Friday, May 05, 2006

Reasons given for Goss resignation are but lipstick on a pig!

The abrupt "resignation" of Porter Goss is proof of Bush's failure to lead; his appointment, however, may have compromised national security.

The consensus is that Goss called it quits because he failed to address the reasons he was named to the post. In mainstream media speak, Goss quit after 19 months of trying to "mend" the agency "…embattled over the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the faulty intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

That's lipstick on a pig.

Bush appointed Goss amid great ballyhoo. It was, however, a political appointment from the get go. Goss's real job was to purge the CIA of anyone daring to question Bush's bogus and various rationales for waging aggressive war against a nation that had never attacked the United States and, in fact, posed no strategic threat to the United States whatsoever. His was a partisan appointment and because it was, Bush efforts to politicize the CIA may have compromised national security.

Now —if Goss was not up to the job, the responsibility must lie with the man who made the appointment: George W. Bush. Clearly -Bush wanted a toady at Langley and sadly, for the nation, he got one. That Goss is now out after a short 19 months of making enemies is nothing short of an indictment of Bush's utterly failed regime.

What intelligence failures?

Much is made in the MSM of "intelligence failures" leading up to 911. It has since been learned that Bush had numerous warnings about 911 and did nothing. There is a growing body of evidence that there was specific information even up to the very day of the attacks. Still, the United States failed to scramble fighters until after it was too late. In view of the fact that Dick Cheney was in charge of gaming a terrorist attack that very day, serious consideration should be given to bringing criminal charges against Dick Cheney. Instead, the Bush administration sought to make the CIA the scapegoat. Most certainly, Goss -as partisan as they come -was seen to be the man to bring the CIA to heel. It would appear that another nefarious plan has failed.

Since Bush tried shift the all the blame for 911 intelligence failures, it has been learned that Bush and Blair literally conspired to "fix" the intelligence to support a decision already made. Bush and Blair, according to the famous Downing Street Memos, had decided to attack Iraq but needed a pretext. WMD was it. The timeline of events supports that view: Colin Powell's address to the United Nations was known —at the time —to have consisted of old, out of date satellite photos and at least one plagiarized student paper. There was also the case of U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson who blew the whistle on the bogus "yellow cake" story. And who can forget the beat up old trailer that was said to have been a "chemical lab"?

It's hard not to conclude that Bush appointed a GOP partisan who took with him to the CIA not only Bush's political agenda but also his numerous justifications for carrying on a perpetual, so-called "war on terrorism". That the war itself is may be a fraud has not kept Bush from citing it as justification for his arrogant and arbitrary abrogations of due process of law and the other "freedoms" for which we are said to be waging this so-called "war". Goss was supposted to turn the CIA into a partisan outfit, an organization that would tell Bush what he wanted to hear. Does that make you feel safer?

If that is the case -and I think it is -then it should be considered among the many impeachable offenses that will be charged to George Bush. Any attempt to politicize the CIA weakens the nation, compromises national security, and, in many ways, weakens the nation militarily by compromising the very intelligence upon which defense decisions are made.

Another update, another interesting wrinkle in the story:

Rumsfeld Uses Colin Powell as a Human Shield

by John Nichols

Challenged by veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern to explain why he had claimed to "know" before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction when that suggestion had been repeatedly called into question, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tried to use former Secretary of State Colin Powell as a human shield.

From the crowd at an Atlanta gathering of the Southern Center for International Studies, McGovern asked: "Why did you lie to get us into a war that caused these kind of casualties and was not necessary?"

Rumsfeld replied, "Well, first of all, I haven't lied. I did not lie then. Colin Powell didn't lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate, and he presented that to the United Nations. The president spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence people and he went to the American people and made a presentation. I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there."

What Rumsfeld failed to mention is the hard evidence that Powell was pressured by Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others to make far more aggressive statements regarding WMDs than the Secretary of State thought to be appropriate.

British scholar Philippe Sands, the author of the very fine book Lawless World and perhaps the most dogged investigator of the internal discussions involving the cabinets of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair prior to the war, has revealed that Powell shared his doubts with his British counterpart before speaking to the United Nations in February, 2003. ...
There is obviously more to Goss' sudden departure than his hurt feelings that Negroponte was put between Goss and Bush in the chain of command. The real reasons have to do with Bush's relationship with the CIA itself, problems that started when Bush tried to make the CIA the fall guy for the WMD lies, when Bush tried to make of the CIA a "human shield".

At an even deeper level, the CIA has most certainly been at war with itself since before Bush Sr became CIA director. But more on that later. In the meantime, it's clear that the forces of corporate wealth and privilege have combined to install an absolute fascist dictatorship in the U.S. and the CIA seems to be the last battlefield. The Pentagon was bought and paid for by big business long ago.

Edmund Burke is often misquoted. What he actually said is even more applicable than the misquote:

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

Bush seemed to have presided over just such an eventuality and rode the polls to the top. That even conservatives are deserting him seems to indicate that the consolidation of Bush's absolute dictatorship has failed. We can only hope and, indeed, that would appear to be our only hope.

But ...don't let down your guard.

Is the Resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss Hookergate Related?

Posted by Jon Ponder | May. 5, 2006, 10:51 am

Rumors have been swirling around Washington that CIA Director Porter Goss may have been involved in the poker and prostitute parties at the Watergate Hotel hosted by the defense contractors who bribed former Rep. Duke Cunningham. Goss was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when the parties took place, so it is possible he was involved somehow in either the bribery, the sex with prostitutes or both.

Goss’s abrupt resignation today was offered without a reason — not even the old Washington bromide of an urgent need to spend more time with his familiy. The news readers on CNN and MSNBC are pussyfooting around it but it is hard to see how Goss’s sudden departure after a little more than a year as head of the CIA is not connected to the Watergate II scandals.

Here’s some background on the scandals that posted on Alternet earlier today:

According to recent reports, federal investigators have traced the outlines of a far more extensive network of suspected corruption, involving multiple members of Congress, some of the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence officials, bribery attempts including “free limousine service, free stays at hotel suites at the Watergate and the Westin Grand, and free prostitutes,” tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts awarded under dubious circumstances, and even efforts to influence U.S. national security policy by subverting democratic oversight…

CIA director Goss tied to scandal?

Last week, Harper’s magazine reported that party-goers “under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence committees — including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post.” CIA Director Porter Goss is perhaps the only individual who fits such a description. (”This is horribly irresponsible. He hasn’t even been to the Watergate in decades,” a CIA spokeswoman said. When asked if Goss had attended Wilkes’ parties at the Westin or other locations, she repeated the denial. “It’s horribly irresponsible. Flatly untrue.”) But the alleged links between Goss, Foggo, and Wilkes have led some to return to questions raised when Goss initially selected Foggo to be executive director in November 2004.

Update: NBC’s Tim Russert has been rushed in front of the cameras to insist that Goss’s resignation is a result of head-butting from John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. In other words, “Move along, folks, move along. Nothing to see here.” ...
Bush was motivated to politicize the CIA. His entire "War on Terrorism" continues to be a fraud. Con men perpetrating frauds are always in in need of confederates.

How Bush Was Offered Bin Laden and Blew It

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

George Bush, the man whose prime campaign plank has been his ability to wage war on terror, could have had Osama bin Laden's head handed to him on a platter on his very first day in office, and the offer held good until February 2 of 2002. This is the charge leveled by an Afghan American who had been retained by the US government as an intermediary between the Taliban and both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Kabir Mohabbat is a 48-year businessman in Houston, Texas. Born in Paktia province in southern Afghanistan, he's from the Jaji clan (from which also came Afghanistan's last king). Educated at St Louis University, he spent much of the 1980s supervising foreign relations for the Afghan mujahiddeen, where he developed extensive contacts with the US foreign policy establishment, also with senior members of the Taliban.

After the eviction of the Soviets, Mohabbat returned to the United States to develop an export business with Afghanistan and became a US citizen. Figuring in his extensive dealings with the Taliban in the late 1990s was much investment of time and effort for a contract to develop the proposed oil pipeline through northern Afghanistan.

In a lengthy interview and in a memorandum Kabir Mohabbat has given us a detailed account and documentation to buttress his charge that the Bush administration could have had Osama bin Laden and his senior staff either delivered to the US or to allies as prisoners, or killed at their Afghan base. As a search of the data base shows, portions of Mohabbat's role have been the subject of a number of news reports, including a CBS news story by Alan Pizzey aired September 25, 2001. This is the first he has made public the full story. ...
CIA, WMD, War on Terror

'Toons by Dante Lee; use only with permission

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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

A little noted victim of Bush's tyranny: the individual conscience

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Among Bush's many crimes is one that few have written about. Bush has required of our soldiers that they violate their own consciences. And, at the end of the day, it is either a strong individual or a hopeless kiss up who can say that they served Bush in Iraq without violating or burying forever their own moral code. On the home front, support for Bush on any issue has now become a Faustian bargain. At stake is your very soul, or, less theologically, the individual conscience. This is one of the defining characteristics of dictatorship.
George W. Bush: An American Hitler

In George W. Bush's petty, pathetic, partisan world, laws he doesn't agree with don't have to be obeyed, Congressional actions that differ from his political agenda can be ignored and the Constitution of the United States is just a "goddamned piece of paper."

Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe brought this point home Sunday when he revealed Bush has chosen to ignore more laws passed by Congress than any President in history, appending more than 750 laws with "signing statements" that say, in effect, that he doesn't give a damn what the law says because he will do whatever he pleases as a "wartime president" and "commander-in-chief."

Of course it doesn't matter to him that he became a "wartime president" because he lied out his ass to justify an illegal invasion on Iraq based on fake intelligence and a determined policy of ignoring facts that disproved his lies. ...
As I had written earlier: the Bush administration is no longer a "presidency", it's a criminal conspiracy. An increasing number of astute observers have emailed me advocating that Bush and his regime be prosecuted under RICO statutes. Make no mistake —the Bush regime has become a tyranny. The first victim of tyranny is the individual conscience.

As individuals act upon what they believe to be true, a people does so collectively. American hubris, self-importance, and self-appointed moral superiority are, like all falsehoods, the source of much evil throughout the world; and it is all the more egregious that those evils are manifested recently under the worst American presidency in our history.

Aggressive war, torture, duplicity, deliberate deceptions, the abrogation of the very instruments by which Americans instituted the rule of law —all are hallmarks of this Bush "administration", best described as a criminal conspiracy to undermine the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law.
We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United States had minded its own business in the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another 30 to 40 years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.

We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that the rest of the world wants (or should want) to emulate us. ...

Exporting the American Model

Of course, Bush KNOWS that making the middle east safe for Democracy is absolute, right wing crap! A party that has to resort to election theft in its own country is hardly in a position to propose "free elections" in another.

A ruthless dictator who abjures the Constitution in America is hardly in a position to demonize Saddam Hussein.

A lawless bigot in the White House is hardly in a position to talk about the blessings of democracy if they could but wipe out those mean ol' "turrsts" in Iraq!

As more and more is learned about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the torture flights and cold blooded murders of civilians by U.S. troops, I've concluded that the war against Iraq was not even about oil, though Bush's base —the robber barons of big oil —have profited exponentially!

There are no rational explanations for continuing to perpetrate the counter productive policies of bluster, aggressive war, war crimes, torture, and murder. Therefore, Bush's real reasons for attacking and waging an ongoing war crime in Iraq are personal. Bush, a known alumnus of the super secretive Illuminati society called Skull and Bones, apparently just wants to get his jollies by murdering folk by proxy. For Bush's base of oil oligarchs, it's about the plunder of oil; but for Bush it's about the psychotic perversions of an out of control maniac in the White House.

A related update:

Dear President Bush; about that "goddamned piece of paper."
    “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
Let us start out with the fact that the Constitution is actually written on parchment, not paper. A trivial point, I grant you, but one that reveals (along with your inability to correctly pronounce the word "nuclear") a shocking lack of education in a head of state.

But to get to the point, the Constitution is not the parchment itself, but the ideas written upon it; ideas which form the foundations of our nation, ideas which would carry equal weight if written on stone, glass, metal, or even paper. These ideas are the soul of the nation. They include the recognition that the people of this nation have certain rights, rights which the government does not have the authority to remove. These rights include freedom of speech, to say what we think about the nation at any and all times, to write that opinion down and share it however we choose to. These rights include the freedom to worship as we choose, free from coercion. These rights include the right to privacy, in our homes and businesses, free from government intrusions other than in very specific and well-defined circumstances.

Maybe those rights are inconvenient to you, as such rights are always inconvenient to tyrants, but you are not allowed the choice which rights you will abide by or not. That too is spelled out explicitly in the Constitution. ...


Monday, May 01, 2006

You know you're living in a dictatorship when telling the truth becomes a crime

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

If that's not tyranny, what is? As Bush descends into ratings hell, his "absolutist" rhetoric is ratcheted up. Math buffs would say the two are inversely proportional. Even as he descended into the "30's", Bush and his Bushevik regime were defending "Stalinesque" rule with words like "unitary executive","inherent powers", and "executive privilege." Now Bush wants to prosecute reporters for telling the truth about his failed administration.

It's not bad enough that Bush has arrogated unto himself the power to modify statutes with so-called "signing statements". It's not bad enough that Bush has orchestrated an unprecedented crack down on dissent to include Soviet-style prosecutions of reporters on espionage charges; it's not enough that Busheviks have taken aim on the internet itself! Bush is now enforcing —as "law" —measures that have not even passed both houses of Congress. There is a phrase for this: rule by decree! Another word is "tyranny". In response, Rep. John Conyers is taking the so-called "President" to court. Conyers, and a distinguished list of co-plaintiffs, will challenge in court the dictatorial and unconstitutional powers that Bush has arrogated unto himself. It would appear that the "third act" has already begun.
As some of you may be aware, according to the President and Congressional Republicans, a bill does not have to pass both the Senate and the House to become a law. Forget your sixth grade civics lesson, forget the book they give you when you visit Congress - "How Our Laws Are Made," and forget Schoolhouse Rock. These are checks and balances, Republican-style.

Congressman John Conyers

At issue is the GOP budget bill that cuts funding for student loans and medicaid. According to Conyers, the bill struggled to make its way through Congress and House Republicans preferred not to make GOP members vote on it again. The GOP merely certified the measure was the same as a Senate bill and sent it to Bush for his signature. The measure, in fact, differed. Despite warnings, Bush signed it and will now enforce it as if it were the "...law of the land."
Several public interest groups have sought to stop some parts of the bill from being implemented, under the theory that the bill is unconstitutional. However, getting into the weeds a bit, they have lacked the ability to stop the entire bill. To seek this recourse, the person bringing the suit must have what is called "standing," that is they must show they were injured or deprived of some right. Because the budget bill covers so many areas of the law, it is difficult for one person to show they were harmed by the entire bill. Thus, many of these groups have only sought to stop part of it.

—Congressman Conyers

There is one group that is harmed by the measure as a whole: members of the House of Representatives. Conyers is going to court on behalf of the House!

Clearly —this is a significant development in the ongoing effort to check Bush's dictatorial power grab. This is one branch of government going to court to check an unconstitutional power grab by another. How this bill fares in the courts will affect every U.S. citizen. Anyone with an interest in stopping the Bush dictatorship had best pay attention to the progress of this lawsuit.

Here's the irony: Bush's most egregious power grabs have occurred since falling from grace. His approval ratings were already in the 30's when he declared that he was "above the law" and did not need warrants to spy on American citizens. Since that time, Bush is now poised to prosecute those who dare to make public his program of widespread domestic surveillance.
... the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

White House could prosecute journalists in news leak stories

His NeoCon constituency puts forward a dubious "unitary executive" theory, citing Bush's "inherent powers" during a time of war. Nevermind that war was never declared, was not authorized by the U.N. Resolution that Bushies often point to, and is, in fact, a violation of the Nuremberg Principles. Nevermind that the attack and invasion itself is a crime against the peace. As such, it violates U.S. Criminal Codes, Section 2441.

In fact, Bush has made of the "Presidency" a totalitarian regime in which telling the truth about the regime has been made a crime by decree. If this is not tyranny, then what is? If truth is officially suppressed, then only lies are left. A regime premised upon a pack of lies is not legitimate.

Not surprisingly, the Busheviks are covering their tracks with Stalinist tactics: official secrets. "Official Secrets", of course, are whatever Bush says they are. As we write, the Bush dictatorship has ordered the reclassification of millions of documents to prevent them being seen by American citizens. Anyone citing, quoting, or making public these documents to reveal the truth about Bush's illegal, unconstitutional coup d'etat will be prosecuted. The charge: espionage!

The Bush administration is not a "Presidency", it's a criminal conspiracy; the GOP is not a political party, it's a crime syndicate.

An update:
Bush in ‘ceaseless push for power’

By Caroline Daniel in Washington
Published: May 1 2006 19:30 | Last updated: May 1 2006 19:30

President George W. Bush had shown disdain and indifference for the US constitution by adopting an “astonishingly broad” view of presidential powers, a leading libertarian think-tank said on Monday.

The critique from the Cato Institute reflects growing criticism by conservatives about administration policy in areas such as the “war on terror” and undermining congressional power.

“The pattern that emerges is one of a ceaseless push for power, unchecked by either the courts or Congress, one in short of disdain for constitutional limits,” the report by legal scholars Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch concludes.

That view was echoed last week by former congressman Bob Barr, a Republican, who called on Congress to exercise “leadership by putting the constitution above party politics and insisting on the facts” in the debate over illegal domestic wiretapping of terrorist suspects. ...