US troops say that their support for attacks would diminish.”

...

Nearly every opinion poll in the U.S. has shown that roughly 6 in 10 Americans also back a withdrawal within a year.

¹²⁵ ‘Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate .Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States. dated April 2006

¹²⁶ ‘US intelligence report: Iraq war breeding more terrorists’ By Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor, September 25, 2006

¹²⁷ ‘Israel authorizes ‘severe’ response to abductions’ – CNN, Wednesday, July 12, 2006

“This affair is between Israel and the state of Lebanon,” Adam said. “Where to attack? Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate—not just southern Lebanon, not just the line of Hezbollah posts.”

Earlier, Israel’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, told Israel’s Channel 10, “If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years.”

¹²⁸ ‘Bush Wants Wider War’ By Robert Parry, August 3, 2006

George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as an opportunity to expand the conflict into Syria and possibly achieve a long-sought “regime change” in Damascus, but Israel’s leadership balked at the scheme, according to Israeli sources.

One Israeli source said Bush’s interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered “nuts” by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has generally shared Bush’s hard-line strategy against Islamic militants.

After rebuffing Bush’s suggestion about attacking Syria, the Israeli government settled on a strategy of mounting a major assault in southern Lebanon aimed at rooting out Hezbollah guerrillas who have been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post hinted at the Israeli rejection of Bush’s suggestion of a wider war in Syria. “Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria,” the newspaper reported.

¹²⁹ ‘Israeli Leaders Fault Bush on War’ By Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, August 13, 2006

[T]he month-long war has failed to achieve its goals of destroying Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon or intimidating Iran and Syria.

Instead, Hezbollah guerrillas fought Israeli troops to a virtual standstill in villages near the border and much of the world saw Israel’s bombing raids across Lebanon – which killed hundreds of civilians – as “disproportionate.”

Now, as the conflict winds down, some Israeli officials are ruing the Olmert-Bush pact on May 23 and fault Bush for pushing Olmert into the conflict.”

...

For his part, Bush spent July and early August fending off international demands for an immediate cease-fire. Bush wanted to give Olmert as much time as possible to bomb targets across Lebanon and dislodge Hezbollah forces in the south.

But instead of turning the Lebanese population against Hezbollah – as Washington and Tel Aviv had hoped – the devastation rallied public support behind Hezbollah.

¹³⁰ ‘Iraq War Timeline: Lie by Lie – June 2, 2003’

¹³¹ ‘The Next Act’ By Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker

“It’s a classic case of ‘failure forward,’” a Pentagon consultant said. “They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq—like doubling your bet. It would be an attempt to revive the concept of spreading democracy in the Middle East by creating one new model state.” ... “The former senior intelligence official added that the C.I.A. assessment raised the possibility that an American attack on Iran could end up serving as a rallying point to unite Sunni and Shiite populations.” ...”According to the Pentagon consultant, “The C.I.A.’s view is that, without more intelligence, a large-scale bombing attack would not stop Iran’s nuclear program. And a low-end campaign of subversion and sabotage would play into Iran’s hands—bolstering support for the religious leadership and deepening anti-American Muslim rage.””

¹³² ;He wants to revive Congress’ scrutiny’ By BILL ADAIR and WES ALLISON, November 12, 2006

For the past six years of the Bush presidency, Waxman and other Democrats say, the Republican-controlled Congress, which reconvenes today for a lame-duck session, was more cheerleader than investigator. Congressional committees failed to scrutinize the administration’s actions on Iraq, energy policy, the war on terrorism and many other issues. They say committee hearings were little more than GOP infomercials.

“The Republican leaders of the Congress decided they were Republicans first and leaders of a branch of government second,” Waxman said in an interview. “They thought they were doing the Bush administration a favor by not asking questions that might embarrass them.”

...

Some Senate Republicans, particularly Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Armed Services Chairman John Warner of Virginia , have challenged the administration, but House leaders have shown little interest in oversight.

“It hasn’t been absent, but it’s been minimal,’’ said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

¹³³ ‘H. J. Res. 114(107): Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002’ – GovTrack.us”:

House Vote

• Party: Yes – No – Not Voting
• Democrat: 80 – 126 – 1
• Republican: 216 – 6 – 2
• Independent: 0 – 1 – 0

Senate Vote

• Party: Yes – No – Not Voting
• Democrat: 29 – 20 – 0
• Republican: 49 – 1 – 0
• Independent: 0 – 1 – 0

¹³⁴ ‘Senate Democratic Policy Committee Hearing – An Oversight Hearing on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in U.S. Government Contracting in Iraq – Bunnatine Greenhouse, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ June 27, 2005 – pdf

¹³⁵ ‘Democrats close Senate to push war probe’ – CNN, Tuesday, November 1, 2005;

¹³⁶ ‘On the Issues: Iraq’ – Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader

Democrats want to move us in a new direction – ensuring that 2006 is a year of significant transition with Iraqis assuming responsibility for their country and with the responsible redeployment of U.S. forces.

There are only two directions to take in Iraq: Bush’s plan of staying the course to let a future President to sweep up after, or the Murtha plan to change the direction of that course. Rep. Pelosi has joined with Rep. Murtha in calling for the redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq to make our country safer, our military stronger, and the region more stable.

* * *
By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

“This Republican Congress must be fired because they are still putting their own egos above the truth – and above human lives,” wrote an Army Reservist in a letter to MoveOn members appealing for volunteers to call voters¹x².

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I watched the attack on the World Trade Center with a special horror because the people killed were all civilians without training, arms, or defense. I called my unit that afternoon and begged, “Wherever this came from, send me there.”

But that’s not where they sent me. They sent me to Iraq.

Around a month into my tour, my small unit was ambushed by hundreds of insurgent fighters at a Coalition Provisional Authority base. The local security force (hired by corporate mercenaries) deserted immediately, taking guns and radios with them.

We were besieged for 22 straight hours under a steady stream of small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades. Forces from multiple nations attempted rescues throughout the night. At dawn, when morning prayers created a pause in the attack, we managed to escape with our lives.

I spent the next 11 months doing convoys, writing reports, and getting to know the real Iraq. I talked to hundreds of Iraqis; many became true friends. I saw the rage after Abu Ghraib. And I saw way too many innocent civilians die as the country slipped further and further over the edge.

The troops I served with suffered from limited ammunition, armor, resources, and staff. While we brushed our teeth in dirty water recycled from the showers, Halliburton reps got rich off contracts handed to them by their Republican friends back in Washington.

Reservists like me risk our lives when Congress says we must – and we need citizens like you to hold them accountable when they betray that trust.

This Tuesday is our very last chance to do that. It’s the last chance for Americans to stand up and say we will not forget, we will not excuse, and we will not let this betrayal happen again.

Source

¹ Letter from ‘Ginmar’ to MoveOn.org members

² MoveOn.org Call for Change program

* * *
By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com