Downing Street Memo

Will `Tough Guy' Dick Cheney Cop Out as Usual and Take a Pardon?

dlindorff — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:29:33 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Vice President Dick Cheney has cultivated the image of a serious
tough guy, with his grim, scowling vissage, his dismissive "So?"
comments when things go badly, his unrepentant defense of torture,
including waterboarding, and his brash statements confirming that he
approved the interrogation measures that clearly violated US criminal
statutes and the Geneva Conventions.

But it appears we willl in a few days get to discover whether Cheney
really is a tough guy, or whether he is in truth just the same
corpulent, self-centered hypocrite and gutless coward that he was back
in the 1960s when, despite being a vocal backer of the Vietnam War, he
ducked the draft not once but five times by arranging for student and
marriage deferments, which he later defended by saying he had "other
priorities" than serving his country.

If, as most people expect, Cheney is offered a pardon by outgoing
President George Bush for his role in approving the systematic torture
of US captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, for his role in the
outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame and the subsequent
coverup of that crime, and for his role in lying about the alleged
threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the vice president will be
admitting that he is guilty of those crimes. He will also be taking the
coward's way out, after earlier strutting about and claiming to be in
the right.

It would be vintage Cheney--talking big but hiding from responsibility for his statements and his actions.

If Cheney were for real, he would tell Bush he doesn't want no
stinkin' pardon. He'd say he backed a policy of torture of captives
because they deserved it, because it would save American lives, and
because he had no respect for international law. He would dare the US
government, and other governments around the world that have a policy
of universal jurisdiction, to indict him and put him on trial for his
actions.

But that's not Dick Cheney's way. His way is to duck responsibility and to let lesser people take the heat for him.

We've seen his MO already. This is a guy who would furtively destroy
the career of a dedicated undercover agent, putting not just her, but
all of her in-country contacts in places like Iran at risk for their
lives, and then let a subordinate, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, take the
fall for him. Libby, recall, was convicted of lying about his role in
exposing Plame's identity in a federal trial that included considerable
evidence that it was his boss, Cheney, who was actually behind the
effort. He ended up being convicted and sentenced to prison, though he
was spared being locked up by a presidential clemency order. Cheney
didn't lift a finger to protect Libby, who remains a convicted felon,
unable to return to his practice of law.

If Bush pardons Cheney, and if Cheney accepts that pardon, he will
be admitting that he is a war criminal, willing to let a few
low-ranking soldiers who simply did what he says he wanted them to do
take the heat for him and his criminal actions.

While we're at it, it will also be interesting to see whether Bush,
whose media handlers have also spent the last eight years constucting
an image of him as a swaggering, tough-talkin' Texas cowboy, will grant
himself a broad pardon for his many crimes in office.

My guess is he will do both, confirming that this has been an
administration not of tough guys, but of cowards, hypocrites and
professional buckpassers.

_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:32:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

Set aside for the moment the fact that the claim that Saddam
Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore (so-called yellowcake) from the
desert nation of Niger was based upon forged documents which were
almost certainly the work of Defense Department hacks in the
Rumsfeld/Cheney-created Office of Special Plans (see my book The Case for Impeachment).
Even if this fraudulent deal had been real, how on earth could it have
been used as it was by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to
justify an invasion of Iraq?

Consider that what was being asserted was that Iraq had attempted
(not even succeeded!) to buy 400 tons of uranium ore. This claim was
used by President Bush, in his Jan. 20, 2003 State of the Union
address, to argue that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But in the case of a country that does not have a nuclear weapon, a program is years away, perhaps a decade or more away, from the reality of having a usable weapon.

As we have seen in the case of Iran, which has been refining
uranium ore now for at least five years, the mere fact of possessing
uranium ore, and even of having a quantity of gas centrifuges to refine
out the minute quantities of the fissionable isotope U-235 are only the
first and, technologically speaking, the easiest, steps towards
actually constructing a bomb. (Experts say that after all this time,
even if it is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb, which the
Iranian government denies, the country remains years from that alleged
goal.)

If Bush and Cheney had not been lying through their teeth, and
Saddam had actually been buying yellowcake for the purpose of making a
nuke weapon, he would still have had to obtain large numbers of
centrifuges, would have had to power them up and run them for years,
and would have then had to obtain the technology to build and test a
bomb, none of which steps he was even alleged to have taken.

Yet Bush was claiming that there was an imminent threat to
America posed by Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake purchase effort, and that
an invasion had to be launched almost immediately. He used the term
imminent because that is the legal requirement in the UN Charter, to
which the US is a signatory and which is based upon the Nuremberg
Charter established at the end of the Second World War. It states that
no nation may invade another nation unless that nation poses an
imminent threat to the would-be invader.

The yellowcake story, now definitively shown to have been a
deliberate lie, even if true, could not have constituted such an
imminent threat.

Yet not once has this key point been addressed by any member of
Congress who voted to authorize an invasion. Nor does the point get
mentioned in mainstream journalistic reports on the matter.

Average Americans, nearly half of whom reportedly believe that the
earth was formed just 6000 years ago and a fair proportion of whom
believe that the sun revolves around the earth, might be excused for
not understanding this point, but clearly intelligent members of
Congress like former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry
and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who both claim they
might not have voted for war “had they had known then what they know
now,” are themselves caught in a lie.

They and other war backers clearly knew in 2002 and 2003 that the
yellowcake story, even if true, was no justification for war. So did
editors and reporters (like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New
York Times, for example).

I have yet to see a single US corporate media outlet explain that
the yellowcake story was simply never a justification for war. It will
probably never happen, and yet many analysts have said it was that
claim by Bush, Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and
others (remember her dark warnings about not wanting a “smoking gun” to
be a “mushroom cloud”?), more than any other that stampeded the nation
into a war that has cost over $1 trillion over five years, and over
4000 US lives and one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld and others in the outgoing
administration should all be impeached, tried and jailed for their
lying and treason in embroiling the US in the pointless and criminal
Iraq War, with the yellowcake story a key element in any indictments.
But there needs to be some kind of reckoning too, for the willful
ignorance and deceit on the part of the majority of Congress and of the
press in pretending that an alleged scheme to buy uranium ore was a
justification for launching a war of aggression, which five years on,
is still continuing.

The American people themselves also need to reflect deeply, not
just on how ill served we are by our elected officials and by our
media, but on how gullible we have become, and how ignorant.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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A Goverment of Liars Must Be Brought Down

dlindorff — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:28:05 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

When journalists are caught lying outright, they can be fired, and can even find their careers terminated. Take Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who made up a story about a young drug user. A decade after her firing, she was earning $6/hour as a Liz Claiborne clerk in a department store. Or consider Stephen Glass, who famously made up stories at the New Republic. He landed on his feet as a fiction writer, but his journalism days are over.

So what to do about George Bush and his gang of fabulists, who now, thanks to a study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, stand shown to have lied to Congress and the American people 935 times in what the two organizations say was "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

Clearly we’ve come a long way from that first President named George who, at least in popular mythology, "couldn’t tell a lie."

And while it is a given in American political life that "politicians lie," we’re talking here about some whoppers that weren’t just about self-promotion, like Hillary Clinton’s claims that she was involved in all of the major decisions in Bill Clinton’s White House, or Obama’s claim that he has always opposed the war in Iraq, or John McCain’s claim that he is a "straight talker." We’re talking about lies that led to the US violating international law by invading a country that posed no imminent threat, lies that have led to the needless and pointless deaths of some 4000 American military personnel and to the maiming of nearly 80,000 others, lies that have left a nation of 34 million in ruins, with 4 million refugees, 1 million dead, and political chaos that is perhaps irremediable. We’re talking about lies that have cost the US upwards of $2 trillion in actual military outlays and future debt payments. Lies that have cast the US in the role of pariah nation and terrorist state in the eyes of the rest of the world.

The idea that Americans would be willing to impeach a president for lying about a sexual act, or that they would reject a candidate for plagiarizing part of a speech, but that they would then simply shrug at hard evidence that a president, along with his vice president, secretary of state, defense secretary and national security adviser had all lied in a conscious, coordinated conspiracy to trick them into a disastrous war is hard to believe.

At this point, we should have hordes of people pressing on the iron fences of the White House, armed with pitchforks, baseball bats and cattle prods, ready to storm the place and wreak vengeance. Where are the angry relatives of dead and maimed soldiers? Where are the idealistic students? Where are the taxpayers who’ve been robbed blind? Where’s the outraged Congress? Where are the incensed editorialists in the media?

Hey! Wake up! This is a goddamned outrage?

We all knew it, of course, but until now, thanks to a news media that has long since stopped reporting on serious issues, particularly where it involves criticism of the powerful, we could hide behind the belief that it was all "business as usual" in Washington, a truth-challenged city to be sure.

But now we know. Now there is no hiding from the truth. Now we have it documented and quantified in a way that makes the enormity of the offense clear and undeniable.

Now we are required to take action.

No editorial writer worthy of the name can ignore this scandal. No member of Congress can ignore this affront to the Constitution. No citizen can ignore this abuse.

There is only one appropriate response to the crime that has been documented here by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, and that is impeachment. We have the crime laid out before us. We have the evidence in hand. It is now the obligation of the House to hold an impeachment hearing in which that evidence will be put before the members. After that, there must be a vote on an article of impeachment, against Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld, for lying to the American people.

No president, no vice president, no senior cabinet officer, can be permitted to commit a treasonous act as serious as lying the nation into a needless war, and be permitted to remain in office. To allow such treachery to go unchallenged is to tell all future administrations that truth and openness have no place in American government. To allow this crime to pass is to declare that democracy in America is moribund, for the people can only be sovereign as long as they are given the truth about what their government and their leaders are doing.

No member of Congress who sits idly by and refuses to call these lying leaders to account deserves reelection.

A government based upon lies is by definition a dictatorship.

It is time for action. If Congress will not act then it is up to we the people to clean house from top to bottom.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Minneapolis April 28 Impeachment Event - With Canoes

CausalCrunch — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 02:25:34 -0400

Help us with ImpeachForPeace.org's Minneapolis A-28 event! We will spell out "IMPEACH" with canoes on Saturday morning, April 28th, and again with bedsheets that evening. Be a part of this effort to tell the world that the Twin Cities are serious about impeachment!
To participate in the first event, gather at 10:30 a.m. at the Lake Calhoun Pavilion at 3000 Calhoun Parkway East in Minneapolis. Allow time to find parking. Wear light colored/bright colors to stand out from the lake water. Be on time! To pay for canoe rental, we’ll need your help. It costs $10 per hour to rent a canoe, and we hope to have two people per canoe. (It may take us as much as two hours, which means the cost may be as much as $10 per person.) Also, if you know anyone who lives at Lake Place or Lake Calhoun Beach Club Apartments, please contact us! We need to use a lakefront, top floor apartment as a vantage point from which to take a photograph.
Then, that evening, show up at Riverside Park at 7:00 p.m. This is the West side of the Mississippi riverbank, beneath the Route 122 bridge near the UofM Campus. Here's the Map We'll need 65 twin bedsheets (preferably white) and as many flashlights as you can carry to form the word "IMPEACH" and underlight the sheets so that they're visible to the jets landing at the airport and the cameras capturing the image. In order to do this, we’ll need 85 people in the morning and 150 in the evening to commit in advance to these nationally important events! Sign up here: http://volunteerforchange.org/org/show/547 You won't regret helping to contribute to the restoration of law and the constitution!

DoD Report Appears to Confirm Downing Street Memo

CactusPat — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 06:23:26 -0500

DoD Report Appears to Confirm Downing Street Memo By Jason Leopold
A long-awaited report on the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence has found that a secretive policy shop exaggerated the Iraqi threat, providing the White House with cherry-picked information about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The shop, operating out of the Pentagon, was set up by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Its goal was to lay the groundwork for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq. The report would appear to confirm British intelligence assertions that surfaced in a document widely referred to as the Downing Street Memo that the facts against the threat posed by Iraq were being fixed around the Bush administration's policy leading up to the invasion of Iraq... (more)

Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said the report is a "a devastating condemnation of the activities of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Those activities supported the Bush administration's misleading case for war against Iraq."

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General produced the report, which focuses largely on the work of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith's Office of Special Plans sent the Bush administration bogus intelligence on Iraq's weapons program and ties to terrorist organizations that supported the administration's policy.

An executive summary of the report was released late Thursday by Senator Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Levin has spent the past two years battling the former Senate Republican leadership to conclude its so-called Phase II investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Last month, in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he was told by Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kans.), who was formerly in charge of the second phase of the Senate's investigation, that Vice President Dick Cheney applied "constant" pressure on Roberts to drag out the probe on pre-war intelligence. A spokeswoman for Cheney denied the allegation.

Levin will chair an armed services committee hearing Friday, at which acting Pentagon Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble will discuss the findings of the report. On Thursday, Levin released an unclassified executive summary of the inspector general's findings: specifically, the role Feith's Office of Special Plans played in helping the White House to mislead the public about Iraq. Levin said he is trying to get the entire report declassified.

The inspector general's unclassified executive summary of the report, as characterized by Levin, states:

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced and disseminated to senior decision-makers alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaeda relationship. These assessments included some conclusions inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community,

The inspector general also stated that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community."

The inspector general concluded that these "inappropriate" activities were authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, or Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense.

Senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, made numerous public statements that reflected the views of the Feith alternative analysis, which were inconsistent with the analysis and judgments of the intelligence community. Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the "best source of information" on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Rockefeller said the conclusions of the report are damning. Moreover, he said, his committee was kept in the dark about the Office of Special Plans and the fact that it was engaged in intelligence-gathering activities.

"The IG has concluded that this office was engaged in intelligence activities," Rockefeller said. "The Senate intelligence committee was never informed of these activities. Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law. In the coming days, I will carefully review all aspects of the report and will consult with [Senate intelligence committee] Vice Chairman [Kit] Bond to determine whether any additional action by the Senate intelligence committee is warranted."

The White House and the Pentagon have been dogged by questions about Feith and OSP's activities dating back to the beginning of the Iraq War. It was during that time that a number of CIA analysts spoke privately with Democratic lawmakers and complained that Feith's unit had been cherry-picking intelligence information that provided worst-case scenarios about Iraq's weapons programs. Levin and Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), called for an immediate investigation.

Republicans successfully thwarted a probe into the policy shop back then, but the issue resurfaced in November 2005, when the Iraq War took a turn for the worse. Levin and other lawmakers began to demand documents and the authority to conduct interviews with Feith and his staff. But Senator Roberts, who headed the Senate intelligence committee, sidestepped the Democratic lawmakers' requests and instead asked the inspector general in the Department of Defense to look into OSP's activities. That all but guaranteed that it would become bogged down in bureaucratic red tape and that tough questions would take years to answer.

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program - evidence that would have helped the White House to build a solid case for war in Iraq. Rumsfeld helped set up the Office of Special Plans in 2001 and tapped Feith to head the office.

The OSP, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover, and present it to the White House to build a case for war in Iraq. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmed Chalabi, who has provided the White House with reams of disputed intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans routinely provided President Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who headed the National Security Council at the time, with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat. Much of that information was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney, and some was never vetted for accuracy by career CIA analysts.

In an article in the New York Times in October 2002, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the OSP to "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker in May 2003 that the Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda."

Lang said the CIA and the OSP often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Paul Wolfowitz.

By the fall of 2002, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans. The CIA had failed to find any evidence of Iraq's weapons programs.

In a rare Pentagon briefing four years ago, Douglas Feith said the Office of Special Plans was not an "intelligence project," but rather a group of eighteen people who looked at intelligence information from a different point of view. Feith now teaches a seminar on Iraq War planning at Georgetown University.

t r u t h o u t | Report
Friday 09 February 2007

Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.

The Nation Demands Impeachment on Monday, Join us..

MplsImpeacher — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 03:47:41 -0500

Well, it only takes a moment to help convince Nancy Pelosi to Impeach Bush/Cheney..

Pelosi most likely said impeachment was "off the table" to remove any appearance of conflict-of-interest that would arise if she were thrust into the presidency as a result of the coming impeachment.

What we need to do is to pressure Pelosi not to interfere with impeachment maneuverings within her party. Sending her Do-It-Yourself impeachments legitimizes her when she is forced to join the impeachment movement in the future.

Sacks and sacks of mail are about to arrive in Nancy Pelosi's office initiating impeachment via the House of Representative's own rules this Monday January 15th. This legal document is as binding as if a State or if the House itself passed the impeachment resolution (H.R. 635).

There's a little known and rarely used clause of the "Jefferson Manual" in the rules for the House of Representatives which sets forth the various ways in which a president can be impeached. Only the House Judiciary Committee puts together the Articles of Impeachment, but before that happens, someone has to initiate the process.That's where we come in. In addition to a House Resolution (635), or the State-by-State method, one of the ways to get impeachment going is for individual citizens like you and me to submit a memorial. ImpeachforPeace.org has created a new memorial based on one which was successful in impeaching a federal official in the past. You can find it on their website as a PDF.

You can initiate the impeachment process and simultaneously help to convince Pelosi to follow through with the process. Do-It-Yourself by downloading the memorial, filling in the relevant information (your name, state, etc.), and sending it in. Be a part of history.

ImpeachForPeace.org

Revisiting the Conyers Report

CactusPat — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:08:58 -0500

I was doing some end of year email clean-up and came across this William Pitt interview with incoming House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers shortly after the release of the "Conyers Report". Curious how things have "changed" after just a few months...

..."Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.)... has released a 350-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance." Within the pages of this report lies the hard, ugly truth of our sorry situation...." (more)

The Conyers Report: An Interview
By William Rivers Pitt
Thursday 17 August 2006
When Ned Lamont defeated Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary last week, the prattling mass of GOP talking heads cried with one voice: the vote was evidence that the "Loony Left" had taken over the Democratic Party. It was a good talking point, and empty vessels like MSNBC's Chris Matthews happily ran with it for a while. Sadly for the Republicans, reality decided to intrude. Poll numbers came out which established that opposition to the Iraq occupation is now the majority position of the American people. The so-called Loony Left hadn't taken over the party. Instead, they had managed to convince the moderate middle that the war was just plain wrong.

Before the ink was dry on the Lamont stories, along came the bombshell: a roomful of terrorists were arrested in Britain for conspiring to blow nine commercial airliners out of the sky. Once again, the right-wing echo chamber ramped up. This is why we need to stay the course in Iraq, they said. This is why we are there. Again, however, these talking points jumped the tracks. The American occupation of Iraq is not curbing terrorism, but is instead inspiring it.

Just after noon on Thursday, August 17th, a report was broadcast stating that a Federal District Court in Detroit had ruled that the Bush administration's use of the NSA to spy on American citizens was unconstitutional. Judge Anna Diggs opinion on the ruling read, "In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained."

A lot of different threads to tie together here, to be sure. Thankfully, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has managed to do so in historic fashion. He has released a 350-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance."

Within the pages of this report lies the hard, ugly truth of our sorry situation. The lies that led us into Iraq, the horrors of torture at Abu Ghraib, the unrelenting attacks against critics, and the frightening desiccation of Constitutional protections are described in scathing detail.

"The single overriding characteristic running through all of the allegations of misconduct identified in our Report," reads the conclusion, "has been the unwillingness of the Bush Administration to allow its actions to be subject to any form of meaningful outside review. Not only were 122 Members of Congress unable to obtain any response to their questions posed regarding the Downing Street Minutes, but neither the House nor the Senate has ever engaged in any serious review of the facts surrounding the NSA domestic spying programs. The institutional damage resulting from such constitutional neglect will likely be felt for many years, if not generations. The lesson of this Report is that if we allow intelligence, military and law enforcement to do their work free of political interference, if we give them requisite resources and modern technologies, if we allow them to 'connect the dots' in a straight forward and non-partisan manner, we can protect our citizens. We all want to fight terrorism, but we need to fight it the right way, consistent with our Constitution, and in a manner that serves as a model for the rest of the world."

Rep. Conyers was kind enough to grant an interview regarding his report, the substance of which is as follows.

WRP: The scope and detail of this report is staggering. How long did it take to compile all the data before you reached your conclusions? How many people worked on its preparation?

JC: We started work on the Constitution in Crisis immediately after the basement hearing we had on the Downing Street Minutes back in June of last year. My Judiciary Committee Staff spent six months on a preliminary version of this report that we released in December. But, as things tend to develop here in Washington, we kept finding new abuses, and with the warrantless wiretapping we had plenty of new ground to cover. So our release this August represents more than a year's work.

WRP: If you had to sum up the essence of this report in a few sentences, what would you say?

JC: We have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their administration; and approved domestic surveillance that is both illegal and unconstitutional. We also have found there has been no independent review of the circumstances surrounding the Bush administration's domestic spying scandals.

WRP: What do you hope the impact of this report will be?

JC: I wanted to publish this report to make sure that everyone was aware of all the facts that we had compiled. The last 6 years have witnessed a crippling diminution in the power of Congress. I hope this report will serve as an important step toward restoring the balance of powers that are the basis of our Constitution and American democracy as a whole.

WRP: The 9/11 Commission released their report in book form. Are there any plans to do the same with this report?

JC: I understand Chicago Academy Publishers will be putting this volume to print in September, along with a foreword by Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

WRP: What do you feel is the most damning aspect of this report?

JC: The failure of the GOP Congress to conduct any meaningful oversight of the many documented allegations of abuse by the administration.

WRP: As much as the Bush administration can be faulted for this Iraq mess and the domestic spying scandal, much of the onus would seem to fall upon the shoulders of Congress. Why do you think the Republican majority has been so willing to abandon its Constitutional responsibilities, and what can be done to reverse this trend?

JC: This is an administration that thrives on secrecy, and has convinced the Republicans in Congress that their political viability depends on merely serving as cheerleaders and rubberstamps for the administration, even when they are demonstrably wrong. That is the message they are hearing from Karl Rove. When Democrats were in control, both Republican and Democratic Presidents knew they would be held accountable for misconduct. A subpoena from John Dingell or Jack Brooks meant something - it served as a check on power. That is unheard of today. I think the trend can only be reversed by a change in control of Congress.

WRP: In light of the information provided in this report, how crucial are the upcoming midterm elections?

JC: The upcoming elections couldn't be more important. If we want to have real government - as our founding fathers envisaged - a Congress with a Constitutional system of checks and balances holding the administration accountable, then now is the time we need to take back control of Congress.

WRP: If the Democrats should re-take the House in November, you will in all likelihood become Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. If this does happen, do you plan on calling hearings regarding the information contained in this report?

JC: I don't want to be presumptuous as to who the Democratic Caucus would select to chair the Judiciary Committee, or lose sight of what should be the prevailing interest of anyone seriously upset by the contents of this report. We need to win back the House of Representatives, plain and simple.

WRP: One gets the sense, after reading this report, that the damage done to the Constitution and the separation of powers by this administration and a complicit Congress may be irreparable. Do you agree? If not, what steps must be taken to undo all that has been done?

JC: You start with oversight and a sense of institutional and Constitutional responsibility. We need to change the present mindset - for too long the Bush administration has seen Congress as an institution that would not stand up for its own prerogatives or independently represent the American people. I think we can come back from the brink, but we need a new Congressional majority to do so.

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. His newest book, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation, will be available this winter from PoliPointPress.

Diplomat's Suppressed Document Lays Bare the Lies Behind Iraq War

CactusPat — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:32:49 -0500

It's the equivalent of another Downing Street Memo... Huge news!, but I've found only ONE MSM news report of it in this country, "Ex-British expert on Iraq says intel overstated". And Google News returns ZERO matches for that one news report! Imagine that.....

Diplomat's suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war
The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act... (more)

In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."

Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been "effectively contained".

He also reveals that British officials warned US diplomats that bringing down the Iraqi dictator would lead to the chaos the world has since witnessed. "I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said.

"At the same time, we would frequently argue when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

He claims "inertia" in the Foreign Office and the "inattention of key ministers" combined to stop the UK carrying out any co-ordinated and sustained attempt to address sanction-busting by Iraq, an approach which could have provided an alternative to war.

Mr Ross delivered the evidence to the Butler inquiry which investigated intelligence blunders in the run-up to the conflict.

The Foreign Office had attempted to prevent the evidence being made public, but it has now been published by the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs after MPs sought assurances from the Foreign Office that it would not breach the Official Secrets Act.

It shows Mr Ross told the inquiry, chaired by Lord Butler, "there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical warfare], BW [biological warfare] or nuclear material" held by the Iraqi dictator before the invasion. "There was, moreover, no intelligence or assessment during my time in the job that Iraq had any intention to launch an attack against its neighbours or the UK or the US," he added.

Mr Ross's evidence directly challenges the assertions by the Prime Minster that the war was legally justified because Saddam possessed WMDs which could be "activated" within 45 minutes and posed a threat to British interests. These claims were also made in two dossiers, subsequently discredited, in spite of the advice by Mr Ross.

His hitherto secret evidence threatens to reopen the row over the legality of the conflict, under which Mr Blair has sought to draw a line as the internecine bloodshed in Iraq has worsened.

Mr Ross says he questioned colleagues at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence working on Iraq and none said that any new evidence had emerged to change their assessment.

"What had changed was the Government's determination to present available evidence in a different light," he added.

Mr Ross said in late 2002 that he "discussed this at some length with David Kelly", the weapons expert who a year later committed suicide when he was named as the source of a BBC report saying Downing Street had "sexed up" the WMD claims in a dossier. The Butler inquiry cleared Mr Blair and Downing Street of "sexing up" the dossier, but the publication of the Carne Ross evidence will cast fresh doubts on its findings.

Mr Ross, 40, was a highly rated diplomat but he resigned because of his misgivings about the legality of the war. He still fears the threat of action under the Official Secrets Act.

"Mr Ross hasn't had any approach to tell him that he is still not liable to be prosecuted," said one ally. But he has told friends that he is "glad it is out in the open" and he told MPs it had been "on my conscience for years".

One member of the Foreign Affairs committee said: "There was blood on the carpet over this. I think it's pretty clear the Foreign Office used the Official Secrets Act to suppress this evidence, by hanging it like a Sword of Damacles over Mr Ross, but we have called their bluff."

Yesterday, Jack Straw, the Leader of the Commons who was Foreign Secretary during the war - Mr Ross's boss - announced the Commons will have a debate on the possible change of strategy heralded by the Iraqi Study Group report in the new year.

The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

By Colin Brown and Andy McSmith
Published: 15 December 2006

Be sure to snag a personal copy of the full transcript of evidence given to the Butler inquiry....

House Democrats Commit to Holding Bush Accountable

Chip — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 03:28:55 -0500

House Democrats have issued their broad general outline of goals titled "A New Direction for America" saying "Our goal is to restore accountability, honesty and openness at all levels of government. To do so, we will create and enforce rules that demand the highest ethics from every public servant…Honest leadership is not a partisan goal. It is the key to a stronger union. We must all work together to put together the progress of all Americans ahead of the special interests of the few."

House Democrats are supporting those high goals with some very specific commitments, among them:

"Hold the Bush Administration accountable for its manipulated pre-war intelligence, poor planning and contracting abuses that have placed our troops at greater risk and wasted billions of taxpayer dollars."
"Restore accountability and openness in federal contracting by subjecting major contract actions to public disclosure and aggressive competition; criminally prosecute contractors who cheat taxpayers, with penalties including suspension and debarment; impose stiff criminal and civil penalties for wartime fraud on government contracting; prohibit contractors with conflicts of interest from conducting oversight or writing contract requirement they could bid on; mandate full disclosure of contract overcharges; create tough penalties for improper no-bid contracts; and close the revolving door between federal contract officials and private contractors."

You can send Madam Speaker Pelosi a note asking her to follow through on the commitments made in "A New Direction for America." Here's what I wrote:

###

Dear Madam Speaker,

I am writing you to ask the House to do its constitutional duty by opening investigations into the conduct of President Bush, VP Cheney, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as described in the articles of impeachment introduced by Representative Cynthia McKinney.

I know that you have said that impeachment is off the table, but abiding our Constitution cannot be off the table.

There appears to be sufficient evidence to warrant investigations and I ask you to let them proceed.

###

Why not let Madam Speaker Pelosi know we expect the House Democrats to keep their commitments? Again, and again, and again!

Tell Our Congress To Rescind Bush's War Starting Powers

thepen — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:02:56 -0500

ACTION PAGE: http://www.peaceteam.net/aumf.php

The history of the last four years has proven that the Bush administration cooked intelligence and lied to obtain the original Authorization for Use of Military Force ("AUMF"), which was then immediately abused to launch an unprovoked and unwarranted invasion and indefinite occupation of Iraq. Yet, even as the strategic disaster in Iraq lurches further out of control day by day, the Bush administration is still talking about even more irrational plans to light a bigger powder keg in Iran. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Cheney arrogantly stated just before the elections that even were the Democrats to take back the Congress they would find some way around any legislative restrictions to pursue their insanity option in Iran.

Well we DID take back Congress. And the first thing Congress must do to reassert adult control over the petulant White House is to cancel the 2001 AUMF. Not only was it used to justify preemptive imperialism in Iraq, it has been trotted out incessantly since to excuse the illegal domestic wiretaps, the program of torture and secret detentions in violation of the Geneva convention, and every other manner of defiance of Congress and the federal courts since. It was NOT an authorization to unilaterally violate the Constitution, but it has been taken as such, and accordingly it MUST go.

A simple majority of Congress is all that is required to restore the appropriate and just balance of powers, to at least require the executive to have the express consent of Congress before any ill-advised new military misadventure. Only withdrawing the AUMF can send a message that foreign policy run amok will no longer be the order of the day.

The one click form below will send your personal message to all your government representatives selected below, with the subject "Terminate the Authorization for Use of Military Force." At the same time you can send your personal comments only as a letter to the editor of your nearest local daily newspaper if you like, and be added to the Voters For Peace Pledge.

ACTION PAGE: http://www.peaceteam.net/aumf.php