| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"undergroundgrad" |
| Date: |
28 Nov 2005 06:23:01 AM |
| Object: |
Bush's Burgeoning Body Count |
Bush's Burgeoning Body Count
Fallen Legion II
By Nick Turse
About six weeks ago, at the urging of fellow TomDispatch author Rebecca
Solnit, I undertook the beginnings of an on-line memorial to the Fallen
Legion of the Bush administration. It was, in effect, a proposal for a
virtual "wall" made up of the seemingly endless and ever-growing list
of top officials as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and
career civil servants who had quit their government posts in protest or
were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to
retire by administration strong-arm tactics, cronyism, and disastrous
policies. As a start, I offered 42 prospective names for a Fallen
Legion (and brief descriptions of their fates). These ranged from
well-known figures like the President's former chief adviser on
terrorism on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, former Army
Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill to the archivis! t of the United States, the state director of
the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho, and three members of the White
House Cultural Property Advisory Committee (who resigned over the
looting of Iraq after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops). I also called upon
readers to aid my future efforts and to send suggestions to:
fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com . (And I renew that call in this piece.)
The response has been, in a word, overwhelming. Hundreds of letters
poured in -- from readers who took me to task for the omission of their
own personal picks for such a "Wall" to notes of encouragement from
courageous former officials already included in my listing (like Teresa
Chambers, the U.S. Park Police Chief who was fired for speaking out and
now has a website documenting her long struggle). Some of the fallen
whose stories, sad to say, I hadn't even heard of, wrote in as well.
Here, then, is the second installment in what is by now an ongoing
series at Tomdispatch dedicated to continuing to build the Fallen
Legion Wall, "brick" by "brick." Included in this installment is one
honorary legionnaire, former NFL football player Pat Tillman, and a
consideration of some officials picked by readers for spots of honor
whose departure from government service was less than clear cut. This
new installment adds approximately 175 additional casualties to the
rolls of "the Fallen." But bear in mind that this list is not yet close
to being finished. Many suggested Fallen Legionnaires (even some who
wrote in personally) do not appear below, but will take their bows in
future follow-ups.
Additional Casualties
Jesselyn Radack: An attorney in the Justice Department's Professional
Responsibility Advisory Office who worked on the case of John Walker
Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, Radack warned federal
prosecutors that interrogating him without his attorney present would
be unethical. When the FBI interviewed Lindh anyway, Raddack told
Tomdispatch, she "then recommended that [the transcript] be sealed and
only used for intelligence-gathering purposes, not for criminal
prosecution." Again, her advice was ignored. Later, when Lindh was on
trial, Radack learned that the judge in the case had requested copies
of all internal correspondence concerning Lindh's interrogation.
Although Radack had written more than a dozen e-mails on the subject,
she discovered that only two of them had been turned over and neither
reflected her contention that the FBI had committed an ethics
violation.
Read the rest of this article here:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=39653
.
|
|
| User: "A Veteran for Peace" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush's Burgeoning Body Count |
28 Nov 2005 01:25:25 PM |
|
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In article <1133180581.248132.23400@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"undergroundgrad" <undergroundgrad@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Bush's Burgeoning Body Count
Fallen Legion II
By Nick Turse
About six weeks ago, at the urging of fellow TomDispatch author Rebecca
Solnit, I undertook the beginnings of an on-line memorial to the Fallen
Legion of the Bush administration. It was, in effect, a proposal for a
virtual "wall" made up of the seemingly endless and ever-growing list
of top officials as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and
career civil servants who had quit their government posts in protest or
were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to
retire by administration strong-arm tactics, cronyism, and disastrous
policies. As a start, I offered 42 prospective names for a Fallen
Legion (and brief descriptions of their fates). These ranged from
well-known figures like the President's former chief adviser on
terrorism on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, former Army
Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill to the archivis! t of the United States, the state director of
the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho, and three members of the White
House Cultural Property Advisory Committee (who resigned over the
looting of Iraq after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops). I also called upon
readers to aid my future efforts and to send suggestions to:
fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com . (And I renew that call in this piece.)
The response has been, in a word, overwhelming. Hundreds of letters
poured in -- from readers who took me to task for the omission of their
own personal picks for such a "Wall" to notes of encouragement from
courageous former officials already included in my listing (like Teresa
Chambers, the U.S. Park Police Chief who was fired for speaking out and
now has a website documenting her long struggle). Some of the fallen
whose stories, sad to say, I hadn't even heard of, wrote in as well.
Here, then, is the second installment in what is by now an ongoing
series at Tomdispatch dedicated to continuing to build the Fallen
Legion Wall, "brick" by "brick." Included in this installment is one
honorary legionnaire, former NFL football player Pat Tillman, and a
consideration of some officials picked by readers for spots of honor
whose departure from government service was less than clear cut. This
new installment adds approximately 175 additional casualties to the
rolls of "the Fallen." But bear in mind that this list is not yet close
to being finished. Many suggested Fallen Legionnaires (even some who
wrote in personally) do not appear below, but will take their bows in
future follow-ups.
Additional Casualties
Jesselyn Radack: An attorney in the Justice Department's Professional
Responsibility Advisory Office who worked on the case of John Walker
Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, Radack warned federal
prosecutors that interrogating him without his attorney present would
be unethical. When the FBI interviewed Lindh anyway, Raddack told
Tomdispatch, she "then recommended that [the transcript] be sealed and
only used for intelligence-gathering purposes, not for criminal
prosecution." Again, her advice was ignored. Later, when Lindh was on
trial, Radack learned that the judge in the case had requested copies
of all internal correspondence concerning Lindh's interrogation.
Although Radack had written more than a dozen e-mails on the subject,
she discovered that only two of them had been turned over and neither
reflected her contention that the FBI had committed an ethics
violation.
Read the rest of this article here:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=39653
thanks, and
The Vietnamization of Iraq
By Jed Babbin
Published 11/28/2005 12:08:06 AM
As hard as it is to think of Ted Kennedy as a political visionary, his
April 2004 statement that "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," was way
before its time. In the last presidential election year Kennedy
started down a path that would have been political suicide for Kerry.
But Kerry's approach -- feigning support for real action against
terrorism -- lost. The Dems will not make the same mistake in 2008.
The architects of our defeat in Vietnam have dusted off their old
plans and are adopting them to Iraq. They are working hard to make
Kennedy's statement come true.
The whole Democrat menagerie has embarked on a campaign to Vietnamize
Iraq: to make it a demonstrable defeat and by so doing regain the
White House regardless of the consequences. If they succeed, Iraq will
become a far greater failure than Vietnam was because the stakes are
much higher abroad and at home. The next presidential election will,
like the last one, be a referendum on Iraq. And if Iraq is a failure,
the Democrats will be a success.
"Vietnamization" once meant arming, training and supporting an ally so
that it could defend itself and thus relieve Americans of the burden.
But to the Democrats and the Chernobyl Republicans who are trying to
Vietnamize Iraq, Vietnam is not a nation but an outcome. To succeed in
Vietnamizing Iraq, they must treat the nation's uncertainty like
uranium ore, refining it in stages into politically fissionable
material. First, they must catalyze the nation's uncertainty into
doubt, and then refine public doubts about the war into conviction
that America should not fight it, and that the Iraqis must be left to
their own devices. Sen. Joe Biden -- who rarely has an unexpressed
thought -- has shed a dim light on the Democrats' strategy.
On Meet the Press yesterday, Biden said that the 79-19 Senate vote two
weeks ago for John Warner's three-part antiwar resolution was a "vote
of no confidence" in Bush's prosecution of the war. In response to Tim
Russert's questions, Biden's Republican pal Warner didn't even manage
a decent harrumph. The Senate resolution -- even with so many
Republicans supporting it -- wasn't a vote of no confidence. But it
was a message to America that a strong Senate majority was unhappy
with Mr. Bush's conduct of the war. It was a long step toward
achieving Vietnamization of Iraq by destroying public support for the
war.
Biden perhaps revealed too much. He linked his desire for a
Vietnam-like timetable for withdrawal from Iraq to the timetable for
2008 presidential aspirants, including himself. On Meet the Press,
having said we have only a six-month window of opportunity to get it
right in Iraq, Biden later said that his presidential ambitions depend
on his ability to raise money in those same six months. If Biden and
his ilk can Vietnamize Iraq in six months, they believe they can
regain the White House. And the only way they can do either is to
destroy America's will to win, just as they did in the Vietnam War.
The old protest drums are pounding out the old messages: we can't win,
we got into this because we were lied to, and our enemy is no worse
than our ally.
CHRIS MATTHEWS HAS BEEN beating the "Bush lied" drum as hard as
anyone. Two Sundays ago, as I wrote in AmSpecBlog that day, Matthews
said that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution -- which LBJ used to expand the
American involvement in Vietnam -- was based on lies just as was the
Iraq war resolution. The Tonkin Gulf resolution, passed by Congress
and authorizing expanded military intervention in Vietnam, has always
been used by the party of George McGovern to condemn the Vietnam war.
The problem that the antiwar left has is that the Tonkin Gulf attack
-- and the threat of Saddam -- weren't fiction.
As I wrote in 2003, "the destroyer USS Maddox -- gathering
intelligence for the South Vietnamese -- was attacked by four North
Vietnamese patrol boats on August 2, 1964. Maddox -- aided by carrier
aircraft -- severely damaged the attackers, leaving at least one dead
in the water." The next night, another attack was detected, but due to
the overcast skies, U.S. aircraft couldn't find them and they couldn't
find the U.S. ships. One pilot who flew that second night e-mailed me
that he was confident the enemy boats were there. In that e-mail, he
told me, "We were being vectored by a radar operator. He could see our
aircraft and he could see the targets on the water. We were vectored
to a surface target, but without flares we could not see it. I know
for certain there were targets on the water, but like the WMD in Iraq,
we could not visually find them."
We shall only indulge in the briefest restatement of the facts about
Saddam's WMD. The fact we haven't found the WMD in Iraq proves
absolutely nothing about whether they existed or whether Saddam wasn't
doing his best to obtain more. Sen. Jay Rockefeller gave Saddam almost
a year to move them after his January 2002 trip during which he told
the Saudis, the Jordanians, and the Syrians that the president had
already decided on war. When we fiddled and diddled at the UN for six
months beginning in September 2002, hundreds of trucks carried we know
not what out of Iraq, according to the Dulfer Report. There was no lie
by the president. But the Dems exhibit a most fundamental lack of
understanding about Iraq, what is at stake there and what Iraq's
neighbors are.
Once again, Biden is the best orator of ignorance and naivete. In his
Saturday WaPo column, Biden -- assuming the best of intentions in
wonderful nations such as Iran and Syria -- wrote, "Iraq's neighbors
and the international community have a huge stake in the country's
future. The president should initiate a regional strategy -- as he did
in Afghanistan -- to leverage the influence of neighboring countries."
Iraq's neighbors do have a huge stake in Iraq. Syria, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia cannot afford democracy to take root in Iraq because it would
threaten their despotisms and support for terrorism. Biden's vacuity
can be effective if he is not answered. And another key step to
successfully Vietnamizing Iraq -- silencing those who support the war
-- has been very effective.
VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY HAS, at long last, been speaking out strongly
against those who are accusing the president of lying us into a war.
He has said, with precise correctness, that "One might...argue that
untruthful charges against the commander in chief have an insidious
effect on the war effort." The WaPo's Michael Kinsley characterized
that comment as "ugly and demagogic," writing on Friday that "the
administration now concedes that the country went to war on a false
premise." The administration does no such thing, and Kinsley's
hyperbole seeks to do precisely what he accuses the Vice President of
doing.
What Kinsley is doing is essential to the success of the Dems'
campaign. Kinsley smears as "ugly and demagogic" those who criticize
the antiwar types. In Kinsley's book, it's perfectly permissible to
call the president a liar, but totally out of bounds to say that we
are fighting an existential war against terrorists in Iraq and in many
other places. Kinsley, and the rest of the MSM, are working hard to
produce the result that Jane Fonda and John Kerry did in the 1970s.
When they achieved media acceptance of the wrongness of the Vietnam
War, they also managed to marginalize as a warmonger and a fool anyone
who believed Vietnam was a war worth fighting. Kinsley and his
brethren in the MSM will only tolerate variances on the theme of how
and when we'll quit and run from the war against terrorism.
There is only one answer to this: presidential leadership and faster
achievement on the battlefield. Americans are entitled to have doubts
and uncertainties. The war has, thanks to the media, become a
Vietnam-like daily bloodletting. The war's opponents -- even the Dems
-- are right in that we cannot continue this way indefinitely. The
president needs to do three things. First, he needs to tell Mr.
Rumsfeld and Gen. Pete Pace to deal with terrorism at its sources,
wherever they may be, at the greatest speed they can manage. Second --
as I've said over and over -- he needs to be out and about, leading
the country and the world by telling us long, hard and continuously
what we are doing, where, how and why, and why it's worth the cost in
blood and treasure. He must do this every day from now until he leaves
office. It's the burden of a war presidency, and he hasn't shouldered
it. It's his job and it's high bloody time he did it.
Third, Mr. Bush should pick up his veto pen and kill the misbegotten
Senate resolution, including the McCain amendment. Let's raise the
temperature on the Chernobyl Republicans. If they can't take it, maybe
some of them -- such as Messrs. McCain and Hagel -- might well come
around.
--
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing
their memory, or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and
let them rewrite history." -- ***** Cheney 11/16/2005
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." -- John Updike
"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
--
Impeach Bush ! a noble cause
Operation Iraqi Liberation = O.I.L.
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