On the bedside table:
Now Colin Powell Tells Us!
Now Colin Powell Tells Us!
Almost perfectly on queue after my conjecture over his silence in last week’s blogs, Colin Powell has decided to appear out of thin air and go negative on his former employers, especially Mr. Dick Cheney.
On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the San Francisco Chronicle that he and his department's top experts never believed that the Iraqis posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the President followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now he tells us. !
The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a "mushroom cloud" over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd.
US Shelved Evidence discounting Iraq's WMD
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House faced new questions Wednesday about President Bush's contention three years ago that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.
The Bush administration publicly asserted that two trailers captured by troops in in May 2003 were mobile "biological laboratories" even after intelligence officials had evidence that it was not true, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. On May 29, 2003, President George W. Bush hailed the capture of the trailers, declaring "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
But a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons, the Post reported, citing government officials and weapons experts who participated in the secret mission or had direct knowledge of it.The Post said the group's unanimous findings had been sent to the Pentagon in a field report, two days before the president's statement.
Bush cited the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction as the prime justification for invading . No such weapons ever were found. Bush and Cheney continued to insist for weeks afterward that the trailers were mobile biological weapons labs, even though they had been advised otherwise.
The 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal involves the use of a telemarketing firm hired by that state's Republican Party for election tampering.
During that state's 2002 election for the U.S. Senate seat the NHGOP hired GOP Marketplace to jam another phone bank being used by the state Democratic Party and the firefighters' union for efforts to turn out voters on behalf of then-governor Jeanne Shaheen on Election Day. John E. Sununu (son of the former anti-environmentalist chief of staff to daddy Bush), the Republican candidate, won a narrow victory. In addition to criminal prosecutions, disclosures in the case have come from an ongoing civil suit filed by the state's Democratic Party against the NHGOP.
Three men have been convicted of federal crimes for their involvement as of 2006. However, investigators and those who have followed the scandal closely believe that there were more people involved at the national level. It has been suggested that some high-ranking Republican Senate leaders were aware, and more recently records showing phone calls from the political operative convicted of engineering the scheme have raised questions as to whether officials in the Bush Administration were involved as well.
James Tobin, of Bangor, Maine, is among three people convicted on criminal charges in the phone-jamming; he has appealed. He served as President Bush's New England campaign chairman in 2004, but resigned shortly before the election after Democrats first alleged he was involved in the phone-jamming.
After thought: When the Founding Fathers conceived the structure of our government in the Constitution they built into it a series of checks and balances in order to promote a long-term equilibrium of governance. A bicameral Congress, a Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary, and the promotion of a free and inquisitive press were all crucial elements of the new political system. These important redundancies were established to protect against what Alexis de Tocqueville would later refer to as the “tyranny of the majority.” The Fathers were well read in the histories and philosophies of those who came before them. In the words of Isaac Newton they were "standing on the shoulders of giants." With this broad pool of knowledge, mixed with some amazing personalities, they created a synthesis of nation building that the world had never seen before or since.
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote”.
-Benjamin Franklin
For most of the country’s history this equilibrium was maintained, with one huge exception—the Civil War, establishing the American Constitution as the world’s longest standing working political document. The government of the people, for the people, by the people became the shining example to those other nations encouraged by the success of the American experiment.
So how has it gone so wrong? A frightening development has happened over the last twenty years, right under our noses, and now it stinks to high heaven! A snapshot of the checks and balances taken today shows one point of view (Republican) in charge of all of the component parts; the Executive branch, both chambers of Congress, the Supreme Court (and most circuit and appellate courts), and I would argue the “free” press also (after all, most of the networks, radio stations and daily newspapers are owned by a handful of corporations, most or all of whom supported the Republicans in the last two elections). I would go one further and argue that it is precisely this ownership of these relatively new tools of mass communication by entrenched corporate interests that has been the most important development in the “takeover” of the People’s democracy. Nowadays, the country is filled with millions of people who own very little of the American dream but who have a wealth of opinions--they are Rush Limbaugh's audience. They appear, like zombies, in churches, in bars, in Walmarts by the millions, all the time railing against their own self interests in most cases.
"When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality." --Thomas Jefferson to M. deStael, 1807.
In other words—throw the bums out!!
(AP 4/12/06)
SAN FRANCISCO (Chronicle 4/12/06)
Be seeing you...