US Diary: Bush remains on course, steadily paddling up shit creek

1. Impeachment Calls Grow Louder -- by Matthew Rothschild

Last Saturday, I went to a town hall meeting on the Iraq War and impeachment in Madison, Wisconsin. This one was sponsored by Veterans for Peace. More than 150 other events around the country on January 7 were co-sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America and afterdowningstreet.org.

In Madison, about 350 people crammed into the Labor Temple to show their enthusiastic support for bringing the troops home. But what really got the crowd going was the drive for impeachment.

The event opened with longtime peace activist Robert Kimbrough asking people to speak up so we all could hear them. But not for the sake of the NSA or the CIA or the FBI or the Pentagon, he said, adding that they all have recording devices that will pick everything up anyway.

Someone shouted behind me, "Bring it on!"

Ed Garvey, a great Wisconsin progressive, addressed the dismissive attitude that prevails in Washington and among the cynics: that impeachment is impossible, and that we're just wasting our time talking about.

The same was said about the women's suffrage movement and about the civil rights movement, he observed, adding that when he's done he'd like to echo Rosa Parks, who said, after the bus boycott, "My feet may be tired but my soul's at rest."

I'm telling you, my friends, there's something going on at the grassroots that the mainstream media isn't getting.

And that's this urgent desire by millions of Americans to defenestrate Bush from power and reclaim our democracy.

There were other overflow crowds in Sacramento, Chicago, and Livonia, Michigan, according to an inspiring report on afterdowningstreet.org.

The move in Congress, headed by John Conyers, is also picking up co-sponsors here and there.

"A total of eight US House members have co-sponsored Resolution 635 to create a select committee to investigate the grounds for impeaching President Bush," according to Atlanta Progressive News. "The co-sponsors are Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA)."

Senator Russ Feingold said on January 8 that he, too, would consider impeachment.

"I think there is an orderly and dignified way to find out what happened," he said. "And if there was a legal violation there needs to be accountability," he said, according to a report in the Vermont Guardian. "You can't put the cart before the horse, but I would not rule out any form of accountability."

The Vermont Guardian said Feingold added that this would include impeachment. Feingold said that Bush "probably broke the law" when he authorized the NSA to spy in the United States without warrants.

Former Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who was on the House Judiciary Committee that impeached Richard Nixon, has come out for impeachment of Bush in The Nation. "A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law - and repeatedly violates the law - thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal of office."

The fuel for impeachment lies at the grassroots. That is where the organizing must happen. The city council of Arcata, California, is leading the way, adopting on January 4 a resolution demanding the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Other towns and cities will surely follow, and not just in progressive strongholds like Arcata.

Americans of almost every stripe don't want a President wire-tapping their phones or snooping on their e-mails without warrants.

Americans of almost every stripe don't want a President who puts a crown on his head.

Time for us to tire out our feet, and save the soul of this country.


2. Proof Bush Deceived America -- by Ray McGovern

James Risen’s State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, may hold bigger secrets than the disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.

Risen’s book also confirms the most damning element of the British Cabinet Office memos popularly called the “Downing Street memos;” namely, that “the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.” The result is that it is no longer credible to maintain that the failures in the Iraqi intelligence were the product of a broken intelligence community. The Bush administration deliberately fabricated the case against Iraq, lying to Congress and the American people along the way.

Risen, a senior reporter for The New York Times , reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had an urgent need in the summer of 2002 to get the equivalent of a “second opinion” regarding Bush’s plans for war in Iraq—insight independent of his own telephone conversations with the president and independent of what Blair was hearing from his own foreign office.

During his April 2002 visit to Crawford, Blair had gone out on a limb in pledging to support war on Iraq. The following months saw him getting nervous. So he chose what intelligence parlance calls a “back channel,” and sent the chief of British intelligence, Richard Dearlove, to Washington to sound out his counterpart: the garrulous CIA director George Tenet, who he knew to be very close to the president.

The highly revealing Downing Street memo contained the minutes of Dearlove's briefing of Blair and his top advisers upon his return from Washington on July 23. But what the memo left unanswered was the question of who gave Dearlove the confidence to say this to his prime minister:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.

When the Sunday Times published the minutes of that key briefing on May 1, 2005, it seemed a safe bet that Dearlove’s source was Tenet, and I said so .

Now we have the confirmation. Risen writes that George Tenet was reluctant to receive Dearlove, but acquiesced when the British made clear that Blair considered the back-channel meeting urgent. Tenet then rose to the occasion—with a vengeance. Risen, quoting a former senior CIA official who helped host the British for a session that lasted most of Saturday, July 20, 2002, reports that Tenet and Dearlove had a 90-minute one-on-one conversation, during which Tenet was “very candid.”

Risen adds that by the time of this “intelligence summit,” senior CIA officials had concluded that “the quality of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction didn’t really matter,” since war was inevitable. That perverse attitude certainly prevailed two months later, when the fabricated National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and WMD was produced by Tenet’s National Intelligence Council in a successful attempt to deceive Congress into voting for war.

A former CIA official told Risen that after the conversation with Tenet, Richard Dearlove could certainly “figure out what was going on; plus, the MI6 station chief in Washington was in CIA headquarters all the time, with just about complete access to everything.” In any case, we now know that Blair got what he wanted out of the visit—the inside scoop from someone enjoying the complete trust of, and daily access to, President Bush.

The president now says that he does not want his political opposition to dwell on how he lied to Congress and the American people in order to invade a country and kill tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and more than 2,200 U. S. troops—not to mention the many thousands maimed for life. Perhaps he knows that Risen's book could do as much damage to his administration by calling renewed attention to the Downing Street memos as is likely to be done by the revelations of the secret NSA wiretapping.

One world leader recognizes the extreme danger of official lies told to a nation in the service of an aggressive war. He also happens to be a leader who survived the horrors of fascism in the last century. In a Jan. 1 address to the world, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the consequences of lies such as these, in what can only be a thinly veiled reference to the president of the United States:

…Sacred Scripture, in its very first book, Genesis, points to the lie told at the very beginning of history by the animal with a forked tongue, whom the Evangelist John calls ''the father of lies'' (Jn 8:44). Lying is also one of the sins spoken of in the final chapter of the last book of the Bible, Revelation, which bars liars from the heavenly Jerusalem: ''outside are... all who love falsehood'' (22:15). Lying is linked to the tragedy of sin and its perverse consequences, which have had, and continue to have, devastating effects on the lives of individuals and nations. We need but think of the events of the past century, when aberrant ideological and political systems wilfully twisted the truth and brought about the exploitation and murder of an appalling number of men and women, wiping out entire families and communities. After experiences like these, how can we fail to be seriously concerned about lies in our own time, lies which are the framework for menacing scenarios of death in many parts of the world.

The ethos of the Central Intelligence Agency in which my contemporaries and I worked was chiseled into the marble at the entrance of CIA headquarters: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Sadly, the agency has come a long way.

(Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word , the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. A 27-year veteran of the CIA’s analysis ranks, he is now on the steering group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- VIPS ).