Neo – CONNED !

[jjw1965]

Neo – CONNED !

 

[Ocean Breeze]

On cons and lies

Tell Us Who Fabricated the Iraq Evidence
by Norman Dombey

President Bush's principal adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned again over the improper naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei, accused by the American right of being insufficiently aggressive, wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry Franklin pleads guilty to passing on classified information to Israel. Just a normal week in politics. But there is a thread linking these events and it is Iraq.
Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war, and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question: who was so keen to prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that they forged documents purporting to show that he was trying to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons? The forgery was revealed to the Security Council by ElBaradei. That was not an intelligence error. It was a straightforward lie, an invention intended to mislead public opinion and help start a war.

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely, nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11 and a month after that, as George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists, a report from the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

Disappointingly for the neocons, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to check the story: he reported that it was nonsense. When the story was repeated by Bush, Wilson went public. His wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, was then outed by the White House. Hence Rove's predicament.

An organisation called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up in the Pentagon by Douglas Feith, a former consultant to Israel's Likud party, to prepare for the war. In the words of Robert Baer, a distinguished former CIA man, it was a "competing intelligence shop at the Pentagon"..."if you didn't like the answer you're getting from the CIA". In short, bogus stories would get a second chance at the OSP.

A clue to the ancestry of these black arts can be found in 1980, when right-wing Republicans wanted Ronald Reagan elected. They publicised a story that Billy Carter, the then President Jimmy Carter's colourful brother, had received $50,000 (£28,000) from the Libyan government.

The story was always denied by the President and no evidence of the payment was found, but the story helped to elect Reagan. Its source? Sismi, and an associate of a man called Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen is an intriguing and enduring presence in the murkier parts of US foreign policy. He is an American specialist on Italy with a long-standing commitment to Israel. According to The New York Times, in December 2001, a few months after the CIA first heard the Niger claims, Ledeen flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin. In Rome they met the head of Sismi.

Some months later, the documents were published, having been sold to an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to Sismi.So far, so circumstantial. One man who might well know the answer to all this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA. His belief is that the documents were produced in the US but "funnelled through the Italians". When an interviewer asked Cannistraro "if I said Michael Ledeen", he reportedly replied "I don't think it's a proven case ...You'd be very close"

Ledeen, on hearing this, issued the following statement: "I have absolutely no connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen them. I did not work on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing about them, don't think I ever wrote or said anything about the subject."

It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?

Norman Dombey is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Sussex and an expert on Iraq's nuclear capability.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

What 2000 looks like...........and the lies it took to get there.. :evil: :twisted: :evil:

USRegime=Madness personified.

http://theunitedamerican.blogs.com/Movies/2000A/2000.html

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Bush & the four horsemen

October 10, 2005

It's becoming apparent to even the most avid Bush loyalist, that the current charlatan-in-chief has been the greatest catastrophe in the nation's 200 year history. Regrettably, there are strong indications that the Crawford albatross is planning to pull us further downward towards the ocean floor.

At present, the republic is buckling beneath the weight of deception, violence and incompetence. In Iraq, the plan to chop up the country into three smaller parts is moving ahead despite the intensity of the resistance or the objections of the Sunni minority. Bush has assumed the mantle of an Iraqi Jefferson Davis championing the merits of reformation and regional autonomy. The new constitution provides only the thinnest cover for a neocon master-plan that destroys what little is left of Iraqi society while legitimizing a permanent American occupation. Al Jaafari, Talibani, Chalabi and the long list of rogues and collaborators have made their Faustian bargain with their US overlords and put their country on a course that will result in decades of hardship and slaughter; all for what?

A mottled earthen hut in the world's most perilous gated community; the green zone?

At home the effects of Bush's rule have been equally harsh. The anarchic Bush has rummaged through the Bill of Rights like a draught-horse in a steeple-case. No statute, law or amendment has escaped his withering attention. One by one, he's savaged the constitutional protections that once shielded the citizen from the long-arm of the state. He's cut through 800 years of English and American jurisprudence like the Grim Reaper on saint's day; leaving nothing behind but the gulags that house his victims.

In the next six months the country will face its greatest challenge since the Civil War. The confluence of potential threats is unprecedented. Experts are predicting that oil supplies will not meet demand in the first quarter of 2006. This is bound to cause skyrocketing prices, long lines at gas stations, a downward-trend in the economy, and a declining dollar. The American economic landscape, already full of potholes, is heading for an even bumpier road ahead. The soaring deficits, the jobless recovery, the humongous housing bubble, and a personal savings rate lower than any time since the Great Depression; all foreshadow an end to the giddy Clinton-era prosperity. Meanwhile, the Bush troupe is on a spending-bacchanal that's put the country on the fast-track to ruin. Bush is like the girl who couldn't say no; shoveling out the bucket-loads of cash to every mega-corporation that lines up at the White House lawn with a begging bowl in hand.

A quick review of Iraq, (where the $18 billion in reconstruction money vanished into the flannel pockets of Bush constituents) or New Orleans (the next destination for the ravenous corporate parasites) shows that the well-oiled system of cronyism is in full meltdown mode. There's simply not enough payola to fill the coffers of every crook in the Bush phone directory.

The market is getting increasingly anxious with the drunken spending-frenzy and needs only the slightest shove to put it into a nosedive. As Allan Greenspan admitted, the spending is "out of control," and yet, the stealing continues unabated. No Fed-chieftain or money-managing magician is strong enough to rescue the drowning economy from its doldrums. The rock-hard foundation of fiscal solvency has been utterly abandoned.

America's energy future is looking even more tenuous than the economy. Oil supplies are stretched to the limit and available resources are reaching the point of diminishing returns. The double-whammy of Katrina and Rita has put the entire Gulf region on life-support making our dependence on foreign oil greater than ever.

Its no wonder the Bush administration chose Iraq as the second domino in its global crusade. The oil business is built on projections and we can be reasonably certain that they saw that the wiggle-room was disappearing from the market. The collection of corporate kingpins in the administration is not persuaded by sentimentality; they don't trudge off to war for freedom or democracy, but cold-hard cash. The chance to control the last of the world's oil proved irresistibly seductive; especially since it was the only way to perpetuate the caste-system that has dominated the planet since the eighteenth century. It's impossible to imagine that Bush or his fellows would abdicate what they believe is their birthright; the continuation of elite-white-male rule into perpetuity.

But now, of course, they've hit a glitch. Iraq has changed from cakewalk to quagmire in a matter of months and the entire project is going sideways. The combination of poor planning, insufficient numbers of troops and the most inept civilian leadership in Pentagon history has torpedoed the Bush strategy to extend the realm and secure vital oil supplies. In other words, we're up the creek.

Bad luck follows Bush like a shadow. Another 3 years and the frogs and locusts will be collecting at the borders ready to pick the last flaccid strands of flesh off the American dream. Even barring another onslaught of biblical-type hurricanes; the steady militarization, the flat-lining economy, and the bird flu will certainly finish us off. The first major wrinkles in the oil supply are expected sometime in January. We can assume the credit-weary, over-extended American public will be gasping for air shortly thereafter.

It was a great run while it lasted. We reached Olympus long enough to unfurl the banner before tumbling back down to terra firma. What more can we expect? Maybe we should just quietly take our seats on the USS Hindenburg and let our madcap captain point us towards the blackest thundercloud on the horizon.

We're doomed anyway.

Courtesy

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Pinter: We have brought torture and misery in the name of freedom
Harold Pinter




October 14, 2005



By Harold Pinter who yesterday won the Nobel Prize for Literature
Published: 14 October 2005
The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror - and indeed the pity - of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.

But the "free world" we are told, as embodied in the United States and Great Britain, is different to the rest of the world since our actions are dictated and sanctioned by a moral authority and a moral passion condoned by someone called God. Some people may find this difficult to comprehend but Osama Bin Laden finds it easy.

What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to justify themselves) - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

An independent and totally objective account of the Iraqi civilian dead in the medical magazine The Lancet estimates that the figure approaches 100,000. But neither the US or the UK bother to count the Iraqi dead. As General Tommy Franks of US Central Command memorably said: "We don't do body counts".

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it " bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East". But, as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers. What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem and chaos.

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well, President Bush himself answered this question when he said: "We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation". I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

What do Bush and Blair actually see when they look at themselves in the mirror?

I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments.

Adapted by Harold Pinter from a speech he delivered on winning the Wilfred Owen Award earlier this year

speaking of powerful TRUTHS.........

 

[neocon-hunter]

The scariest part about the Neocons to me is this:

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That is a very dangerous thing.

If you fight the same enemy long enough, you become them.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

If you fight the same enemy long enough, you become them.

and sadly they already have. Fighting the so called "terrorists" the way they chose ......has turned them into terrorists. They terrorize with fear tactics, with words, with bias and prejudice, with propaganda and lies. ......and the military "option"

and :

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

........they become the very "evil" they keep creating ........but no one can make them realize that....as they have blinders on ( both eyes and ears)

 

[no1important]

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That sure is the truth. Thats why "W" brings up OBL and terrorism to keep his colonization plans going.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Re: RE: Neo – CONNED !

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That sure is the truth. Thats why "W" brings up OBL and terrorism to keep his colonization plans going.

......indeed......and this is why OBL is more useful to bush alive and "missing".. than captured. Bush needs/wants him "on the loose"...and OBL KNOWS THIS.....as OBL is not as stupid as bush is.

so the operative question is : What is in it for OBL???

 

[Ocean Breeze]

White House sets up group to market war in Iraq in 2002: article

www.chinaview.cn 2005-10-17 01:19:43


WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- The White House set up, without announcement, a group to market a war in Iraq in August 2002, seven months before the March 2003 invasion, according to an article published by the New York Times on Sunday.

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, and only one newspaper article or two have mentioned it in passing reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, said the article in the newspaper's opinion page.

The group had eight members, including Karl Rove, the top political adviser to President George W. Bush, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and then presidential security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others, and itsmission was to market a war in Iraq.

On July 23, 2002, a week or two before the WHIG first convened in earnest, a British official said that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war, said the article, written by columnist Frank Rick.

On Sept. 6, 2002, a few weeks after the WHIG first convened, Card alluded to the group's existence that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," the article noted.

The official introduction of that product began two day later, the article said. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, 2002, Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam Hussein as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

Cheney cited as evidence a front-paged article, later debunked,about supposedly nefarious aluminium tubes in that morning's New York Times, the article said.

Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of the WHIG and the start of the US invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's CIA mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims,took place nearly a year before the infamously fictional 16 words about "uranium from Africa" in Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of the war, the article said. Enditem

LYING BASTARDS

 

[Reverend Blair]

A little more on the Valerie Plame thing.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Like the way this one is written

The Slings and Arrows of George W. Bush's Outrageous Fortune
by Robert Higgs
by Robert Higgs




The Happy Days train has pulled out of the station at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. No more do the Oval Office and the Rose Garden resound with laughter as they did when Shock-and-Awe was being dispensed to the most menacing and evil villain since Vlad the Impaler. Today, verily, there is no joy in Mudville. If we can credit the opinion polls and the progressive journalists who gleefully report them, Mighty Casey has struck out. Indeed, the whole lineup seems to have fanned, and Bush League players fear that ignominious defeat awaits them in the 2006 playoffs. Reliable sources report that Democratic Party officials have been salivating heavily and that members of the loyal opposition have begun to make extraordinarily large purchases on credit.

The emperor, sunk in personal exasperation and political funk, desperately needs to regain the ebullient fighting spirit he exhibited when he declared, just prior to ordering an all-out nuclear attack on Denmark, that "as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed. . . . The only path to peace and security is the path of action." Although the sagacious Vice President and de facto commander-in-chief Dick Cheney countermanded young George's order to attack Denmark, the better to marshal troops for impending attacks on each of the Muslim countries from Morocco to Mindanao, Bush's confident mien did wonders in those glorious days to lift the populace out of its Vietnam Syndrome, that frightful if wholly mythical psychological slough into which Americans were said to have relapsed after their momentary euphoria when George H. W. Bush kicked Saddam's butt in 1991.

Now, ordinary people and opinion leaders who lack the strength of character to stay the relentlessly downward course, like the wretched sharks they are, have pounced on the Bully Boy Emperor and his chief bootlickers, kicking them while they are down. House Majority Leader (currently in absentia from his leadership position) Tom DeLay has been indicted by an incurably partisan Texas prosecutor, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist must endure investigation for alleged hanky-panky with regard to corporate stock sales. Just because Republicans have been seen jumping from Bush's sinking ship of state like – well, you know – does not mean that one and all must abandon the president as he struggles to disentangle himself from the veritable flock of albatrosses now wrapped around his neck, weighing him down and impeding his freedom of movement. The man needs to breathe, for crissake.

Emblematic of these troubles is the relentless persecution of the mischievous boy genius Karl Rove (aka "Bush's Brain"). A man who rose to his present heights of gray eminence by dint of his dedication to dirty tricks and his steadfast loyalty to the horse he rode to the top of the political trash heap, the already-busy Rove must now divert his attention from the urgent demands of composing the president's teleprompter scripts and instead expend precious time and energy on such trivial tasks as destroying the reputations of all who speak ill of the person whom political philosophers have definitively identified as "the only president we have." The journalists, not content even with this malodorous pursuit of the president's indefatigable lackey, a man who plainly seeks only to promote the public interest, have delighted of late in dragging down another dedicated public servant, commander-in-chief Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. This journalistic harassment is so stupid. How can anyone nicknamed Scooter possibly have done anything seriously at odds with right reason?

So low have the president's critics sunk that they have had the impudence to reveal that his heart-to-heart video conference with a handful of carefully coached gung-ho soldiers in Iraq was – at this point, I suggest that you remove any impressionable children from the reading area – actually a shameless fraud, the sort of counterfeit news the administration's (any administration's) press warriors concoct with mind-numbing regularity, the better to deepen the moral and intellectual slumber of the masses. That reporters should so much as whisper such an accusation shows how far the dignity of the Fourth Estate has fallen since the days when Franklin D. Roosevelt could yuck it up strictly off the record with the White House press corps, who in lapdog gratitude never wrote a harsh word about the charismatic leader who worked so hard to pull the country out of the depression of 1929–33 and into the depression of 1937–38. Sending some of these ungrateful journalists for a few months' residence at the Hotel Gitmo might do wonders to improve their manners.

No one, of course, dares to dispute the president's courageous leadership during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Did he shrink from his duty? Did he take refuge in an elaborate high-tech bunker bored into a sturdy mountainside in Colorado? Hell, no! Only days after the Corps of Engineers' levees failed, washing the greater part of the city of New Orleans into Lake Pontchartrain and thence to the Gulf of Mexico, George W. Bush was there, diverting government personnel from the rescue of survivors to the provision of security for his royal highness. The terrible risks notwithstanding, his manhood did not fail him when a photo-op called, and he rose to the occasion just as he had risen during all previous crises, indeed, much as he had after the stalwart termination of his terrified base-hopping aboard Air Force One after 9/11, when he came fearlessly to Manhattan and, yes, stood up and made a short speech.

You betcha: he did exactly the same thing in New Orleans. He came, and he told us suffering southerners that he was proud of the wonderful job FEMA was doing. Good thing he came and cleared up that matter, too, because until then those of us on the ground (or in the water) here in southeast Louisiana had been laboring under the impression that FEMA had done nothing except to obstruct the efforts of the countless private parties seeking to save lives and property and to restore vital services. It just goes to show how wrong the eye witnesses – myself among them – can be. I speak with complete assurance, therefore, when I declare that anyone suffering in a future catastrophe, whether it be an act of God or blowback from an act of Bush, can expect the president to come along and make a bullshit speech. Makes a man proud to be an American. Gives us something to cling to when our houses have been blown away, crushed by fallen trees, or washed down the river.

Topping the entire unjust assault on our Glorious Leader, however, now comes the carping criticism of his nomination of Harriet Miers to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. To see just how unfair these criticisms are, we must bear in mind some crucial facts.

First, the Supreme Court is not really an important part of our government any longer. Think of it as an unofficial part of the Executive Office of the President. If, for example, the court should make a due process ruling the president doesn't fancy, he can simply order the defendant removed to Guantanamo. The beauty of that tropical paradise, of course, is that it lies outside every court's jurisdiction, yet within the control of the U.S. Department of Defense, presided over by Bush's gentle and side-splittingly funny cabinet secretary, the avuncular death-master Donald Rumsfeld. Besides serving as a convenient lodging place for legal unpersons, Gitmo has the additional virtue of facilitating some fascinating experimentation in – what shall we call it? – advanced fraternity hazing: just one more of the administration's contributions to the improvement of campus life (No Child Left Behind; No Alleged Unlawful Combatant Left in Court).

Second, the president actually searched high and low for a court nominee. He looked under the same White House rug where he once sought to find Osama bin Laden to the immense delight of the assembled reporters (droll, droll was our intrepid leader in those halcyon days). After much anguished deliberation, Bush settled on the nomination of a ham-and-Swiss sandwich to fill the vacant slot on the court. However, when he vetted this choice to a select group of confidential advisers, he was told that ham was absolutely out of the question. Bush then closeted himself in prayer for the greater part of an entire morning and came forth with the idea of nominating a corned beef on rye. Although the president was satisfied that this choice reflected his best judgment, Cheney, as he so often does, overrode the choice and insisted that Bush select something more sentient. About that time, Bush's personal attorney crept into the room, and the president, looking up with the flash of genius for which he has become legendary, knew instantly that he had hit upon the best legal mind he could find without leaving his office.

The Christian Right, of course, has displayed nothing but despicable disloyalty in its criticism of Bush's choice. Nevertheless, the always-forgiving president has ignored their howls of protest and assured them that Ms. Miers is indeed a church-going Christian and a person who really does know the difference between a plaintiff and a defendant in a routine law case. Although she has neither written anything of substance nor spoken publicly on constitutional jurisprudence, Miers can make a terrific egg salad, according to the president, who also observed enthusiastically: "And she sure as hell has never said a bad word about me!" So far, the fundamentalists seem unconvinced, but it is difficult to form a clear judgment about their thinking at the moment, when so many of them are preoccupied with the campaign to exhume the remains of William Jennings Bryan, to find out once and for all whether he was poisoned by liberals descended from monkeys.

Much more might be affirmed, of course, in charting the president's sea of troubles. I have not even mentioned the government's latest phony-baloney election in Iraq – still another critically important landmark in transforming Iraq from a hellhole ruled by a sonofabitch into a hellhole ruled by our sonofabitch. But, as Bush himself always says, "when the going gets tough, the tough get . . . started? moving? under way? whatever."

 

[Ocean Breeze]

It's bush/cheney

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 16 October 2005

There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.

As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group."

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage."

The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's "escalation of nuclear rhetoric" could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, "because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb." It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about "uranium from Africa" in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

It was not until the war was supposedly over - with "Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved" with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as "Bush's brain," he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

"Bush's Brain" is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in "Bush's Brain," bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by "a layer of operatives" from any ill behavior that might implicate him. "There is no crime, just a victim," Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

-------

 

[JomZ]

Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war, and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question.

How does that old saying go..... The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Funny how we never ever learn this.

 

[Jo Canadian]

 

[unclepercy]

Re: RE: Neo – CONNED !

The scariest part about the Neocons to me is this:

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That is a very dangerous thing.

If you fight the same enemy long enough, you become them.

God, this statement is the biggest pile of steaming sh*t ever seen in this forum. I don't see you digging up bombs with a shovel in blistering heat, Whistlebritches.

PS: I have a LONG list of charming names, but I'll try to stay away from the Canadian "racist" ones - if I knew what they were. I guarantee that Whistlebritches is not racist. :lol: :lol:

Uncle

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Re: RE: Neo – CONNED !

The scariest part about the Neocons to me is this:

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That is a very dangerous thing.

If you fight the same enemy long enough, you become them.

God, this statement is the biggest pile of steaming sh*t ever seen in this forum. I don't see you digging up bombs with a shovel in blistering heat, Whistlebritches.

PS: I have a LONG list of charming names, but I'll try to stay away from the Canadian "racist" ones - if I knew what they were. I guarantee that Whistlebritches is not racist. :lol: :lol:

Uncle

sorry percy.......... seems the higher abstraction of what hunter said missed ya completely.

This is one reason that most of the world thinks neo cons are ignorant ...........They are not capable of that higher level of abstraction.......and prefer things in black ,white, and TOLD to them in repetative rhetoric. this way they don't have to do any real THINKING for themselves. Just as everyone........the neocon faction must learn to realize its limitations.

 

[unclepercy]

Re: RE: Neo – CONNED !

The scariest part about the Neocons to me is this:

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That is a very dangerous thing.

If you fight the same enemy long enough, you become them.

God, this statement is the biggest pile of steaming sh*t ever seen in this forum. I don't see you digging up bombs with a shovel in blistering heat, Whistlebritches.

PS: I have a LONG list of charming names, but I'll try to stay away from the Canadian "racist" ones - if I knew what they were. I guarantee that Whistlebritches is not racist. :lol: :lol:

Uncle

sorry percy.......... seems the higher abstraction of what hunter said missed ya completely.

This is one reason that most of the world thinks neo cons are ignorant ...........They are not capable of that higher level of abstraction.......and prefer things in black ,white, and TOLD to them in repetative rhetoric. this way they don't have to do any real THINKING for themselves. Just as everyone........the neocon faction must learn to realize its limitations.

I am not a neo con. I am an individual who is - thank you very much- quite able to think abstractly. Also one who is able to think laterally - which apparently you aren't.

The beauty of lateral thinking is that it allows you to see the majority of the picture, rather than experiencing the binocular effect. Cognitive analysis allows one to integrate information dynamically into a structured cohesive paradigm. Yet, it does not
blur reality into a warped estimation of probability.

What I see is information being discounted, misinterpreted, ignored, rejected, or overlooked because it fails to fit a prevailing
set of beliefs. Limitations, my dear, we all have them.

Uncle

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Re: RE: Neo – CONNED !

The scariest part about the Neocons to me is this:

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That is a very dangerous thing.

If you fight the same enemy long enough, you become them.

God, this statement is the biggest pile of steaming sh*t ever seen in this forum. I don't see you digging up bombs with a shovel in blistering heat, Whistlebritches.

PS: I have a LONG list of charming names, but I'll try to stay away from the Canadian "racist" ones - if I knew what they were. I guarantee that Whistlebritches is not racist. :lol: :lol:

Uncle

sorry percy.......... seems the higher abstraction of what hunter said missed ya completely.

This is one reason that most of the world thinks neo cons are ignorant ...........They are not capable of that higher level of abstraction.......and prefer things in black ,white, and TOLD to them in repetative rhetoric. this way they don't have to do any real THINKING for themselves. Just as everyone........the neocon faction must learn to realize its limitations.

I am not a neo con. I am an individual who is - thank you very much- quite able to think abstractly. Also one who is able to think laterally - which apparently you aren't.

The beauty of lateral thinking is that it allows you to see the majority of the picture, rather than experiencing the binocular effect. Cognitive analysis allows one to integrate information dynamically into a structured cohesive paradigm. Yet, it does not
blur reality into a warped estimation of probability.

What I see is information being discounted, misinterpreted, ignored, rejected, or overlooked because it fails to fit a prevailing
set of beliefs. Limitations, my dear, we all have them.

Uncle

:roll:


Ho hum.. "if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck......craps like a duck......." :wink:


Someone should create a board /computer game called Neo Conned. :wink: Has potential.

(might also assist the rest of us......in comprehending what makes them "tick")

 

[unclepercy]

Re: RE: Neo – CONNED !

The scariest part about the Neocons to me is this:

Their movement falls apart if they don't have that 'evil' in the world to fight.

And they are more than able to create the idea of absolute evil in those they oppose, rather than modifying their world view.

That is a very dangerous thing.

If you fight the same enemy long enough, you become them.

God, this statement is the biggest pile of steaming sh*t ever seen in this forum. I don't see you digging up bombs with a shovel in blistering heat, Whistlebritches.

PS: I have a LONG list of charming names, but I'll try to stay away from the Canadian "racist" ones - if I knew what they were. I guarantee that Whistlebritches is not racist. :lol: :lol:

Uncle

sorry percy.......... seems the higher abstraction of what hunter said missed ya completely.

This is one reason that most of the world thinks neo cons are ignorant ...........They are not capable of that higher level of abstraction.......and prefer things in black ,white, and TOLD to them in repetative rhetoric. this way they don't have to do any real THINKING for themselves. Just as everyone........the neocon faction must learn to realize its limitations.

I am not a neo con. I am an individual who is - thank you very much- quite able to think abstractly. Also one who is able to think laterally - which apparently you aren't.

The beauty of lateral thinking is that it allows you to see the majority of the picture, rather than experiencing the binocular effect. Cognitive analysis allows one to integrate information dynamically into a structured cohesive paradigm. Yet, it does not
blur reality into a warped estimation of probability.

What I see is information being discounted, misinterpreted, ignored, rejected, or overlooked because it fails to fit a prevailing
set of beliefs. Limitations, my dear, we all have them.

Uncle

:roll:


Ho hum.. "if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck......craps like a duck......." :wink:


Someone should create a board /computer game called Neo Conned. :wink: Has potential.

(might also assist the rest of us......in comprehending what makes them "tick")

Before I ever got to your reply, I knew what you were going to say.
So predictable.

Uncle