Marble Composition

Egregious

Looking back, after the Watergate hearings, I never thought we'd have a presidency or an administration as bad as Nixon's. I was wrong. As Jimmy Carter said the other day, what we're witnessing is the Bush administration vs. every other one that came before them. From Billmon:

Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.

"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said . . . (emphasis added)

Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council.

He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages. (emphasis added)

He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a National Security Council memo arguing strongly that the United States needed many more troops for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

From Josh Marshall:

Yesterday morning we noted that Ahmad Chalabi is being feted next week at the American Enterprise Institute. Set aside the fact that little more than a year ago he was implicated in sharing US intelligence with Iran. What we know pretty much conclusively now is that Chalabi connived at gaming the US into war by cooking up all manner of bogus intelligence and unsubstantiated claims about WMD and terrorism. It is almost a cliche at this point -- Chalabi, the Iraqi emigre behind most of the outlandish bogus intel.

One extreme view would have it that Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot and, as such, any lying and cheating and stealing in America is just a means to the end of getting the previous regime overthrown. As it happens, I think the guy is more just a gamer and an opportunist. But be that as it may, what sort of American organization would be hosting and celebrating such a man after all we know today, after all the bad acts we know he has committed against this country.

The organization is, of course, AEI. And how can it be that their feting of him, as they are to do next week, does not amount to a big 'who cares' or 'ends justify the means' or 'we knew what he was up to all along anyway' about all the phoney baloney he pulled in the lead up to the war?

Will any politician, Republican or Democrat, stand up and speak out against this outrage? Does anyone plan to protest?

This is not the country that I grew up in.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 11/05/2005 08:26:00 PM