TRUTHOUT ORIGINAL
Now Can We Investigate?
Monday 13 July 2009
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist
With new revelations about secret intelligence activities under the Bush/Cheney administration, House Democrats are calling for a formal investigation into a secret CIA program that was not disclosed to Congress. (Photo: AP)
President Obama is in the process of losing what may be the most important argument of his young administration. The argument is not about health care, bank bailouts, the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, the environment or the auto industry, though arguments on these issues are indeed ongoing and hanging in the balance.
No, the Obama administration is losing the argument about the past being less important than the future. They would like his government, Congress and the American people to look forward, and to leave behind as much of the past as possible. The past, in this case, is the battery of crimes, cover-ups and tyrannies unleashed by their predecessors in the Bush administration.
The Obama administration's argument in favor of leaving the myriad abuses of the Bush administration to the dustbin of history is understandable, though hardly valid at this point. Obama and his team have a thousand and one problems to deal with in the here and now, and according to them, any attempt to quest into the past will derail all the work they have to do. They are also justifiably concerned that Republicans in Congress will try to burn down the Capitol building if Democrats even twitch in the direction of digging up the past.
Understandable? Sure. Valid? Not by a long chalk.
Half a dozen times since his inauguration, President Obama has seen his agenda depth-charged by a report on some nefarious activity by the previous administration. Not only have his plans and intentions been derailed by these reports - whether they be about torture, government secrecy, indefinite detention, or whatever else - he has himself become culpable for the damage done by either trying to ignore these transgressions or by adopting them himself.
It happened again this weekend. The Obama administration has been trying to gear up for a millennial debate over health care reform, but Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have once again gotten in the way, not once but twice. "The Bush administration authorized secret surveillance activities that still have not been made public, according to a new government report that questions the legal basis for the unprecedented anti-terrorism program," reported The Associated Press on Friday. "President George W. Bush authorized other secret intelligence activities - which have yet to become public - even as he was launching the massive warrentless wiretapping program, the summary said. It describes the entire program as the 'President's Surveillance Program.' The report describes the program as unprecedented and raises questions about the legal grounding used for its creation. It also says the intelligence agencies' continued retention and use of the information collected under the program should be carefully monitored."
"The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency's director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday," reported The New York Times on Sunday. "The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy."
Thud. Nobody is talking about health care now, or Ghana or nuclear reduction deals with the Russians. Just like that, all discussion has once again turned to the actions and activities of the Bush administration. President Obama has been acting as if only two options - ignorance or adoption - are available to deal with these Bush-era eruptions, because he does not want his presidency to become overwhelmed by the third available option: investigation and prosecution.
Guess what? The Obama administration is already being overwhelmed, and will continue to lose ground every time another one of these wretched revelations hits the headlines, which they will, over and over again. There is more out there about Bush and Cheney's torture program. There is more out there about their indefinite detention program, about their broad policy of absolute secrecy, about how and why we invaded Iraq, about their domestic surveillance program - specifically, who got spied on in America and why - and even about exactly what happened before and on September 11.
Let's investigate. Let's prosecute. Let's clean out the Augean stables of the Bush administration and put things right again. It's not as if the desire to do exactly that isn't already present in the body politic. A majority of Democrats and a whole passel of Americans want to see the crimes and cover-ups of the Bush administration looked into and punished with vigor.
Some members of Congress appear poised to do just that. "House Democrats said yesterday that they expect to launch a formal investigation into a secret CIA program that was not disclosed to Congress for almost eight years, a probe that could entangle senior Bush administration officials who oversaw intelligence issues, reported The Washington Post on Sunday. "Democrats on the House intelligence committee said the inquiry would examine both the nature of the still-secret program and the decisions to keep congressional oversight committees in the dark about its existence."
And Congress, it seems, may not be alone. "(Attorney General Eric) Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way," reported Newsweek on Saturday. "Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter."
Let's get it over with, shall we?
5 opmerkingen:
Crimineel tuig! Ander tuig werd voor dezelfde misdaden opgehangen!
Daar heb je ze weer, tot in de wortel verrot.
anzi
Hoge jongen uit de Bush adm., Kolonel Wilkerson,wel vaker goed voor kritisch geluid :
'The secret CIA program allegedly aimed at assassinating suspected terrorists abroad has raised the eyebrows of at least one former senior Bush Administration official who hints that the program may have actually gone into effect, despite the denials of the agency and congressional staff who have been briefed.
The aide, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, was chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The State Department, under Colin Powell, asked the Pentagon which countries were being targeted but found out little information from then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Wilkerson asserts.
“After some hemming and hawing, which was Rumsfeld’s forte, he finally admitted that he had dispatched some of these teams,” Wilkerson explained. “I don’t think we ever knew the full range of his deployments.” Wilkerson believes the CIA became involved in the program of targeted assassinations later.
“It’s laughable [the idea] that the CIA has never lied to Congress,” Wilkerson quipped. “They lie to Congress on a routine basis,” said Wilkerson. Historically, it’s presidents that take the fall when the CIA lies to Congress. Wilkerson says it’s unprecedented for a vice president to fill that role as Cheney appears to have done.'
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/15/wilkerson-cia-program-active/
And yet here we are, in July 2009, wringing our hands over the alleged existence of "unrealized" plans to perhaps set up some kind of CIA death squad on the orders of Dick Cheney! And even this hallucination is riddled with unreality of its own: witness the emphasis on Cheney's involvement when even the new stories make clear that Cheney was acting on the authority of a presidential directive. George W. Bush is being written out of the picture; evidently he is to remain untainted even by the current spate of fantasy stories, which not only ignore the proven, acknowledged existence of actual, active CIA death squads but also Bush's central role in actually signing the directives that made the killings possible. Even if one buys the notion that Bush was a dimbulb who simply signed whatever the wily Cheney shoved under his nose, that does not absolve Bush of the moral and legal responsibility for these state-sanctioned murders.
Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, delivered to Congress and televised nationwide during the final frenzy of war-drum beating before the assault on Iraq. Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide – "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let's put it this way. They are no longer a problem."
In other words, the suspects – and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects – had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds – or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators…applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man's bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law – our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1797-unreality-check-amnesiac-controversy-ignores-cias-real-death-squads.html
Dick Cheney's "Executive Assassination Ring".
Was British Weapons Expert Dr. David Kelly a Target ?
by Tom Burghardt
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14423
The Democrats’ Selective Amnesia on Assassination
The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn’t just proxies authorized to do the assassinations.
The Clinton White House worked for years with the CIA to craft an assassination policy — specifically relating to "al-Qaeda" in general and Osama bin Laden and his top deputies specifically. CIA operatives like Billy Waugh complained in the early and middle years of the Clinton presidencies that they were lawyered to death by Clinton’s attorneys in their attempts to get the green light to kill bin Laden in Sudan. "[I]n the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders," recalled Waugh. Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran. Eventually, however, Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other "al-Qaeda leaders." That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton’s signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations. George W. Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Of course, current CIA Director Leon Panetta was Clinton’s chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue when Clinton was president.
En onder Bush werd het pas echt feest:
Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed [to Afghanistan] on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. "Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement," Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. "I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead… . They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that." Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. "Perfectly clear, Cofer," Schroen told him. "I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field." Black later explained why this would be necessary. "You’d need some DNA," Black said. "There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!"
http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/07/15/the-democrats-selective-amnesia-on-assassination/
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