Media

George W. Bush should be given an indictment, not a library.  An online email action is letting the Department of Justice know the facts about the former president.  And the People's Response to the George W. Bush Library and Policy Institute is filling the streets of Dallas with protesters this week as five current or former presidents join in a celebration of Dubya's national service.  I'll certainly be there.

I wish I were kidding about the following.  The Dallas Morning News is refusing to take good money to publish the ad below because it suggests former president Bush lied about Iraq. 

Of course it would be shocking to suggest that Bush might have lied.  Who ever heard of such a thing?

Campaign promises don't count, of course.  Bush discarded those by the dozen, but who doesn't?  And when he said he'd fire whoever leaked Valerie Plame's name and then didn't, that's more of a technicality than a lie.  And when he claimed in his 2007 State of the Union to have prevented four terrorist plots and none of them were real, that was more of a poetic license than a lie.  Also when he said he hadn't been warned about Hurricane Katrina and then we saw that video of him being warned, there was no proof he actually understood what was being said to him.  Oh, and when he promised never to spy without a warrant and then got caught, that was sort of a willful falsehood for our own good, not a lie at all.  And when he said he didn't torture and then confessed to torturing, that was the fault of pesky journalists; Bush himself never intended to admit to torturing if he hadn't been pestered about it!

But if we can remember all of these near-lies these several years later, it does seem possible that Bush had a little trouble with the truth.  Let's look at Iraq, just to be sure.

On January 31, 2003, Bush met with Tony Blair in the White House and proposed all sorts of harebrained schemes to try to start a war in Iraq.  They understood that Iraq was no threat.  Bush promised an all-out effort to get U.N. approval for an attack.  Then the two of them walked right out to the White House Press Corpse (sic) and proclaimed their intention to avoid war if at all possible, warned of the threat from Iraq, and claimed to already have U.N. approval for war if needed.  I'll grant you that looks like a lie, but if none of the reporters there that day are bothered by it (not a one of them has ever complained), why should we be?  Maybe Bush meant that he'd try to avoid war for 60 more seconds.  That could have been true.  Later that day when he had the NSA start spying on other nations' U.N. delegations, maybe he was trying to determine the best Christmas presents to send them.  Hey, it's possible.

In 1999 Bush told his biographer Mickey Herskowitz that he wanted to start a war with Iraq.  But that could have been just a random fleeting whimsy.  Maybe you had to be there to catch the humor.  Also in 1999 at a primary debate in New Hampshire, Bush said he'd "take out" Saddam Hussein.  "I'm surprised he's still there," he said.  But Bush did get the nomination, so we're probably misunderstanding him somehow.

When Bush moved to the White House he must have learned what was what.  In 1995 Saddam Hussein's son-in-law had informed the U.S. and the British that all biological, chemical, missile, and nuclear weapons had been destroyed under his direct supervision.  After U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the lead inspector said they'd come to the same conclusion.  In 2002 the Defense Intelligence Agency agreed.  Also in 2002 CIA Director George Tenet told Bush that Iraq's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri -- a CIA informer -- agreed with the U.N. and the D.I.A., as did Iraq's intelligence chief.  So, still in 2002, the CIA sent 30 Iraqi-Americans to visit Iraqi weapons scientists, but the mission was a failure: they came back with the same definitive conclusion as the U.N., the D.I.A., and Sabri. 

In 2001, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and others in the Bush Administration were telling the media that Saddam Hussein had no weapons.  The closest connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden was that they had both worked with the United States.  Everything changed in 2002, and not because of any evidence.  In October 2002, the CIA told Bush that Hussein was unlikely to attack unless attacked first.  The CIA had told Bush this four times in morning briefings since that spring.  Bush immediately gave a speech in Cincinnati warning of a dire threat from Iraq.  Bush's subordinates took an October 1^st National Intelligence Estimate that said Hussein was unlikely to attack unless attacked and "summarized" it to say nearly the opposite in a "white paper" released to the public. 

By the time Bush and Blair stood before the White House Press Corpse, they had decided on war and begun it.  Troops were being deployed.  Escalated bombing missions were preparing the ground.  Assorted attempts to initiate all-out war had already failed or been abandoned.  That Bush was interested in provoking Iraq is confirmed by extensive covert operations called DB/Anabasis reported by Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book Hubris:

"Over an intense forty-five day period beginning in late 2001, [two CIA operatives] cooked up an audacious plan. . . . It called for installing a small army of paramilitary CIA officers on the ground inside Iraq; for elaborate schemes to penetrate Saddam's regime; recruiting disgruntled military officers with buckets of cash; for feeding the regime disinformation . . . for disrupting the regime’s finances . . . for sabotage that included blowing up railroad lines. . . . It also envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war.  A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border.  They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way.  If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by US fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by U.N. edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war.  On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees -- including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat -- were briefed.  'The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out' [said CIA operative John McGuire]. If all went as planned, 'you'd have a premise for war: we've been invited in.'"

A White House staffer was instructed in 2003 to forge a letter that could be used to tie Hussein to al Qaeda as well as to forge letters smearing vocal opponents of invasion.  Other information tying Hussein to al Qaeda consisted largely of claims fed to a torture victim.  Evidence of biological weapons came from a German informant identified as a heavy drinker with mental breakdowns, not psychologically stable, "crazy," and "probably a fabricator."  Evidence for nuclear weapons rested heavily on a forged letter, rejected as a forged letter by the CIA.  There was also a claim re aluminum tubes that was rejected by the Energy Department and the State Department and even by the military until it contracted out to a couple of hacks in Central Virginia who were willing to say what was needed. 

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller concluded that "In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even nonexistent."

Clearly Rockefeller is jumping to a conclusion, and the more responsible people over at the Dallas Morning News know better. 

Still, if you think there might be something to all of this, I recommend reading The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush.

Laws clearly violated by George W. Bush include, among many others: The U.S. Constitution Article I, Sections 8, 9, Article II, Sections 1, 3, Article VI, and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the prohibition on covert propaganda, Title 2 U.S. Code Section 194, Title 18 U.S. Code Sections 4, 371, 1341, 1346, 1385, 2340A, 2441, The War Powers Act, the United Nations Charter Chapter 1 Article 2 Section 3, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Hague Convention of 1899, Joint Resolution 114 Section 3, Additional Protocol I to Geneva Conventions, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008 Section 1222, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Third Geneva Convention, the International Covenant on Human Rights Articles 7, 10, the Convention Against Torture, the Optional Protocol to the Fourth Geneva Convention on Rights of the Child, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Stored Communications Act.

But who's counting?

Norman Solomon discusses his recent debate with former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson on the lies that took the United States into war 10 years ago, as well as Solomon's cofounding of online activist force RootsAction.org.

Total run time: 29:00

Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan are touring the country with a new book that everyone should have and read.  "The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope" is a history of the Obama Years in the form of a thematically organized collection of columns -- columns that grew out of the reporting done by the most useful show on our airwaves: Democracy Now!