Sense and Nonsense

Impeachable Offense

Impeach the bastards.

ThinkProgress sums up the case here. (but go to the link to read the whole thing):

A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind claims that, after the Iraq war began, the White House ordered the CIA to forge a “backdated, handwritten letter” from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein, in an attempt to tie Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. Here’s what Suskind reports:

– Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, told U.S. and British officials there was no WMD in Iraq, “intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

– In the fall of 2003, the White House ordered CIA Director George Tenet to forge a “fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq” and that Iraq bought yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al Qaeda.

– The letter was commissioned “from the highest reaches of the White House.” “It would have to come from the very top,” Suskind told NPR today.

More on this story here and here and here and here. 

If Suskind is right about this and his claims are verified, this is an impeachable offense.

So, the White House orders the CIA to forge a backdated handwritten letter in an attempt to tie Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks.  What else would the White House do to further its goals?  Anthrax, anyone?

It Was the Oil, All Along

Bill Moyers nicely ties together recent strands of evidence: the Iraq War was about the oil all along.

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil.

Read more here.

Greeley on Phony Patriotism

The Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday printed a great article by Andrew Greeley.  The whole thing is worth reading (it's brief), but here's an excerpt:

[The current war] is not the first patriotic/revenge war on which the country has embarked. Remember the Maine. Remember the Alamo. Remember Fort Sumter. Remember Pearl Harbor. The psychology for whipping up revenge in the name of patriotism has always worked. World War II was a just war, but the mix of patriotism and revenge made it easy for the American military to firebomb out of existence 50 Japanese cities and to destroy a couple more with atom bombs.

Are the American people guilty of a war crime because of the Iraq war? Surely the leaders who cooked up the excuses for the war are. So, too, are the national media that allowed patriotism to silence them. So, too, are those ordinary Americans who almost insisted on some kind of patriotic gore. On this weekend in which we glorify -- with good reason -- our patriotism, we might examine our conscience about what phony patriotism has caused us to do. A third of the American population supported the war and has now changed its mind. It might be wise for such folk to prepare answers to the kinds of questions God might ask about phony patriotism.

Remember John Prine: "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Any More."

U.S. Sanitization of the War

It's good to be reminded from time to time of the ways in which the Bush Administration likes to keep us in the dark about what is actually happening in Iraq.  After all, it wouldn't be good for Americans to be aware of the horrors of warfare there.

There's a long history here, of course, going back to the "embedding" of journalists with U.S. military troops (all the better to control what gets reported) and the long period of prohibition on the release of photographs of flag-draped coffins returning to the U.S. mainland.

Here's the latest entry in this sad history -- an article about an embedded American journalist being censored by the U.S. military after he posted photos from Fallujah.