"According to some estimates
we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions"
—Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
CBS News, January 2002
"This one company that had access to the computers at the FAA and the Pentagon and the FBI and Secret Service on 9-11-2001 was on a terrorist watch list, because of the supposed links to terrorist organizations. Michael Chertoff, who is now the head of Homeland Security, was the head of the Department of Justice's Criminal Investigation Division on 9-11. He refused permission to any FBI agents to raid the offices of this company that had access to the computers which allowed the second and third planes to hit their targets. This despite the links to "Arab terrorists" by their board of directors."
Anonymous, 10-31-05
"The dream of the one-power world may have expired in intractable Iraq, but the dream of the one-party state at home is not yet dead. Bush's difficulty is that his chief opposition is not the weak-kneed Democrats, unable to mount effective opposition even to the Iraq War, but the neglected stuff of the real world. What is currently "voting" against Bush, you might say, is not so much the bloc of independents or security moms or any of the other slices of the demographic pie that public opinion pollsters examine but the molecules of carbon dioxide heating up the global air, the collapsed water purification system of Iraq, the dollars fleeing our Treasury, the wages emptying out of people's pockets." Jonathan Schell, "Faith and Fraud", The Nation, 11-2-05
"The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and talking about Plame."
"Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he shouldn't hide behind those "legalisms" that Republicans were so eager to condemn in the Clinton years."
"The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter."
E.J. Dionne Jr., What the 'Shield' Covered Up, Washington Post, November 1, 2005
"To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty."
"This administration's grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they're promoting national security when they're hurting it; they say they're squelching terrorists when they're breeding them; they say they're bringing stability to Iraq when the country's imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)"
"And the most dangerous opposite of all: W. was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn't have been listening to, and not listening to his real father, who deserved to be listened to."
Maureen Dodd, "Who's On First?", NYT, October 29, 2005
"Legally, there are no significant differences between the investor fraud perpetrated by Enron CEO Ken Lay and the prewar intelligence fraud perpetrated by George W. Bush. Both involved persons in authority who used half-truths and recklessly false statements to manipulate people who trusted them. There is, however, a practical difference: The presidential fraud is wider in scope and far graver in its consequences than the Enron fraud. Yet thus far the public seems paralyzed."
"In response to the outcry raised by Enron and other scandals, Congress passed the Corporate Corruption Bill, which President Bush signed on July 30, 2002, amid great fanfare. Bush declared that he was signing the bill because of his strong belief that corporate officers must be straightforward and honest. If they were not, he said, they would be held accountable."
"Ironically, the day Bush signed the Corporate Corruption Bill, he and his aides were enmeshed in an orchestrated campaign to trick the country into taking the biggest risk imaginable--a war. Indeed, plans to attack Iraq were already in motion. In June Bush announced his "new" pre-emptive strike strategy. On July 23, 2002, the head of British intelligence advised Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the then-secret Downing Street Memo, that "military action was now seen as inevitable" and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Bush had also authorized the transfer of $700 million from Afghanistan war funds to prepare for an invasion of Iraq. Yet all the while, with the sincerity of Marc Antony protesting that "Brutus is an honorable man," Bush insisted he wanted peace."
"In an Ipsos Public Affairs poll, commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org and completed October 9, 50 percent said that if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war Congress should consider impeaching him. The President's deceit is not only an abuse of power; it is a federal crime. Specifically, it is a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States."
"So what do citizens do? First, they must insist that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence complete Phase II of its investigation, which was to be an analysis of whether the Administration manipulated or misrepresented prewar intelligence. The focus of Phase II was to determine whether the Administration misrepresented the information it received about Iraq from intelligence agencies. Second, we need to convince Congress to demand that the Justice Department appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Administration's deceptions about the war, using the same mechanism that led to the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the outing of Valerie Plame. (As it happens, Congressman Jerrold Nadler and others have recently written to Acting Deputy Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. pointing out that the Plame leak is just the "tip of the iceberg" and asking that Fitzgerald's authority be expanded to include an investigation into whether the White House conspired to mislead the country into war.)"
"Third, we can no longer shrink from the prospect of impeachment. Impeachment would require, as John Bonifaz, constitutional attorney, author of Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush and co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, has explained, that the House pass a "resolution of inquiry or impeachment calling on the Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into whether grounds exist for the House to exercise its constitutional power to impeach George W. Bush." If the committee found such grounds, it would draft articles of impeachment and submit them to the full House for a vote. If those articles passed, the President would be tried by the Senate. Resolutions of inquiry, such as already have been introduced by Representatives Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich demanding that the Administration produce key information about its decision-making, could also lead to impeachment."
Elizabeth de la Vega, "The White House Criminal Investigation", The Nation, November 14, 2005 issue.
"...the choices made by--or stolen from--the American people in the 2000 election have gained a momentum that will run and reverberate through the history of the next 30 years. The dangling chad high jinks of 2000 has put into power a bellicose and internationally unilateralist, interventionist administration. Bush Corp. consists of former movers and shakers of the fossil fuel industry--the very industry responsible for producing the key ingredient for runaway climate change. Current American policy and fossil fuel consumption are in effect throwing gasoline on the fires of global warming. And, it is a prescient fact that hundreds of prophecies from around the world--including even those recently published by the Pentagon--point to climate disruption as the key trigger for apocalyptic global warfare in the near future."
John Hogue
"If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that'll take you back to the Declaration of Independence." Col. Larry Wilkerson [Chief of staff for Colin Powell in Bush 2 administration and former director of Marine War College]
"Beginning in 1984, the Centers for Disease Control began providing Saddam's Iraq with biological materials--including viruses, retroviruses, bacteria, fungi, and even tissue that was infected with bubonic plague."
As Craig Unger reported in his 2004 book, House of Bush, House of Saud
"The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity,"
Bush said October 6 at a meeting of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
"Martial law, that's next. Bush is like a plane of glass. You can see all the worms turning around in his head at any moment. The first giveaway of what's on his mind--or the junta's mind."
Gore Vidal [10-20-2005]
"...the US occupation force which last week distinguished itself by burning two bodies of men who attacked some of them and then having Sergeant Jim Baker, "a member of a psychological operations unit", bellowing on his loudspeaker to Afghan villagers "Attention Taliban, you cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be." This was all recorded by an Australian television team." Brian Cloughley, "The Fifth Afghan War"
we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions"
—Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
CBS News, January 2002
"This one company that had access to the computers at the FAA and the Pentagon and the FBI and Secret Service on 9-11-2001 was on a terrorist watch list, because of the supposed links to terrorist organizations. Michael Chertoff, who is now the head of Homeland Security, was the head of the Department of Justice's Criminal Investigation Division on 9-11. He refused permission to any FBI agents to raid the offices of this company that had access to the computers which allowed the second and third planes to hit their targets. This despite the links to "Arab terrorists" by their board of directors."
Anonymous, 10-31-05
"The dream of the one-power world may have expired in intractable Iraq, but the dream of the one-party state at home is not yet dead. Bush's difficulty is that his chief opposition is not the weak-kneed Democrats, unable to mount effective opposition even to the Iraq War, but the neglected stuff of the real world. What is currently "voting" against Bush, you might say, is not so much the bloc of independents or security moms or any of the other slices of the demographic pie that public opinion pollsters examine but the molecules of carbon dioxide heating up the global air, the collapsed water purification system of Iraq, the dollars fleeing our Treasury, the wages emptying out of people's pockets." Jonathan Schell, "Faith and Fraud", The Nation, 11-2-05
"The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and talking about Plame."
"Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he shouldn't hide behind those "legalisms" that Republicans were so eager to condemn in the Clinton years."
"The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter."
E.J. Dionne Jr., What the 'Shield' Covered Up, Washington Post, November 1, 2005
"To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty."
"This administration's grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they're promoting national security when they're hurting it; they say they're squelching terrorists when they're breeding them; they say they're bringing stability to Iraq when the country's imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)"
"And the most dangerous opposite of all: W. was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn't have been listening to, and not listening to his real father, who deserved to be listened to."
Maureen Dodd, "Who's On First?", NYT, October 29, 2005
"Legally, there are no significant differences between the investor fraud perpetrated by Enron CEO Ken Lay and the prewar intelligence fraud perpetrated by George W. Bush. Both involved persons in authority who used half-truths and recklessly false statements to manipulate people who trusted them. There is, however, a practical difference: The presidential fraud is wider in scope and far graver in its consequences than the Enron fraud. Yet thus far the public seems paralyzed."
"In response to the outcry raised by Enron and other scandals, Congress passed the Corporate Corruption Bill, which President Bush signed on July 30, 2002, amid great fanfare. Bush declared that he was signing the bill because of his strong belief that corporate officers must be straightforward and honest. If they were not, he said, they would be held accountable."
"Ironically, the day Bush signed the Corporate Corruption Bill, he and his aides were enmeshed in an orchestrated campaign to trick the country into taking the biggest risk imaginable--a war. Indeed, plans to attack Iraq were already in motion. In June Bush announced his "new" pre-emptive strike strategy. On July 23, 2002, the head of British intelligence advised Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the then-secret Downing Street Memo, that "military action was now seen as inevitable" and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Bush had also authorized the transfer of $700 million from Afghanistan war funds to prepare for an invasion of Iraq. Yet all the while, with the sincerity of Marc Antony protesting that "Brutus is an honorable man," Bush insisted he wanted peace."
"In an Ipsos Public Affairs poll, commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org and completed October 9, 50 percent said that if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war Congress should consider impeaching him. The President's deceit is not only an abuse of power; it is a federal crime. Specifically, it is a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States."
"So what do citizens do? First, they must insist that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence complete Phase II of its investigation, which was to be an analysis of whether the Administration manipulated or misrepresented prewar intelligence. The focus of Phase II was to determine whether the Administration misrepresented the information it received about Iraq from intelligence agencies. Second, we need to convince Congress to demand that the Justice Department appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Administration's deceptions about the war, using the same mechanism that led to the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the outing of Valerie Plame. (As it happens, Congressman Jerrold Nadler and others have recently written to Acting Deputy Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. pointing out that the Plame leak is just the "tip of the iceberg" and asking that Fitzgerald's authority be expanded to include an investigation into whether the White House conspired to mislead the country into war.)"
"Third, we can no longer shrink from the prospect of impeachment. Impeachment would require, as John Bonifaz, constitutional attorney, author of Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush and co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, has explained, that the House pass a "resolution of inquiry or impeachment calling on the Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into whether grounds exist for the House to exercise its constitutional power to impeach George W. Bush." If the committee found such grounds, it would draft articles of impeachment and submit them to the full House for a vote. If those articles passed, the President would be tried by the Senate. Resolutions of inquiry, such as already have been introduced by Representatives Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich demanding that the Administration produce key information about its decision-making, could also lead to impeachment."
Elizabeth de la Vega, "The White House Criminal Investigation", The Nation, November 14, 2005 issue.
"...the choices made by--or stolen from--the American people in the 2000 election have gained a momentum that will run and reverberate through the history of the next 30 years. The dangling chad high jinks of 2000 has put into power a bellicose and internationally unilateralist, interventionist administration. Bush Corp. consists of former movers and shakers of the fossil fuel industry--the very industry responsible for producing the key ingredient for runaway climate change. Current American policy and fossil fuel consumption are in effect throwing gasoline on the fires of global warming. And, it is a prescient fact that hundreds of prophecies from around the world--including even those recently published by the Pentagon--point to climate disruption as the key trigger for apocalyptic global warfare in the near future."
John Hogue
"If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that'll take you back to the Declaration of Independence." Col. Larry Wilkerson [Chief of staff for Colin Powell in Bush 2 administration and former director of Marine War College]
"Beginning in 1984, the Centers for Disease Control began providing Saddam's Iraq with biological materials--including viruses, retroviruses, bacteria, fungi, and even tissue that was infected with bubonic plague."
As Craig Unger reported in his 2004 book, House of Bush, House of Saud
"The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity,"
Bush said October 6 at a meeting of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
"Martial law, that's next. Bush is like a plane of glass. You can see all the worms turning around in his head at any moment. The first giveaway of what's on his mind--or the junta's mind."
Gore Vidal [10-20-2005]
"...the US occupation force which last week distinguished itself by burning two bodies of men who attacked some of them and then having Sergeant Jim Baker, "a member of a psychological operations unit", bellowing on his loudspeaker to Afghan villagers "Attention Taliban, you cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be." This was all recorded by an Australian television team." Brian Cloughley, "The Fifth Afghan War"
