Political Cycles -- Joyce Levine

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Scooter Libby's Cycles All Tied Together (left, Scooter Libby)


Scooter Libby – Born 8/22/50 New Haven, CT. Unfortunately no time is available, so his cycles cannot be completely delineated.


What is interesting is at the time of his arrest, transiting Mars was square his natal Pluto. Mars is the planet of war and conflict. Pluto rules, among other things, subterfuge, covert operations, and the masses. In September when in all likelihood the indictment was being planned, transiting Saturn was conjunct his Venus and square his Mars. Saturn transits are typically when people get caught with any wrongdoing.


More trouble for Libby is brewing especially in February and March. Aspects from transiting Mars, Saturn, and Pluto increase the likelihood of further revelations and increased conflict.


Dick Cheney, Born January 30, 1941, 7:30 PM, Lincoln, NE. Interestingly enough, transiting Saturn was opposing Cheney's Sun in Aquarius exactly on October 28 when Libby was arrested.


There is little probability of Cheney being able to keep a low profile or operate without public scrutiny in the near future. His reputation is likely to take a dive in December, 2005. More revelations will follow in January, 2006. Cheney's involvement with the Valerie Plame debacle is likely to surface in the spring to early summer, if not before then.


George W. Bush, Born July 6, 1946, 7:26 AM, New Haven, CT


Last year I predicted that Bush's popularity would plummet in June, 2005. As of this writing, his ratings are under 40%. Even his normal base of right-wing Christian Fundamentalists are unhappy with him.


Bush had his second Saturn return in June of 2005. Saturn returns are times to grow up, face responsibility, and possibly face the music. Transiting Saturn reached his Leo Ascendant in September, 2005 and his Mercury and Pluto in October, 2005.


Bush's Pluto is in the same degree in Leo as Cheney's Sun is in Aquarius. This involves transiting Saturn with Bush's chart at the time of Libby's arrest. By December, 2005, Bush is likely to encounter more problems because of Libby and Cheney.


Irrational behavior on Bush's part at the end of January and February as transiting Uranus opposes Mars will likely make matters worse. He continues to be wounded by association in March as Chiron conjuncts his seventh house cusp.


Saturn is back on his Ascendant, Mercury, and Pluto in June and July and Chiron opposes his Ascendant once again. This brings more bad news for him, more accountability, and further problems based on his associates.


Mars is active again in September and October, as progressed Mars conjuncts the Moon and solar arc Mars squares the Ascendant. An attack on his life is possible. Further injuries to popularity with the public are likely, including possible difficulties with his political base.


It looks as if the fall elections favor the Democrats.


* * *

Joyce Levine is a full-time professional consulting astrologer with 30 years experience. She serves as a catalyst for her clients to overcome astro/psychological obstacles so that they can achieve their full potential. Joyce is available for consulting work with individuals, couples, families, and businesses. Joyce is the Clerk of NCGR, Level IV Certified in Consulting. She has been a certified professional member of the AFA since 1979.


Joyce is the author of A Beginner's Guide to Astrological Interpretation. Transformational Tapes: Self-Help Series: Meditation, Creative Visualization, Releasing Anger, and Contacting Your Guardian Angel; and Integrating Astrological Cycles Series: Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn, and Jupiter.

Contact Joyce at 617-354-7075, joycel@joycele vine.com




Contributed by Claudia!

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1122nj1.htm#

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.

The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.

The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.

The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.

Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee."

The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability.

Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the president made his strongest comments to date on the subject: "Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Since then, he has adopted a different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21, "This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not."

In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.

In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.

The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael MaloofDavid Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview. and

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.

Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated with the covert intelligence unit engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." In a statement, Feith said he is "confident" that investigators will conclude that his "office worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon.

Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to intelligence analyses provided by the CIA.

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.

After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other officials a note saying: "This was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA. The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."

On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush.

In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.

In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.

The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: "The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored."

This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several former and current senior officials.

Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it.

Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true.

Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame, the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal his role in leaking Plame's name to the press.

The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.

Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also available online.

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"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
How the Bush administration got spooked

By Tom Engelhardt


It's finally Wizard of Oz time in America. You know - that moment when the curtains are pulled back, the fearsome-looking wizard wreathed in all that billowing smoke turns out to be some pitiful little guy, and everybody looks around sheepishly, wondering why they acted as they did for so long.

Starting on September 11, 2001 - with a monstrous helping hand from Osama bin Laden - the Bush administration played the fear card with unbelievable effectiveness. For years, with its companion "war on terror", it trumped every other card in the American political deck. With an absurd system for color-coding dangers to Americans, the president, vice president and the highest officials in this land were able to paint the media a "high" incendiary orange and the Democrats an "elevated" bright yellow, functionally sidelining them.

How stunningly in recent weeks the landscape has altered - almost like your basic hurricane sweeping through some unprotected and unprepared city. Now, to their amazement, Bush administration officials find themselves thrust through the equivalent of a Star-Trekkian wormhole into an anti-universe where everything that once worked for them seems to work against them. As always, in the face of domestic challenge, they have responded by attacking - a tactic that was effective for years. The president, vice president, national security adviser and others have ramped up their assaults, functionally accusing Democratic critics of little short of treason - of essentially undermining American forces in the field, if not offering aid and comfort to the enemy. On his recent trip to Asia, the president put it almost as bluntly as his vice president did at home, "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into war continue to stand behind them." The Democrats were, he said over and over, "irresponsible" in their attacks. Dick Cheney called them spineless "opportunists" peddling dishonestly for political advantage.

But instead of watching the Democrats fall silent under assault as they have for years, they unexpectedly found themselves facing a roiling oppositional hubbub threatening the unity of their own congressional party. In his sudden, heartfelt attack on Bush administration Iraq plans ("a flawed policy wrapped in illusion") and his call for a six-month timetable for American troop withdrawal, Democratic congressional hawk John Murtha took on the Republicans over their attacks more directly than any mainstream Democrat has ever done. ("I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done. I resent the fact, on Veterans Day, he [Bush] criticized Democrats for criticizing them.") Perhaps more important, as an ex-Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran clearly speaking for a military constituency (and possibility some Pentagon brass), he gave far milder and more "liberal" Democrats cover.

For the first time since the war in Iraq began, "tipping points", constantly announced in Iraq but never quite in sight, have headed for home. Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president and drafter of recent presidential attacks on the Democrats, told David Sanger of the New York Times that "Bush's decision to fight back ... arose after he became concerned the [Iraq] debate was now at a tipping point"; while Howard Fineman of Newsweek dubbed Murtha himself a "one-man tipping point".

Something indeed did seem to tip, for when the White House and associates took Murtha on, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats leaped aggressively to his defense. In fact, something quite unimaginable even a few days earlier occurred. When Republican Representative Jean Schmidt of Ohio, the most junior member of the House, accused Murtha (via an unnamed Marine colonel supposedly from her district) of being a coward, Democratic Representative Harold Ford from Tennessee "charged across the chamber's center aisle to the Republican side screaming that Schmidt's attack had been unwarranted. "You guys are pathetic!" yelled Representative Martin Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Pathetic."

There could, however, be no greater sign of a politically changed landscape than the decision of former president Bill Clinton (who practically had himself adopted into the Bush family over the last year) to tell a group of Arab students in Dubai only two-and-a-half years late that the Iraqi invasion was a "big mistake". Since he is undoubtedly a stalking horse for his wife, that great, cautious ship-of-nonstate, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, should soon turn its prow ever so slowly to catch the oppositional winds.

If you want to wet an index finger yourself and hoist it airwards to see which way the winds are blowing, then just check out how the media has been framing in headlines the recent spate of administration attacks. Headline writing is a curious in-house craft - and well worth following. Changing headline language is a good signal that something's up. When the president attacks, it's now commonly said that he's "lashing out" - an image of emotional disarray distinctly at odds with the once-powerful sense of the Bush administration as the most disciplined White House on record and of the president and vice president as resolutely unflappable. Here's just a small sampling:

The Miami Herald, "President lashes out at critics of Iraq war"; the Associated Press, Cheney latest to lash out at critics; the Buffalo News, Bush lashes out at war critics; even the Voice of America, Bush lashes out at political opponents over Iraq accusations.

In other headlines last week, the administration was presented in post-Oz style as beleaguered, under siege and powerless to control its own fate: The Associated Press, for example, headlined a recent Jennifer Loven piece, Iraq war criticism stalks Bush overseas; the New York Times, a David Sanger report, Iraq dogs president as he crosses Asia to promote trade; and CNN headlined the Murtha events, A hawk rattles GOP's cage.

The language used in such recent media accounts was no less revealing. Sanger, for example, began his piece this way:

"President Bush may have come to Asia determined to show leaders here that his agenda is far broader than Iraq and terrorism, but at every stop, and every day, Mr Bush and his aides have been fighting a rearguard action to justify how the United States got into Iraq and how to get out."

While Loven launched hers with, "His war policies under siege at home ...", attributing the siege atmosphere and the Bush "counterattack" to "the president's newly aggressive war critics".

Lashing out, stalked, dogged, under siege, counterattacking, fighting a rearguard action - let's not just attribute this to "newly aggressive war critics". It's a long-coming shift in the zeitgeist, as evident in the media as in the halls of Congress.

On Thursday, for instance, ABC's Primetime TV news, which led with a story on the president "lashing out" at critics, then offered a long, up-close-and-personal segment in which a teary-eyed Murtha spoke of the war-wounded he's regularly visited at hospitals and the fraudulence of administration policy. That same night, another prime-time news broadcast turned the president's claim that the Democrats were "irresponsible" in their criticisms into a montage of Bush repeatedly saying "irresponsible" in different poses - so many times in a row, in fact, that the segment could easily have come from a sharp opening sequence on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

None of this would have been possible even weeks ago in a country where it was once gospel that you don't attack a president while he's representing the United States abroad. That's why, in the Watergate era, Richard Nixon had such a propensity for trips overseas and undoubtedly why our stay-at-home president's handlers decided to turn him into a Latin American and Asian globetrotter. The question is: How did this happen? What changed the zeitgeist and where are we heading?

Poll-driven politics
Polls are, it might be said, what's left of American democracy. Privately run, often for profit or advantage, they nonetheless are as close as we come these days - actual elections being what they are - to the expression of democratic opinion, serially, week after week. Everyone who matters in and out of Washington and in the media reads them as if life itself were at stake. They drive behavior and politics. Fear, too, is a poll-driven phenomenon. Not surprisingly then, it was the moment late last spring when presidential approval ratings fell decisively below the 50% mark, and looked to be heading for 40%, that the White House took anxious note and so, no less important, did a previously cowed media. Somewhere in that period, the fear factor, right in the administration's hands, was transformed into a feeling fearful factor. As I've written elsewhere, faced with the mother of a dead soldier on their doorstep, all the president's men blinked and the Camp Casey fiasco followed. Soon after, before hurricane Cindy could even blow out of town, hurricane Katrina blew in and the president's ratings headed for free fall. In just the last month, they look as if they had been shoved over a small cliff, dipping in the latest Harris and Wall Street Journal polls to an almost unheard of 34% (only five points above Richard Nixon's at his Watergate nadir).

The poll numbers, which once gave the administration's fear factor meaning, have simply evaporated - as have any figures that might indicate that this administration is capable of stanching its own wounds. Emboldening media and political opposition in Washington, such figures give Murtha-like cover to behavior that not long ago would have been unthinkable. A record 60% of Americans surveyed in the most recent USA Today poll, including one in four Republicans, said "the war wasn't 'worth it'. One in five Republicans said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake." Those who felt things were "going well" for the country as a whole dropped nine percentage points in a month.

Democrats long ago fled the ranks of presidential supporters, as more recently have independents; now moderate Republicans are beginning to peel away too. According to Tom Raum of the Associated Press,"[Bush's] approval on handling Iraq fell from 87% among all Republicans in November 2004 to 78% this month. Among Republican women, from 88% a year ago to 73% now. Among independents, approval on Iraq fell from 49% in November 2004 to 33% now." If you want a figure that, from the administration's viewpoint, offers a frightening glimpse into a possible future, consider the 79% of Americans who believe I Lewis Libby's indictment is "of importance to the nation"; this, despite Republican claims that the grounds for indicting were insignificant, and a new Libby defense fund made up of Republican high rollers and assorted neo-cons.

In other words, replace the still emotionally charged issues of the war in Iraq and the president's actions, where, at 34%-40%, a bedrock base of support remains more or less intact, with a less charged ethics-in-government issue and that vaunted Rock of Gibraltar shatters. This is the previously inconceivable future so many Republican politicians suddenly fear.

Just for the heck of it, throw in another factor - "intensity" - and you have an even more volatile picture, given the lack of positive, potentially mobilizing news on the domestic and foreign horizons. E J Dionne of the Washington Post suggests that the polling figures are even worse than they look because intensity of feeling on the war issue is now "on the side of the war's opponents". He adds:

"The findings on the strength of feelings about the war were matched by the intensity of feelings about Bush himself: Only 20% of those surveyed said they strongly approved of the overall job Bush was doing, while 47% strongly disapproved. A president who has always played to his base finds that his base is steadily shrinking."

In other words, doubt and demoralization are setting in - a political rot that can do untold damage. Given how many independents and moderate Republicans who once supported the war have changed their minds, the scathing attacks on Democrats for mind-changing on the war may not prove a winning strategy either. They may, as Raum comments, "backfire on Republicans".

But here's a question: Can we trace Bush's polling near-collapse to its origins anywhere? In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine under the eerie title, "The Iraq Syndrome" (subscription only), John Mueller, an expert on how wars affect presidencies, offers a canny, cool-eyed interpretation of changing American opinion on Iraq. He tracks polling data on the three sustained wars - Korea, Vietnam and Iraq - the US has fought in the last half-century-plus where we took more than 300 casualties.

All three show about the same polling pattern: broad enthusiasm at the outset, a relatively quick and steep falloff in support, followed by steady erosion thereafter from which no long-term presidential recovery seems possible (certainly not via heightened rhetoric). In all three wars, as support fell, pro-withdrawal sentiment rose. Though some experts link this pattern to an American "defeat-phobia" ,Mueller points out that, in cases such as Lebanon in the Reagan years and Somalia in the Clinton era, Americans have been quite capable of swallowing withdrawal and defeat (of a sort) without making the presidents involved pay any significant political cost.

The crucial factor in loss of support for each of these wars, Mueller insists, is a growing casualty list and not just any casualties either - only American ones. (The fact that "vastly more" Iraqis have died than all the victims of "all international terrorists in all of history" matters little, he observes, in American popular judgments on the war.) What makes Iraq stand out in this list of three "is how much more quickly support has eroded in the case of Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were around 1,500, the percentage of respondents who considered the Iraq war a mistake - more than half - was about the same as the percentage who considered the war in Vietnam a mistake at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when nearly 20,000 soldiers had already died."

If Mueller's right, then the steady drip of American casualties - many less dead and many more wounded than in Korea and Vietnam, in part because of improved medical care and triage techniques - has seeped deeply into American consciousness. This seems so, despite the administration's careful attempt to keep returning bodies and individual funerals out of sight and so out of mind; despite the fact that the American dead - 60 soldiers in the first 19 days of October - have largely been kept off the front pages of American papers and photos of dead Americans off television (where dead Iraqis can regularly be seen). Short of massive draw-downs of American forces in Iraq, there is no casualty end in sight for this administration; and drawing down ground forces (while substituting air power for them), as Richard Nixon learned in his "Vietnamization" program, only solves a home-front problem at the cost of creating staggering problems on the war front.

For an administration still fighting "withdrawal" with all its strength, this may prove a problem with no exit - further casualties acting as a motor propelling the unhappiness that changes more minds and pushes falling polling figures ever downward, propelling unease about the country, which only leads to escalating casualty figures of another kind - those growing defections from the ranks of your core political supporters.

When agendas go bump in the night
To put the current crisis in some perspective, you could say that two central agendas of the Bush administration proved to be in conflict, although for years this was less than evident (even to the players involved). There was the long-planned neo-conservative drive to invade Iraq and, through that act, begin to remake the Middle East. The neo-cons were backed in this by Vice President Cheney and his crew in the vice-presidential office as well as allied figures like John Bolton, Stephen Hadley, and (some of the time) Donald Rumsfeld, none of whom were necessarily neo-cons. The motives this disparate group held for remaking the region in their image ranged from the urge to establish a planetary, militarily enforced Pax Americana and/or an urge to control the oil heartlands of the planet to a desire - from the Likudniks in the administration - to secure the region for an ascendant Sharonista Israel.

Whatever the overlapping motivations, at the heart of this policy lay an urge to unleash a constitutionally unfettered "war president" on the world. (Torture was a crucial issue in all of this largely because, once established as an essential tool of the "war on terror", it would be proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bush's presidency had been freed of all restraints.) Put into full effect on March 20, 2003, when the "war on terror" melded into an invasion of Iraq, the policy was meant to place in the president's hands every global lever of power that mattered for all time.

It now seems far clearer that the endless fallout from the fatal decision to invade Iraq is eating away at another agenda entirely, one that emerged from the domestic political wing of this administration - from Karl Rove, Andrew Card, Tom DeLay and their ilk. This was the Republican desire to nail down the country as a purely red (as in red-meat) Republican land. The vetting of the K-Street lobbying crowd, the increasing control over the flow of corporate dollars into politics, the gerrymandering of congressional districts to create an election-proof House of Representatives, the mobilization of a religious base dedicated to an endless set of culture wars, the ushering in of a right-wing Supreme Court, and so many other activities were all meant to create an impregnable Republican Party in control of every lever of power in our country into an endless future.

The unfettered, imperial president and the unfettered, imperial Republican Party were joined at the hip by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which led to both the "war on terror" abroad and the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Department domestically. Had the Bush administration pursued both agendas, minus an invasion of Iraq, the two might have remained joined far longer. The crucial invasion decision, made almost immediately by the neo-con war party backed by the president, was supported by White House Chief of Staff Andrew ("From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August") Card and Karl ("the architect") Rove, both of whom believed that a good war, well-promoted and correctly wielded domestically, might drive a Republican agenda to eternal domination in America. None of them expected that it would prove to be the wedge driven between the two agendas.

The first hint of this was caught perfectly in a classic headline: On May 2, 2003, George Bush co-piloted an Air Force jet onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln (carefully kept 30 miles out of its San Diego homeport so that the president could have his "top gun" photo-op instead of climbing a gangplank like any normal being). Following this "historic landing", he stepped up to an on-deck podium where, under a White House banner that read "Mission Accomplished", he declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." This was clearly meant to be the stunning start of the president's campaign for reelection in 2004, a classic piece of Rovian image manipulation and a nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party. And so it seemed to most at the time.

But if you revisit the CNN story about the landing and speech, headlined "Bush calls end to 'major combat'," it's hard now not to note the subhead lurking just under it: US Central Command: Seven hurt in Fallujah grenade attack. Seven wounded American soldiers - that really says it all. The photo-op that was meant for the reelection campaign was already being undermined by another story; two policies yoked together were already pulling in different directions. Our present moment was already being born, unnoticed but in plain sight.

Now both agendas are in disarray with no help whatsoever on the horizon. Imagine, for instance, that the South Koreans timed the announcement of the withdrawal of the first of their troops from (Kurdish) northern Iraq for the moment the president arrived in their country. Imagine that Tony Blair's people are now said to be perfecting total withdrawal plans for next year, and that the president recently may have had to slap down the top American general in Iraq for suggesting withdrawal (or at least draw down) plans of his own. Imagine that various European nations are now investigating (or in the case of an Italian court charging) American agents in the "war on terror" with crimes. Imagine that the president, who often insisted Saddam had been overthrown to rid Iraq of its torture chambers ("the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever") and to end the reign of a "murderous tyrant who ... used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people", now faces a "tip-of-the-iceberg" torture scandal in Iraq involving the people we've brought to power and another spreading scandal about the American use of a chemical-like weapon, white phosphorous, on civilians in the city of Fallujah. Imagine that we proved less capable than Saddam of delivering basics like electricity and potable water to the people of Iraq, that we squandered billions of taxpayer dollars in "reconstruction" funds there, and that we face an insurgency that continues to grow and spread in opposition to a shabby elected government all but in league with the Iranians. Imagine that the president's Iraq war is now devouring his presidency and that it can only get worse.

The Middle East is a sea of political gasoline just waiting for the odd administration match or two; American foreign policy is in a kind of disarray for which even the final days of Vietnam offer no comparison; while at home, the DeLay, Frist, Libby and Abramoff scandals (and associated indictments) can only grow and spread. Special Counsel Fitzgerald has just announced his decision to empanel a new grand jury, sure to drive the Plame scandal ever deeper and higher into the administration and ever closer to the 2006 elections or possibly beyond. It would be easy to go on, but you get the idea.

It is a truism of American politics that voters are almost never driven to the polls by foreign policy. In this case, however, the war in Iraq has chased the president and his men ever since he landed on that carrier deck. How little he knew what he was asking for when, in a moment of bravado, he said of the Iraqi insurgents, "Bring 'em on." He just barely beat the erosive effects of his war to the polls in November 2004. Now, it continues to eat inexorably into the heartland of Republican political domination. Even Republican discipline in Congress - without the Hammer's hammer - has disintegrated under the heat of the war. As Chris Nelson wrote recently in his Washington insider's newsletter, The Nelson Report:

"The stunning swiftness of the bipartisan Congressional collapse of support for the administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, and by extension the entire anti-terrorism effort, is such that it has not been fully appreciated by the 'leadership' of either party. That's the real meaning of a Senate vote, which Republicans tried to spin into a victory for the president, because they avoided the Democrat's amendment to set performance-based withdrawal deadlines."

Now, the war threatens to crack open the Republican base and chase the dream of a single-party Republican political future - only recently so close - right off the map. No wonder the Democrats have just come out swinging (sort of). The political shock and awe the administration so regularly deployed after September 11, 2001 no longer works. The Democrats suddenly have discovered that - no thanks to them - the American people are somewhere else and they have little to fear from George Bush or Dick Cheney. No presidential "counterattack", no "lashing out", no set of speeches or new agenda (to be announced in the 2006 State of the Union Address or anywhere else) is likely to change any of this for the better for this president. Fear is no longer on the Bush administration's side. No wonder they're now afraid - very, very afraid.

Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory Culture. (Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by permission.)

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

Sent in by Claudia:


FUBAR

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http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7639.shtml

GOP memo touts new terror attack as way to reverse party's decline By DOUG THOMPSON Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue Nov 10, 2005, 06:19

A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.”

The memo says such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections.

GOP insiders who have seen the memo admit it’s a risky strategy and point out that such scenarios are “blue sky thinking” that often occurs in political planning sessions.

“The President’s popularity was at an all-time high following the 9/11 attacks,” admits one aide. “Americans band together at a time of crisis.”

Other Republicans, however, worry that such a scenario carries high risk, pointing out that an attack might suggest the President has not done enough to protect the country.

“We also have to face the fact that many Americans no longer trust the President,” says a longtime GOP strategist. “That makes it harder for him to become a rallying point.”

The memo outlines other scenarios, including:

--Capture of Osama bin Laden (or proof that he is dead);

--A drastic turnaround in the economy;

--A "successful resolution" of the Iraq war.

GOP memos no longer talk of “victory” in Iraq but use the term “successful resolution.”

“A successful resolution would be us getting out intact and civil war not breaking out until after the midterm elections,” says one insider.

The memo circulates as Tuesday’s disastrous election defeats have left an already dysfunctional White House in chaos, West Wing insiders say, with shouting matches commonplace and the blame game escalating into open warfare.

“This place is like a high-school football locker room after the team lost the big game,” grumbles one Bush administration aide. “Everybody’s pissed and pointing the finger at blame at everybody else.”

Republican gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey deepened rifts between the Bush administration and Republicans who find the President radioactive. Arguments over whether or not the President should make a last-minute appearance in Virginia to try and help the sagging campaign fortunes of GOP candidate Jerry Kilgore raged until the minute Bush arrived at the rally in Richmond Monday night.

“Cooler heads tried to prevail,” one aide says. “Most knew an appearance by the President would hurt Kilgore rather than help him but (Karl) Rove rammed it through, convincing Bush that he had enough popularity left to make a difference.”

Bush didn’t have any popularity left. Overnight tracking polls showed Kilgore dropped three percentage points after the President’s appearance and Democrat Tim Kaine won on Tuesday.

Conservative Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum told radio talk show host Don Imus Wednesday that he does not want the President's help and will stay away from a Bush rally in his state on Friday.

The losses in Virginia and New Jersey, coupled with a resounding defeat of ballot initiatives backed by GOP governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California have set off alarm klaxons throughout the demoralized Republican party. Pollsters privately tell GOP leaders that unless they stop the slide they could easily lose control of the House in the 2006 midterm elections and may lose the Senate as well.

“In 30 years of sampling public opinion, I’ve never seen such a freefall in public support,” admits one GOP pollster.

Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin says the usual tricks tried by Republicans no longer work.

"None of their old tricks worked," he says.

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) admits the GOP is a party mired in its rural base in a country that's becoming less and less rural.

"You play to your rural base, you pay a price," he says. "Our issues blew up in our face."

As Republican political strategists scramble to find a message – any message – that will ring true with voters, GOP leaders in Congress admit privately that control of their party by right-wing extremists makes their recovery all but impossible.

“We’ve made our bed with these people,” admits an aide to House Speaker Denny Hastert. “Now it’s the morning after and the hangover hurts like hell.”

© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue

CA-Init: Arnold the One-Term-inator

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/9/132345/114

by kos

Wed Nov 09, 2005 at 11:23:45 AM PDT

To call California a disaster for Arnold is the biggest understatement of the year. Schwarzenegger spent $50 million of taxpayer money in an election in which every single ballot initiative failed, and failed handily (the closest prop, the parental notification one, failed by over 5 percent).

In one fell swoop:

Arnold lost his biggest leverage against the Democratic legislature -- the threat of taking his agenda straight to the voters.

He destroyed his early efforts to portray himself as a non-partisan moderate Republican. By the time this thing was over, Arnold was exposed as the tool of the right-wing Republican Party. The union-dues initiative was a blatant attempt to strip California Democrats from their biggest source of funding, while leaving Republican sources of political money free from interference.

Arnold's agenda, itself, was dramatically rejected by the voters. Of his four initiatives, the public union dues measure did best, and it failed by seven points. The rest of his proposals did much more poorly. His flagship spending measure failed by 24 points.

The perception of Arnold's invulnerability is shattered. As early as mid-year, Arnold was still viewed by the media as a formidable political force, unmatched by anything the Dems could offer up. Suddenly, Arnold is looking pretty shitty. And given that the strongest selling point against most of the initiatives was that "Arnold supported them", it bodes terrible for his 2006 chances.

By standing up for his special interests, Arnold is now near-universally reviled as a hypocrite. The California press has been full of stories of Arnold's prolific fundraising, surpassing even that of the hated Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger came into office on rampant (justified) discontent with the flood of special interest money into the political process. They've now realized that Arnold isn't any better. And his special interests are a lot worse than ours.

Arnold will now try to move back to the center and pretend yesterday never happened. Too late. Yesterday happened, and will happen again in November 2006.

He should really consider retirement.

Update: $300 million was spent on this special election. Here's were the money went.

Changed the title to reflect new nickname zeppomarx coined for Arnold in the comments.

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Tags: CA-Init, California, Arnold Schwarzenegger (all tags)

View Comments | 142 comments

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/8/125531/161

Saddam used chemical weapons against civilians. Did the US do so as well?

by kos

Tue Nov 08, 2005 at 10:55:31 AM PDT

So apparently the US is committed to doing everything it claimed it hated about Saddam. First came the torture. Even while Bush was claiming the US had shut down Saddam's rape and torture rooms, US forces in Iraq, Guantanamo, and elsewhere were doing the exact opposite.

Now, we're getting evidence that the US has used chemical weapons in Iraq. From the Independent (UK):

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city [...]

"Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."

Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

The video evidence can be found here.

What final thread of moral authority we still had is frayed beyond repair. Torture and the use of chemical weapons against civilians. How can Bush claim he is now any different than Saddam?

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Tags: Iraq, WMD, chemical weapons, White phosphorus, Myths (all tags)

View Comments | 192 comments

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

Saturday :: Nov 5, 2005

Did Harry Reid Hit Bill Frist This Week With The "Smoking Gun"?

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/005940.php

When Harry Reid shut down the Senate earlier this week due to Pat Roberts and Bill Frist’s stonewalling of a Phase Two investigation over how the Bush Administration used intelligence in making its case for war, many of us wondered why now? What took you guys so long to use a procedural lever that you’ve had available to you all along that could have been employed before the election to raise the issue of Bush’s lies into a campaign issue? Was it a sudden re-growth of guts and balls that did this, or did the Democrats now come into possession of new information that was withheld from them before the election that gave them the club to force this issue out into the open now? We now know the answer, and it is the latter.

According to Editor and Publisher this afternoon, the New York Times has been provided with a previously-classified intelligence document by Senator Carl Levin. And what does this document say, which was provided to the Democrats conveniently months after the 2004 elections?

The intelligence document says that the US intelligence community knew as early as February 2002 that an Al Qaeda operative who was the source for the Bush Administration claims that Saddam was training Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and chemical weapons was indeed a fabricator. And who knew this? Rummy’s Defense Intelligence Agency. And yet what did Bush do eight months later in Cincinnati just before the war resolution?

“Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that ‘we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’”

Some of you may say that “big deal; so Bush lied about this.” But keep in mind that we now know that the Bush Administration also knew as far back as January 2003 that the Niger uranium claim was based on forgeries. We know that the Bush Administration was also told that the aluminum tubes story was bogus before the invasion as well. We now know that the claim that Saddam was assisting Al Qaeda was also a lie, and that the Administration knew this from Rummy himself as far back as February 2002. And we know that the IAEA was still on the ground in Iraq and had not confirmed any of Bush’s claims that Saddam had definitively stockpiled WMDs in violation of the two UN resolutions that Bush based his war upon.

And why exactly is this so important? Because take a look at the certification that Bush sent to Congress to start the war, which was required in the October 2002 war resolution, and then see that as we suspected over two and a half years ago, Bush has a big problem now:

March 18, 2003

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH

This latest revelation means that at the time Bush justified the commencement of war against Iraq consistent with what was required under Public Law 107-243, he certified things not in evidence, and made claims to Congress (Saddam’s active operation of a WMD program and Saddam’s assistance to Al Qaeda) that he, Cheney, and Rummy already knew were false.

He lied to Congress to start the war. And now 53% of the American public says that if it is clear that Bush lied, they would support Congress considering impeachment proceedings against the president.

That may be why the Democrats just now made their stand this week. They have new evidence that Bush lied to Congress, and that the March 18, 2003 determination was faulty, and that Bush knew it was based on fabricators, faked documents, and doctored intelligence.

Steve Soto :: 3:55 PM :: Comments (42) :: TrackBack (4) Other blogs commenting on this post

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051104.html

Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted.

Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play.

And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.....

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

BLACK SITES....Dick Cheney, speaking for the Bush administration, is desperately opposed to John McCain's anti-torture amendment unless it permits torture by the CIA. Here's why:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries....The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

....CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Read the whole thing. This system of "black sites" holds hundreds of prisoners; it has virtually no oversight; it would be illegal under American law; and it depends on torture (and rendition to torture-friendly countries) as routine practices.

It makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?

—Kevin Drum 1:30 PM Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (160)

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley