"DARK" days for the "White"?????house!!

BLACK DAYS FOR LIBBY, ROVE AND THE WHITE HOUSE

George W. Bush's Propaganda War Goes on Trial

By Hans Hoyng and Georg Mascolo

They are two of the Bush administration's most trusted advisors: I. Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. Now, one has been indicted and the other may be soon. The affair promises to put the administration's Iraq policy on trial and will ask uncomfortable questions about just how much the danger from Iraq was exaggerated. The answer may also make things awkward for the New York Times.



REUTERS
US President George W. Bush's second term is becoming mired in scandal.
The man is a well-trained mathematician with a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His friends in the Pentagon chose him to be the first head of state in a democratic Iraq. His single-minded persuasiveness was enough to convince even a hard-nosed New York Times reporter like Judith Miller that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And he even managed to convince a crusty old curmudgeon like US Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraqis would welcome their American liberators with cheers and rose petals.

But the man is also a convicted bank defrauder. He never did quite manage to become head of Iraq, but climbed as high as prime minister. He fell from White House grace because when American troops reached Baghdad, there were no rose petals to be found.

Now, though, comes the show-stopper in this back-and-forth biography: This week, 60-year-old Ahmed Chalabi -- only briefly out of favor in the White House -- will return once more to Washington for a friendly reception as a guest of the United States of America. Chalabi -- known both as a dishonest rascal and as an assertive schemer -- is the only one the White House really trusts to create a realistic coalition of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis in Baghdad. And such a coalition is an absolute prerequisite to any thoughts of American withdrawal from the country.



The very fact that Washington's hopes are once again pinned on such a charlatan says a lot about just how desperate the situation in Iraq has become. In the middle of last week -- a week which quickly became one of the darkest of the 250 weeks US President George W. Bush has occupied the White House -- American deaths in Iraq reached the symbolic threshold of 2,000 victims.

Cheney's indicted advisor

And by the end of last week, it had become abundantly clear that the president and his team would likewise have to give up the hope of being able to escape responsibility for a war based on ultimately untenable arguments -- all of which have emerged as chimeras. On Friday, the pre-history of the Iraq war finally became the matter for a court of law; Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted the vice president's closest advisor I. Lewis Libby. More than that, Fitzgerald made it clear that he may even go further -- to President Bush's chief advisor Karl Rove.

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Rove, 54, Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- and the man who both friends and foes of the president refer to as Bush's Brain -- will in all likelihood soon be called before a court. Cheney's right hand man "Scooter" Libby, 55, comes first.

Their offenses may seem rather minimal: The two top White House advisors may be responsible for having revealed the identity of a CIA agent. Libby, at least, during investigations into the case, may have lied to investigators and misled a grand jury. In a word, perjury.

But there is one small factoid that provides the case with political explosiveness: The uncovering of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, was a part -- even if a small one -- of the pre-Iraq War propaganda offensive. And by no means is it just the top advisors who are involved in the case.

Indeed, it was Cheney himself who in spring 2002 -- almost a year before the US military marched into Baghdad -- made the completely unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear program. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security advisor, took up the war chant with her catchy warning against Saddam's nuclear plans. "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons," she said. "But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The current trial will have to confront the fabrication of intelligence that lead to such overstatements and untruths.

Loose Lipped Libby

At its heart, though, will be a vendetta embarked on by an administration that wanted to put an irritating critic in his place. And it's a vendetta that makes all participants look bad. In his State of the Union address in 2003 Bush -- in looking to prove the existence of Saddam's nuclear weapons program -- asserted that the dictator had attempted to buy uranium in the form of yellow cake from Niger. The only problem? The rumor had long since been disproved. Six months later, former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote, in a piece for the New York Times, that he himself had investigated the paper trail that allegedly proved the yellow cake accusations and had found the documents to be forgeries.



REUTERS
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted.
The rejoinder was not long in coming. The conservative journalist Robert Novak, a Bush Administration supporter, warned his readers against taking Wilson seriously. His government-sponsored research trip to Niger, Novak wrote, was a low-level formality organized by his wife -- and CIA agent -- Valerie Plame.

More than the assertion that Wilson's mission was little more than a pleasure trip, it was the exposure of Plame as a CIA agent that turned heads. After all, under US law, it is a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to reveal the identity of a CIA agent. Immediately, the administration was accused of leaking Plame's identity as a way of getting back at Wilson. Wilson, himself not exactly well-endowed in the class department, enjoyed his sudden fame as a Bush victim and did what he could to keep the affair in the headlines.

Nobody, though, pursued Wilson more doggedly than Cheney's chief of staff Libby. Even before Wilson's article appeared, Libby leaked the background of the coming scandal to New York Times reporter Judith Miller -- a reporter who, thanks to reliance on information from Chalabi, had become convinced of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, after the Iraq War, the New York Times even felt the need to apologize for having gullibly swallowed the government line on Iraq and regurgitating it in the paper. Most of the articles the paper apologized for had been written by Judith Miller.

George W. Bush's Propaganda War Goes on Trial (2)

Return to Part 1





AP
New York Times journalist Judith Miller was celebrated as a hero for her refusal to identify her source. Now, she is suspected of having worked too closely with the US government.
Libby, for his part, was likely only following marching orders given by his boss, Dick Cheney. The vice president, after all, had become the main Iraq hawk within the Bush administration. So much so that his old friend Brent Scowcroft -- who was President George H. W. Bush's security advisor during the 1991 Gulf War at the same time when Cheney himself was secretary of defense -- today considers Cheney "the real anomaly in the administration" and says, even after a 30 year friendship, he doesn't know Cheney anymore, as the weekly magazine the New Yorker reported.

The chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, has, like Scowcroft, also recently made headlines with critique of Cheney. He says that American foreign policy in the run up to the invasion of Iraq was "made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." His point: the vital decision to go to war in Iraq was made outside the usual policy-making channels.

Vice President Dick Cheney was generally wary of the CIA. Libby thus made it a habit to read raw intelligence reports prior to their being processed by CIA experts; an analysis as to the reliability of the intelligence sources was often left out of the equation. The result was over-reliance on informants like Chalabi -- whose self-serving analyses of the situation in Iraq came to have a direct influence on American foreign policy.

Embellishing the evidence

Like Libby, Karl Rove too was part of the super-secret White House Iraq Group. Founded seven months before the invasion by Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card, the group's mission was to sell the Iraq invasion to the American public and to communicate the grave danger presented by the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The circle, which also included now Secretary of State Rice and Bush's current National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, did its best to take what thin evidence there was for a Iraqi WMD program and embellish it as much as possible. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald seems to have taken a special interest in the work of this propaganda unit.

Rove, accompanied by a small army of lawyers, has already spent weeks trying to avoid an indictment. And the Bush White House is panicked at the prospect of losing some of its closest colleagues -- an event that could completely paralyze Bush's second administration. "These will be very, very dark days for the White House," the Washington Post recently quoted Andrew Card as saying.


AP
Next up on the indictment list? Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Nickname: "Bush's Brain."

Bush's second term -- something of a disaster even without the scandal -- is threatening to turn into a quagmire of indignity and intrigue. Indeed, one is reminded of the second terms of Bill Clinton (Monica Lewinsky) and Ronald Reagan (Iran-Contra Affair) before him.

Clinton, though, even at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, could always rely on support from inner circle and from the party faithful. Bush, on the other hand, may have to do without some of his most experienced strategists -- and at a time when his public support is quickly eroding.

Some in his party have attacked him because of the immense budget deficit. Neo-conservatives are angry about what they see as a somewhat directionless Iraq policy. Religious fundamentalists, for their part, are unhappy about his nomination of his legal advisor Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. In the eyes of many Christian fundamentalists, Miers -- herself a born-again Christian -- hasn't done enough for religious life in the United States. Last Thursday, she was forced to withdraw her candidacy.

Not just the White House

And it is not just the White House whose employees have caught the attention of the law. Republican congressional leaders are likewise back-pedalling. Tom DeLay, until last month the influential majority leader in the House of Representatives, has only recently had to succumb to the disgrace of being fingerprinted by a Texas sheriff. He is suspected of money laundering. Bill Frist, his counterpart in the Senate, is likewise under suspicion. His alleged offence: profiting from insider trading in the Hospital Corporation of America -- a chain of hospitals founded in 1968 by his father and brother.

Not even Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is able to present himself as a knight in shining armor. At the beginning of the investigation, the son of Irish immigrants seemed to be doing everything right. He quickly became known as a workaholic who would often send e-mails to his assistants as late as 2 a.m. His file cabinets soon filled with dirty laundry and leftovers of fast-food meals were piled everywhere in his office as even cleanliness took a back seat to his work.

In Chicago, where Fitzgerald has worked as a federal prosecutor since 2001, he has become known as a carbon copy of Eliot Ness, the man who famously brought down Al Capone. And his reputation as an untiring investigator has proven true in Washington as well. Not only has he confiscated e-mails and day planners from the White House, but he has even managed to get his hands on the telephone list of the presidential jet Air Force One.



DPA
Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is heralded as an aggressive investigator. But he is maybe a bit too aggressive.
Still, at a time when his current investigation wasn't going well, he didn't shy away from taking aim at freedom of the press. He managed to have those journalists detained to whom Valerie Plame's true identity as a CIA agent had been leaked. And these inscrupulous methods worked.

Government agents in the Times

New York Times reporter Judith Miller sat in jail for 85 days before she -- following consultations with Libby's lawyer -- was willing to identify Libby as her source. But when it became known exactly what her ensuing testimony revealed, her employer -- which had transformed Miller into a martyr of press freedom -- suddenly no longer appeared in such positive light.

Miller, as it turned out, emerged as a journalist who allowed herself to be manipulated by the government for its own good. Even New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller was forced to admit -- in an e-mail to Times staff -- that Miller had perhaps misinformed her superiors about the role she had played in the campaign against Plame's husband Wilson.

Since then, the reputation of the most important newspaper in the United States has been tarnished. Not only do its journalists have high-up sources within the government. Rather, the unseemly and trusting relationship between Miller and Libby makes one wonder if perhaps the government also had its agents within the New York Times -- and that at a time when America was becoming involved in a war that has revealed itself to be a deadly mistake.

Bush Version 2.1 Crashes

US President George W. Bush may not be the only second-term president to run into a mountain of problems. But for a head of state who staked his reputation on re-introducing values to the White House, the current legal troubles of his advisors are particularly embarrassing.



REUTERS
The smirk has gone as things get rough for Bush.
German newspapers have not, to say the least, generally used kid gloves when writing about US President George W. Bush. From his early decision to back away from the Kyoto Protocol right through the invasion of Iraq, they have been -- minus a brief break following the Sept. 11 attacks -- consistently questioning the American president's every move. And now that his second term is becoming bogged down in scandal, ineptness and mistakes, commentators for the Germany's major dailies can hardly believe their luck.

Friday's indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, has fueled the most recent round of Teutonic Bush bashing. Libby was charged with misleading investigators looking into the divulging of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. Karl Rove, one of Bush's most trusted advisors may be next. For German editorialists on Monday, it's all part of a pattern.

Which pattern? The center-right daily Süddeutsche Zeitung notes in its Halloween commentary that there seems to be a curse on presidential second terms. Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and now Bush all ran into second-term roadblocks. The primary problem facing Bush, at the moment, is his reliance on his advisors, the paper argues. And it is exactly those advisors who are creating many of his problems. "More than any other president in recent history, Bush has made himself dependent on a small circle of advisors centered on Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney. Bush hasn't only depended on them, but has also let them take over some control. They should now advise the president to fire his advisors if he wants to improve things. That, however, is hardly to be expected."

The Financial Times Deutschland likewise points -- in an editorial called "Bush, Version 2.1" -- to the long list of presidents before Bush who encountered problems in their second terms. But it points out that, at the heart of Bush's problems is the style with which he leads: "Discipline and loyalty have become equated with a bunker mentality and the browbeating of political opponents." While the paper admits that the use of special prosecutors carries with it a raft of problems, it is a positive development that the US is finally engaged in a debate about the war in Iraq. Now, it is time for Bush to act if he doesn't want to become a lame duck. "When Reagan was facing the Iran-Contra Affair in 1987, he took the opportunity to re-build his cabinet. Bush could do the same."

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Traditionally hard on the US president, the left-leaning Berlin daily, Berliner Zeitung, indulges wholeheartedly in the anti-Bush tirade on Monday. "When George W. Bush became president of the US five years ago, he wanted to do everything differently. After the sex scandals of his predecessor, Bush wanted to reintroduce morals to the White House." But, the paper argues, that hasn't happened. "In the last few weeks, it has become clear that the president himself lacks respect for the office. One year into his second term -- with the knowledge he cannot campaign for a third -- Bush seems primarily concerned with his own legacy and does what he wants."

"Aside from a whole lot of time, US President George W. Bush doesn't have all that much to offer at the moment," writes the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung. And the paper is not at all optimistic that Bush will be able to find his way out of his current crisis. That, partially, comes from the sheer complexity of the canyon Bush has fallen in to. The problems are myriad and one of the most worrisome for Bush is that his own party is on his case and the man who used to be there to keep the Republicans in line, former House majority leader Tom DeLay, is "as good as in jail." And then there are the voters themselves who are "disappointed with a government that used the language of morals and rule of law more than any other." Bush, the paper concludes, is unlikely to be able to pull himself out of the current crisis.

DICK CHENEY UNDER FIRE

All the Vice President's Men

By Juan Cole

The ideologues in Cheney's inner circle drummed up a war. Now their zealotry is blowing up in their faces.



REUTERS
The inner circle around U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has been called a "cabal" that made critical decisions about US foreign policy.
As Washington waits on pins and needles to see if special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments, the focus falls on Dick Cheney's inner circle. This group, along with that surrounding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made up what Colin Powell's top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, called "a cabal" that "on critical issues ... made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." Cheney is the first vice president to have had, in effect, his own personal National Security Council. This formidable and unprecedented rump foreign policy team, composed of radical hawks, played a key role in every aspect of the war on Iraq: planning for it, gathering "evidence" to justify it and punishing those who spoke out against it. It is not surprising that members of that team, and Cheney himself, have now also emerged as targets in Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press, along with Bush advisor Karl Rove.

Although the investigation has focused on Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a number of other Cheney staffers have been interviewed. Who are these shadowy policymakers who played such a major role in shaping the Bush administration's foreign policy?

Most of the members of Cheney's inner circle were neoconservative ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel. This does not mean that the war was fought for Israel, although it is undeniable that Israeli concerns played an important role. The actual motivation behind the war was complex, and Cheney's team was not the only one in the game. The Bush administration is a coalition of disparate forces -- country club Republicans, realists, representatives of oil and other corporate interests, evangelicals, hardball political strategists, right-wing Catholics, and neoconservative Jews allied with Israel's right-wing Likud party. Each group had its own rationale for going to war with Iraq.

FOUND IN...

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Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by avenging the slight to his father produced by Saddam's remaining in office after the Gulf War. Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely that the Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the company he headed in the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy. The evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a war president to ensure his reelection. The neoconservatives viewed Saddam's Iraq as a short-term danger to Israel, and in the long term, they hoped that overthrowing the Iraqi Baath would transform the entire Middle East, rather as Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman emperor and Sunni caliph in the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic Turkey that was allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by Princeton emeritus professor and leading neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis.) This transformation would be beneficial to the long-term security of both the United States and Israel.

Cheney and Bush's underlings went too far

None of these rationales would have been acceptable across the board, or persuasive with Congress or the American public, so the various factions focused on the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately for them, this rationale was discovered to be a mirage. And in the course of trying to punish those who were pointing out that the emperor had no clothes -- or, in this case, that the dictator had no weapons of mass destruction -- Cheney and Bush's underlings went too far. Ironically, their attempt to silence critics succeeded only in turning a harsh light on their own actions and motivations.

"Cheney Assembles Formidable Team," marveled a Page One article in the Feb. 3, 2001, edition of the New York Times. It turns out that Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president's own National Security Council was being downsized. The number of aides who counseled Cheney on domestic issues was much smaller. In contrast, Al Gore had been advised by a single staffer on security affairs.

The leader of the team was Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Libby had studied at Yale with Paul Wolfowitz, who brought him to Washington. He co-authored a hawkish policy document with Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense for its head, Dick Cheney, after the Gulf War in 1992. When it was leaked, it embarrassed the first President Bush. Libby was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century in 1997 during the Clinton years, when many neoconservatives were out of office. The PNAC attempted to use the Republican-dominated Congress to pressure Clinton to take a more belligerent stance toward Iraq, and it advocated significantly expanding military spending and using U.S. troops as "gendarmes" in the aftermath of wars to "shape" the international security environment.


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Cheney was also a PNAC member, and his association with this group from 1997 signaled a shift from his earlier hard-nosed realism, as he allied himself with the neoconservatives, who dreamed of transforming other societies. The James Baker branch of the Republican Party had long been critical of Israel for causing trouble for the United States in the Middle East with its expansionist policies and unwillingness to stop the settlement of the West Bank, and Baker was well aware that the vast majority of American Jews do not vote Republican.

Cold-War inspired worldview

Although a staunch defender of Israel, Cheney at one time was at least on speaking terms with this wing of the Republican Party. (The sense of betrayal felt by his old colleagues was summed up by Bush I's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who told the New Yorker he considered Cheney a friend, "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." As time went on, however, he increasingly chose to ally with neoconservatives and the Jewish right in the U.S. and Israel, accepting them as powerful allies and constituents for his vision of a post-Cold War world dominated by an unchallenged American hegemony that would be backed by a vast military-industrial establishment fed by U.S. tax dollars. He continually promised skeptical Jewish audiences that a democratic Iraq would benefit Israel. His choice of advisors when he became vice president demonstrated a pronounced preference for the neoconservatives.

But Cheney's alliance with the neocons was probably driven more by his Manichaean, Cold War-inspired worldview -- in which the U.S. battled an evil enemy -- and his corporate ties, than by an obsession with Israel or remaking the Middle East. Islamist terror provided a new version of the Soviet "evil empire." And the neocons' dynamic foreign policy vision, their "liberalism with guns," offered more opportunities for the military-industrial complex than did traditional Republican realism in a post-Soviet world, where peer states did not exist and no credible military threat menaced the U.S. Only a series of wars of conquest in the Middle East, dressed up as a "defense" against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could hope to keep the Pentagon and the companies to which it outsourced in the gravy.

Such wars could no longer be fought in East Asia, given Chinese and North Korean nuclear capabilities, and there were no U.S. constituencies for such wars in most other parts of the world. The Middle East was the perfect arena for a renewed American militarism, given that the U.S. public held deep prejudices against the Arab-Muslim world, and, after Sept. 11, deeply feared it.

Samuel Alito’s America


This morning President Bush nominated 3rd Circuit Appeals Court Judge Samuel Alito for the U.S. Supreme Court.” Who is Samuel Alito? ThinkProgress has the facts:

ALITO WOULD OVERTURN ROE V. WADE: In his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Alito concurred with the majority in supporting the restrictive abortion-related measures passed by the Pennsylvania legislature in the late 1980’s. Alito went further, however, saying the majority was wrong to strike down a requirement that women notify their spouses before having an abortion. The Supreme Court later rejected Alito’s view, voting to reaffirm Roe v. Wade. [Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 1991]


U.S. President George W. Bush (L) announces the nomination of U.S. Appeals Court Justice Samuel Alito (R) for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court at the White House in Washington, D.C., October 31, 2005. Bush nominated Alito to the Supreme Court on Monday in a move likely to set off a partisan battle with Democrats as he tries to right his struggling presidency. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

ALITO WOULD ALLOW RACE-BASED DISCRIMINATION: Alito dissented from a decision in favor of a Marriott Hotel manager who said she had been discriminated against on the basis of race. The majority explained that Alito would have protected racist employers by “immuniz[ing] an employer from the reach of Title VII if the employer’s belief that it had selected the ‘best’ candidate was the result of conscious racial bias.” [Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 1997]

ALITO WOULD ALLOW DISABILITY-BASED DISCRIMINATION: In Nathanson v. Medical College of Pennsylvania, the majority said the standard for proving disability-based discrimination articulated in Alito’s dissent was so restrictive that “few if any…cases would survive summary judgment.” [Nathanson v. Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1991]

ALITO WOULD STRIKE DOWN THE FAMILY AND MEDICAL LEAVE ACT: The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) “guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one.” The 2003 Supreme Court ruling upholding FMLA [Nevada v. Hibbs, 2003] essentially reversed a 2000 decision by Alito which found that Congress exceeded its power in passing the law. [Chittister v. Department of Community and Economic Development, 2000]

ALITO SUPPORTS UNAUTHORIZED STRIP SEARCHES: In Doe v. Groody, Alito agued that police officers had not violated constitutional rights when they strip searched a mother and her ten-year-old daughter while carrying out a search warrant that authorized only the search of a man and his home. [Doe v. Groody, 2004]

ALITO HOSTILE TOWARD IMMIGRANTS: In two cases involving the deportation of immigrants, the majority twice noted Alito’s disregard of settled law. In Dia v. Ashcroft, the majority opinion states that Alito’s dissent “guts the statutory standard” and “ignores our precedent.” In Ki Se Lee v. Ashcroft, the majority stated Alito’s opinion contradicted “well-recognized rules of statutory construction.” [Dia v. Ashcroft, 2003; Ki Se Lee v. Ashcroft, 2004]

DAYS LEFT UNTIL THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE BUSH REGIME
Call Toll-Free 1-866-973-4463 or E-Mail -- to contact World Can't Wait | Drive Out the Bush Regime

"The Bush Administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide. I give my full support to the Call to Drive out the Bush Regime." --Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate playwright


Your government, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.

Your government is openly torturing people, and justifying it.

Your government puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.


Your government is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.

Your government suppresses the science that doesn't fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.


Your government is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.

Your government enforces a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance.

People look at all this and think of Hitler — and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance.

For the last two years, Federal Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has investigated a potential crime, namely the revealing to the general public that Valerie Wilson nee Plame worked for the CIA in counter-proliferation, and was an undercover agent. To charge someone with a crime at the Federal level requires an indictment - a summary of allegations and facts which show that there is probable reason to believe that a crime was committed, and that a particular individual should be charged with that crime and prosecuted. It is part of the safeguards of our judicial system that prosecutors are not able to charge by themselves, but have three forms of oversight. First, they work for the public, directly or indirectly. Second, the process is overseen by a judge, and approval is needed along the way for warrants and subpoenas power. Most importantly, they must convince a body of citizens, the grand jury, that there is probable cause a crime has been committed, and that a particular individual or group of individuals should face criminal charges.
At 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time today Fitzgerald all but declared his investigatory phase over, and that his office was entering into a new phase, where Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has been charged with a crime, and must be tried. It is tempting to speculate on what this means, what the fallout will be, and where the direction goes from here. But first, it is important to capture the staggering...

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The War Party Is Down, but for How Long?
by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com
In a political landscape that had until recently seemed unremittingly bleak, in which a small and all-powerful group of politicians could rule at will with no regard for either the truth or the nation's best interests, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's five-count indictment of top Cheney aid I. Lewis Libby fell like a sledgehammer on a once-unbreakable edifice dedicated to overweening arrogance and the acquisition of power at all costs.
As the Seattle Times said of Fitzgerald, "his five-count indictment Friday of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff proves the system is working." And about time. In July 2004, commenting on her own stymied attempts to bring the truth to light, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds decried "a broken system, a system abused and corrupted by the current executive, a system badly in need of repair."
Through his tenacity and single-minded determination to get to the bottom of the Plame leak and forged-documents affair, Patrick Fitzgerald seems to be doing the necessary repairs. We can only hope that the judge set for the next stage of the trial – Reggie Walton, the same judge who dismissed Sibel Edmonds' case on the grounds of allegedly protecting "certain diplomatic relations for national security" – doesn't reprise his performance there. Ms. Edmonds lamented that Walton obstructed her petition...

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