Evil GOP Bastards

Evil GOP Bastards

The role of the media. The lies of the Bush Administration are promulgated without rebuttal by the mainstream media. For example, in late October, 2004, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) reported reported that among Bush voters:

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56% believed that experts agreed that Iraq had WMDs

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75% believed that Iraq was either involved in 9/11 or gave substantial support to Al Queda.

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58% said that if Iraq did not have WMDs or was not involved with al Qaeda, the US should not have gone to war.

Accordingly, most Bush voters went to the polls believing demonstrably false information. The only possible source of that false information was the mainstream media (including right-wing talk radio and cable TV “news”). Clearly, the media took no pains to convey correct information to the voters. Furthermore, if the media had done so, Bush might well have lost over 5% of his votes, and the election. In short, he owed his re-election to the failure of the mainstream media to do its job of reporting the news.

And that’s just the beginning. The media further assisted Bush/Cheney by trumpeting the slander against John Kerry by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” and by muffling the evidence of Bush’s dereliction of duty to the Texas Air National Guard.

The Bush-friendly connivance of the mainstream media continues to this day, as news of “The Downing Street Memo,” with its compelling evidence of impeachable offenses by the President, remains hidden from the front pages of the newspapers and is completely absent from the TV news. So too any journalistic investigation of the integrity of the 2004 election, despite an abundant and ever-growing fund of evidence that the election was stolen.

During the past week, following the disclosure of Mark Felt as the Watergate “Deep Throat,” some pundits have asked, “Where is today’s Deep Throat?” To which others have replied, “No, the question is where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins today?” Both questions miss the mark. The relevant question is, “where are the Ben Bradlees and Kathryn Grahams today?” – (i.e., the editor and publisher of the Washington Post during the Watergate affair). Not in the “mainstream.” The voices of dissent, the remaining investigative journalists, and the conveyers of accurate information, are in the still small voice of the independent press and the internet.

And so, the power of the Presidency has subdued the mainstream media. Even so, the media has enormous, if unrealized, power over the Bush regime, for once the demonstrable facts of the Iraq War, the 9/11 attacks, the economic plunder by the corporations and the plutocrats, the stolen elections, the starvation of social services, etc., become known to the public, the Bush administration is finished, and the Republican party is destined for another generation in the political wilderness. This is the sword of Damocles that the media holds over the Bush gang.

It is a weapon that the mainstream media has chosen not to use, and is unlikely to use as long as its owners remain confined within the GOP reservation. So it is up to the independent publishers and the internet. Can they, at long last, get the facts out to the public? On that question, the future of the Bush Administration and the Republican party turns – and well they know it.

Herein is a grave danger to the Busheviks. A regime of lies can not long endure – especially so in this emerging “information age.” As Bush himself famously observed, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." And in fact, the truth is beginning to leak into the public awareness. Those PIPA statistics concerning the public misunderstanding of the Iraq war no longer apply, thus the Administration no longer pretends that Saddam’s WMDs and alliance with al Qaeda justifies the war. Now a majority of the public believes that the Iraq war was a mistake, and that proportion is increasing, as Bush’s approval ratings continue to plummet.

The credibility of the Bush regime is dissolving, and with it the regime’s scaffolding of lies. Donald Rumsfeld told us in March, 2003 that “We know where [the WMDs] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.” Subsequent searches of that area have exposed that lie. And Dick Cheney famously proclaimed in August, 2002 that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” That sound clip is being heard ever more frequently. So when Cheney appears on Larry King Live and says that he is “offended” by the Amnesty International report on torture, and insists that the Iraq insurgency is “in its last throes” – well, “fool me once...”

In the Soviet Union the Communist Party owned and controlled the media and the education system and ruthlessly excluded news and opinion from “the outside.” But it could not suppress The Beatles, Rock and Roll, FAXes, audio and video tapes, The Voice of America and the BBC – the youth culture and the nascent information age. All this, incidentally, before the Internet. So when at last the peoples of the several republics of the Soviet Union no longer believed the official lies, it was all over for the Communists.

Now the Bush regime has to contend with all that, plus “the internets” and the influx of “unofficial” but authentic information from within and from outside our borders.

Even so, most of the American people simply can’t yet get it into their heads that their President and Vice President, along with the chief members of the President’s Cabinet, are unscrupulous liars. But the notion is slowly infecting the body politic like a persistent mind-virus. People hate to discover that they’ve been lied to, and will often steadfastly deny that unpleasant truth. But once they finally acknowledge that they’ve been conned, then watch out! “Beware the wrath of the American people!”

karl Rove as Plame Leaker

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July 2nd, 2005 3:39 pm
MSNBC Analyst Says 2nd Source Confirms Karl Rove as Plame Leaker

By Greg Mitchell / Editor & Publisher

NEW YORK Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source. Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, now claims that at least two sources have confirmed that the name is--top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

O'Donnell first offered this report Friday night on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show. Today, he went beyond that, writing a brief entry at the Huffington Post blog:

"I revealed in yesterday's taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine's e-mails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source. I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.

"McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don't expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.

"Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow."

Here is the text of what O'Donnell said on Friday:

"What we're going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper's e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury--the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

"I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury."

Other McLaughlin Group panelists then joined in discussing whether, if true, this would suggest a perjury rap for Rove, if he told the grand jury he did not leak to Cooper.

Besides his career at a TV journalist, O'Donnell has served as a producer and writer for the series "The West Wing."

According to published reports, Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the case, has interviewed President Bush and Vice President Cheney and called Karl Rove, among others, to testify before the grand jury.

"The breadth of Fitzgerald's inquiry has led to speculation that it has evolved into an investigation of a conspiracy to leak Plame's identity," the Chicago Tribune observed on Friday, "or of an attempt to cover up White House involvement in the leak."

US Planning for possible attack on Iran

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Journalist: U.S. planning for possible attack on Iran
White House says report is 'riddled with inaccuracies'

Monday, January 17, 2005 Posted: 8:11 AM EST (1311 GMT)

story.hersh.jpg
Seymour Hersh said his information on Iran came from "inside" sources.

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration has been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions to learn about nuclear, chemical and missile sites in Iran in preparation for possible airstrikes there, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.

The effort has been under way at least since last summer, Hersh said on CNN's "Late Edition."

In an interview on the same program, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said the story was "riddled with inaccuracies."

"I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's drawing are based on fact," Bartlett said.

Iran has refused to dismantle its nuclear program, which it insists is legal and is intended solely for civilian purposes. (Full story)

Hersh said U.S. officials were involved in "extensive planning" for a possible attack -- "much more than we know."

"The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids," he wrote in "The New Yorker" magazine, which published his article in editions that will be on newsstands Monday.

Hersh is a veteran journalist who was the first to write about many details of the abuses of prisoners Abu Ghraib in Baghdad.

He said his information on Iran came from "inside" sources who divulged it in the hope that publicity would force the administration to reconsider.

"I think that's one of the reasons some of the people on the inside talk to me," he said.

Hersh said the government did not answer his request for a response before the story's publication, and that his sources include people in government whose information has been reliable in the past.

Hersh said Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld view Bush's re-election as "a mandate to continue the war on terrorism," despite problems with the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Last week, the effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the Bush administration's stated primary rationale for the war -- was halted after having come up empty.

The secret missions in Iran, Hersh said, have been authorized in order to prevent similar embarrassment in the event of military action there. (Full story)

"The planning for Iran is going ahead even though Iraq is a mess," Hersh said. "I think they really think there's a chance to do something in Iran, perhaps by summer, to get the intelligence on the sites."

He added, "The guys on the inside really want to do this."

Hersh identified those inside people as the "neoconservative" civilian leadership in the Pentagon. That includes Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith -- "the sort of war hawks that we talk about in connection with the war in Iraq."

And he said the preparation goes beyond contingency planning and includes detailed plans for air attacks:

"The next step is Iran. It's definitely there. They're definitely planning ... But they need the intelligence first."

Secret air campaign against Iraq?

Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!

une 30th, 2005 4:27 pm
Secret air campaign against Iraq?

Downing Street memo, other documents may show war really started earlier than March 2003.

By Tom Regan / Christian Science Monitor

Most American media have focused on the allegations from the Downing Street memo that the Bush administration was going to "fix" the intelligence in order to justify the war against Iraq. Now the reporter who broke the original story says they have missed a more substantial allegation to arise from the same set of leaked documents.

Michael Smith, defense writer for the Sunday Times of London wrote this past Sunday that "The American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began." (This bombing capaign is referred to in the Downing Street memo.)

Addressing a briefing on lessons learned from the Iraq war Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley said that in 2002 and early 2003 allied aircraft flew 21,736 sorties, dropping more than 600 bombs on 391 "carefully selected targets" before the war officially started. The nine months of allied raids "laid the foundations" for the allied victory, Moseley said. They ensured that allied forces did not have to start the war with a protracted bombardment of Iraqi positions.

If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W. Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted illegally.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times last week on how he received the series of documents from two sources in the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Smith (who originally strongly supported the war in Iraq) wrote that at first he did not consider the now famous "Downing Street Memo" the most important of the documents he received. Instead, he felt it was a separate briefing paper which showed that the Blair government would support military action, but they had to find way to do that legally.

The Downing Street plan, according to the leaked briefing paper, was to use the United Nations to trap Saddam Hussein into giving them a reason to attack. The US and the British would do this by prodding "the UN Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors." It was hoped that Hussein would find this unacceptable, giving them a "legal justification for war."

But if that didn't work, the US was already working on "Plan B," and the information on that was in the Downing Street memo.

It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B [and apparently confirmed by Gen. Moseley's comments mentioned above]. Put simply, US aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

The number of bombs dropped on Iraq in March and April of 2002 was almost zero. But from May to August, that increased to 10 tons a month.

But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war. The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

And in another story on June 19th for the Times, Smith reported that another of the leaked documents, a paper on British Foreign Office legal advice, showed that the increased bombing campaign was "illegal" under international law, despite US claims to the contrary.

" ... the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July [2002] meeting [where the contents of the Downing Street memo wer recorded], made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.

The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.

Smith also writes that since Congress did not authorize military action against Iraq until Oct. 11, 2002, "the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally."

In an interview with RawStory.com (an alternative news source that covers stories under-reported by the mainstream media), John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a military defense analysis group, said his organization had raised questions about the increase in bombing in August of 2002. "The group saw the strikes as a means by which the US could degrade Iraqi defensive capabilities, and as a precursor to a declared war."

"It was no big secret at the time," [said Mr. Pike]. "It was apparent to us at the time that they were doing it and why they were doing it, and that was part of the reason why we were convinced that a decision to go to war had already been made, because the war had already started." Pike says the allied forces used their position in the 'No-Fly- Zone' to engage in pre-emptive action long before war was formally declared.

"They, I think, had decided to take advantage of Southern Watch and Northern Watch to go ahead and take the air defense system apart and attack any other targets that they felt needed to be preemptively destroyed," Pike asserted. "They explicitly altered the rules of engagement, because initially the rules of engagement had been that they would shoot back if [someone] shot at them. Then they said that if they were shot at, they would shoot at whatever they wanted to."

The conservative commentary blog, RedState.org, however, offers another explanation for the increased bombing – that the US and Britain were trying to force Hussein into complying with coalition requests for him to readmit weapons inspectors. And besides, the site argues, "what if Blair and Bush were trying to goad Hussein into putting a noose around his neck?"

Do you consider that, perhaps, Bush and Blair had determined that Hussein needed to go, once and for all? Perhaps they had good reason to believe that this leopard was not going to change his spots, and wasn't going to stop menacing the neighborhood. Then, maybe Blair and Bush looked around, saw the irresoluteness of the UN, saw the military weakness and political spinelessness of the other major nations on Earth (the nations of "Old Europe", for instance), and determined that, if someone is going to have to fight Hussein – that someone is US! Best fight him now, as opposed to fighting him a few years from now, after UN sanctions have collapsed and he's had a chance to upgun.

The Wall Street Journal reports on how the blogosphere has kept the story of the Downing Street Memo alive despite efforts by Blair and Bush, who have not denied the authenticity of the original document, to put it to rest. On Thursday, Blair admitted that he has been "astonished" by the coverage that the memo had received in the US and Britain.

Finally, in an ironic footnote to the incident, RawStory.com reported that the number of bombs dropped on Iraq actually declined after the start of the war in March, 2003.