| Friday, February 10, 2006 |
| What do YOU believe? |
There's literally so much going on out there it's hard to keep up...
First, there's the Jason Leopold story that hit the Internet today confirming that indeed there was an orchestrated campaign to discredit former Ambassador Joe Wilson as retribution for his criticism of the Iraq war, and that that campaign was led by Vice President Dick Cheney. Writes Leopold:
Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials.
The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson.
In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House.
The officials said they decided to speak out now because they have become disillusioned with the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq and the flawed intelligence that led to the war.
They said their roles, along with several others at the CIA and State Department, included digging up or "inventing" embarrassing information on the former Ambassador that could be used against him, preparing memos and classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the National Security Council, and attending meetings in Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney, Hadley, and others the efforts that would be taken to discredit Wilson. The story goes on to explain that the campaign began in response to an interview Wilson did on CNN, in which he called into question the goals of an Iraq war, which he surmised would increase -- not thwart -- terrorism.
The anti-Wilson campaign was, of course, tied in with the Libby-leaked campaign, also under Cheney's direction, to distribute classified information to the media in order to buck up support for the invasion of Iraq. (Interview with Murray Waas, who broke that story, here).
Then add to that the Walter Pincus story in today's WaPo spelling out the objections of a former CIA official, who claims the administration "sexed up" the intelligence on Iraq in order to smooth the way for an invasion...
Why was the desire of the Bush administration (and the Tony Blair administration, while we're at it...) so strong -- so nearly desperate -- to invade Iraq? Iraq posed no military threat to the United States: Saddam had an addled military, no air force, no oil bargaining chip, no connections to al-Qaida and as we now know the Bush administration knew at the time neither WMD nor nuclear weapons.
So what was it? Was it just the neocon dream of establishing a beachhead in the Middle East and sticking it to the goddamned Arabs once and for all? Or the PNAC fixation with extending American dominance by blackmailing Europe with Yankee-controlled oil? Was it about enriching Halliburton, General Electric and the other big war contractors? Or establishing a broad surveillance society that would make every possible habit of every American the property of a government poised to shovel that information into the arms of the corporations standing behind the curtain?
At this point, I'm so disillusioned and disgusted with what's going on in Washington, including with the continuing terrorism scare-lies (do you really believe this 2001 or 2002, Liberty or Library Tower foiled plot story? If you do, you must be a FReeper...) and which I do believe extends beyond our borders, outside the real interests of Americans, that I'm ready to believe almost anything...
Which brings me to this column, written by a great columnist at the outfit I once did a little writing for. ... and this link ... and this video...
I know it sounds like Moonbatty fanaticism, but if you believe that your government would lie, cheat and attempt to destroy people in order to start a war that doesn't even make strategic sense, but which they had to know would result in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people ... if you believe that men who are supposed to be working for us, are working so much against us that they would give away American industry to foreign powers, permit the breaching of our borders in order to feed slave labor to multinationals, that they would strip Americans of the most basic civil rights, and make about 40 percent of us like it (or be too afraid not to) -- if they would do all that, including to, at this point, more than 1 million U.S. soldiers who have rotated in and out of Iraq ... what do you believe they wouldn't do?
Tags: Iraq war, Bush Administration, Halliburton, Corruption, 9-11 |
posted by JReid @ 6:10 PM   |
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