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What der Kaiser und Firma desperately didn’t want you to see: the killing of 60 Minutes

This case sends chills down my spine. What are we becoming, People, when our government, our paid civil servants, the people into whose hands we entrust our Constitutionally guaranteed rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are allowed to control any aspect of a Free Press? When they can bully, inflence and downright “persuade” the media about any of its reporting?? And to do it by such egregious and unconscienable means: by planting fake documents and then shouting ooh, ooh, look, those documents are forged, how dare you . . .

And the reason for that ruinous scam, that venomous attack on the venerable 60 Minutes broadcast network? Are We The People surprised that the episode of 60 Minutes, the one that was silenced by so-called credibility problems following the Bush National Guard documents scam, was set to uncover a BushCo fraud? It was a half-hour expose, “powerfully, coherently and credibly reported,” revealing that “the Bush administration had, either intentionally or with breathtaking credulity, relied on patently false intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq.” Not that we didn’t already know that or anything, but to finally get it out in no uncertain terms, in a respected, mainstream investigative medium—but read this:

The Cowardly Broadcasting Company
CBS cravenly killed a 60 Minutes segment about Bush’s deceptive case for invading Iraq. What did it contain that was too much for voters to see?
Mary Jacoby
salon.com, September 29, 2004 (no subscription, no problem; watch a painless commercial for a free day pass)

By relying on documents that could not be absolutely authenticated from a blind source to make the otherwise irrefutable case that George W. Bush shirked his National Guard duties in the early 1970s, CBS anchor Dan Rather dealt the credibility of journalism a "body blow," according to Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler. But just how damaging was that blow?

One measure of the debacle is a 60 Minutes Wednesday segment that millions of viewers now will now not see: a hard-hitting report making a powerful case that in trying to build support for the Iraq war, the Bush administration either knowingly deceived the American people about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities or was grossly credulous. CBS news president Andrew Heyward spiked the story this week, saying it would be “inappropriate” during the election campaign.

The importance that CBS placed on the report was evident by its unusual length: It was slated to run a full half hour, double the usual 15 minutes of a single segment. Although months of reporting went into the production, CBS abruptly decided that it would be “inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election,” in the words of a statement that network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards gave the New York Times. . . .

“Two years ago, Americans heard some frightening words from President Bush and his closest advisers,” Bradley said in his introduction of the now-shelved report. “Saddam Hussein, they said, could soon have a nuclear bomb. Of course, we now know that wasn't true.” Not only did Saddam not have a nuclear program, Bradley said, but “he hadn’t for more than ten years. How could the Bush administration be so wrong about something so important?”

The answer, Bradley was to have told viewers, “has a lot to do with a single piece of evidence: A set of documents that appear to prove Saddam was secretly buying uranium ore.” . . .

After video clips “in rapid succession” of Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld all delivering “deliberate and practiced” warnings “with eerily similar wording” about how imminently dangerous Hussein was,

Cut to Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” The expression on Bush’s face as he speaks portentously was a look of concern. Yet, had the segment aired, the viewer would have understood that the president was not telling the truth. . . .

In his State of the Union address in January 2003, President Bush cited the supposed Iraqi nuclear threat, slyly attributing its sourcing to British intelligence, since discredited by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report. . . .

The show was thorough, covering the Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame affair as well as bringing to mind the question of “whether the right-wing government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had helped manufacture evidence that his ally, Bush, could use to persuade Americans to support an invasion.”

Please read the article to learn about this latest case of investigative journalism squashed by the Bush administration by means of desperate dirty tricks.

With that in mind, see When Fascism Comes to America, by Maureen Dowd, September 21 in buzzflash, which begins with this quote:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public. . .
—Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the New York Times, April 9, 1944

The article goes on to reveal exactly how BushCo has manipulated and molded FOX News to suit its purposes, how the Bush Family continues to profit from war “through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links,” and how “we have been warned” of “the scent in the air” of fascism.

Monday, September 27, 2004

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Haven’t had time yet to put together a separate page on Bush Family ties to global-scale crimes, so here it is, since the U.S. media has been effectively turned to pablum by Bush-loving megacorporatists, another contribution from the foreign press—the whole world is truly united in battling this scourge. To those who say, “so what, that was his grandfather," I say the whole present-day Bush infestation is a mafioso-type Family continuing to build on what the ancestral parasites put in place, sustaining itself on the blood of wars and human suffering.

How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power
Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president
Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
the Guardian (UK), September 25, 2004

Bush 2nd term = guaranteed end of the middle class

As predicted, GWBush made reference to his glorious vision of an “ownership society” in his RNC acceptance speech last week. This is simply BushCo double-speak for wealth redistribution in favor of the rich. As Mark Gongloff, CNN/Money Senior Writer explains, these proposals will shift the tax burden to the lower and middle classes and create huge deficits:

. . . [tax-free Lifetime Savings Accounts and Retirement Savings Accounts] will shift the tax burden to those who live from paycheck to paycheck, who can’t afford to save. Such plans will also drain tax revenue, with upper-income families able to sock away several thousands of dollars in income, tax-free, every year. Without significant spending cuts to match them, critics say, government debt will rise, which will undercut national saving.

“We need to figure out how to help more lower- and middle-income people save for retirement,” said Robert Greenstein, founder and executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank that’s frequently criticized Bush’s policies, “not lose large amounts of money by giving people breaks at high-income levels, who already have substantial assets to fall back on.” . . .

[Permanent tax cuts] will substantially expand the federal budget deficit after 2010, almost precisely at the moment when Baby Boomers will start retiring en masse, drawing federal benefits and putting a strain on the budget. . . .

Get a trenchant and detailed analysis here:

And you thought his first term was a nightmare
What Bush has planned for America if he wins
Charles Tiefer
Salon, August 25, 2004

President Bush’s plans for a second term threaten a devastating series of far-reaching challenges to the viability of the Democratic Party itself. Under Bush’s slogan of an “ownership society,” the Republicans intend a long-term effort, using changes in Medicare, Social Security and taxes to pit better-off and worse-off Democrats against each other, offering all-but-irresistible incentives for some to desert the others—and any progressive national coalition. Congressional Democrats reeling from the impact of the last four years of Republican government in the White House and Congress (apart from the brief Democratic-controlled Senate in part of 2001–02) will find no respite in the platform’s subtext about the party-splitting wedges ahead. A second-term Bush agenda will constantly impale Democrats on the dilemma of abandoning their poorer, sicker, older and minority groups, or seeing their better-off, healthier and younger members lured off to the other party. . . .

Excellent blogger insights at BlogCritics.com:

Scam Alert: Watch Out For “Ownership Society” And “Investor Class”
Hal Pawluk, August 30, 2004

Both terms are warning signals of this administration's new push to sell the privatization of health care and social security.

Before you buy into it, ask yourself: “Who benefits?”

The answer is: “Those who have more money than they need already.”

Privatization of health care and social security gives them more places to stash the cash without paying any taxes. This plan also gets more money out of the U.S. Treasury and into the coffers of private financial institutions. And will require a tax increase or cuts in benefits.

Who will not benefit is the 45 million without health care because they can't afford it already. No “savings plan” or “tax break” is going to help when they don't have the cash in the first place.

Social security is a double scam, because not only does it work for the rich, it will cost another $2 to $4 trillion from tax-payers . . .

And see this, by Robert B. Reich at tompaine.com, September 7:

A Society of Owners
The Republicans are selling their vision of an “Ownership Society” to a nation of debtors.

. . . The fact is, an Ownership Society based on the stock market would be a casino. The Bush administration would like you to put your Social Security payments into the stock market, but beware. If your timing is bad, you could find yourself retiring in a bear market. It’s happened before. That’s one of the reasons Social Security—as social insurance—was invented.

Face it: The Republican "Ownership Society" is hokum. . . .

Now tell us something we didn’t know

Pakistan says US claim that bin Laden near capture is politicking
AFP, Sept. 6, 2004

ISLAMABAD (AFP)—Pakistan rejected as pre-election politicking a US official’s weekend claim that Osama bin Laden was close to being captured.

“He can say this but we have no sound information. This is a political statement,” Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told AFP.

The US State Department official in charge of counter-terrorism affairs, Joseph Cofer Black, told local Geo television on Saturday that the forces pursuing the Al-Qaeda chief had got closer to him in the past two months. . . .

Rashid however said no new information had come to light despite a series of high-profile Al-Qaeda arrests which began in mid-July. . . .

Senator Bob Graham’s new book exposes the Bush-Saud connection—again

Bush links to Saudi royals resurface in new book
Andrew Buncombe
UK independent, September 7, 2004

The controversy over President George Bush’s links with the Saudi royal family is likely to be reignited after a series of fresh allegations in a new book claiming that his administration engaged in a “cover-up” to protect its ally after the 11 September attacks.

In his forthcoming book, Intelligence Matters, the Florida senator Bob Graham says President Bush and his senior officials “coddled” the Saudi authorities and pursued a war against Saddam Hussein that diverted resources from the hunt for al-Qa’ida.

Senator Graham, co-chairman of a joint House/Senate investigation into the 11 September attacks, says the White House blacked out 28 pages of the report that dealt with purported links between the Saudis and the hijackers.

In particular, Mr Graham alleges that a mysterious Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who was living in San Diego before the attacks and who befriended and funded two of the hijackers, was a Saudi government spy.

Mr Graham says that Mr Bayoumi was essentially a "ghost employee" of a Saudi contracting firm called Ercan, whose owner was an alleged early supporter of Osama bin Laden. He also had repeated contacts with a Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles who was later thrown out of the United States on suspicion of terrorist links. . . .

See A Case Not Yet Closed in the current Newsweek for Michael Isikoff’s take on Senator Graham’s courageous exposé, as well as an interactive page showing the connections and key players since the 1930s in American-Saudi Ties That Bind. Also see Graham book: Inquiry into 9/11, Saudi ties blocked, in Sunday’s Miami Herald, by Frank Davies, for another review.

Hmmmm . . . not only turning a blind eye to and blatantly covering up for the sponsors of the annihilation of more than 2,000 of our own citizens, but cozying up like bosom buds while diverting resources away from the real perpetrators, squandering our military capability on an illegal occupation of a sovereign nation with no demonstrable ties to 9/11, a corporate takeover of a country. Tell me again, what is it we do with traitors?

There are now so many books out exposing Bush family improprieties, GW incompetencies, and Republican conniving and lies that a whole web site (which might already exist somewhere) could be devoted just to reviews of them. One that came out in June, Bush Unplugged: The True Patriot’s Guide to George W. Bush, by Marc Umile, is brought to the fore in Truth and Its Neo-Consequences, by Sean Gonsalves, writing for AlterNet, Sept. 7, 2004:

. . . [Author Marc] Umile is also a longtime listener of the Rush Limbaugh radio talk show. So he decided to take Rush's advice to heart.

“When listening to Rush during the Clinton years, whether he was talking about Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, this gate, that gate or even the Vince Foster suicide episode, Rush was always quick to tell his listeners, ‘if you ever want to get to the bottom of any political intrigue, my friends, follow the money! Follow the money trail.’ ”

And so he did. Bush Unplugged is the result. It’s a straight-talking exploration of the man “W” and the myth.

“While writing the book,” he told me, “I would email chapters to conservative friends of mine and it freaked them out. What happens is when you learn the whole story and you’re a conservative you get caught flat-footed. And then you’re outraged that you’ve been duped and betrayed (by Bush).

“What we’re dealing with here is an information gap,” he said, adding that if conservatives took Rush’s advice seriously and followed the money trail, they would realize they are the victims of the biggest neo-con in American political history. . . .

Must-see TV

Right up there with Fahrenheit 9/11 as one of the great Bush In His Own Words videos is this Daily Show segment, George W. Bush: Words Speak Louder than Actions, a brilliant counterpoint to the inane propaganda coming out of the RNC. Modem users: be patient, well worth the wait.

RNC distortions and lies: setting the record straight

Now that the clueless love-fest is over, help yourself to a reality check:
Throwing Out the Garbage
Molly Ivins
AlterNet, September 7, 2004

Under the radar . . .

Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft’s Hellish Vision
Attorney general shows himself as a menace to liberty.
Jonathan Turley
Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2004

If you can read only one article today, let it be this one, an exposé of what “the president” really did when he was supposed to be serving with the National Guard, as well as unique insights into his rather odd personality and the ways of the Bush Crime Family—and pass it on (if you’re not a Salon subscriber, sit back and watch a painless brief commercial for a free one-day pass):

George W. Bush’s Missing Year
The widow of a Bush family confidant says her husband gave the future president an Alabama Senate campaign job as a favor to his worried father. Did they see him do any National Guard service? “Good lord, no.”
Mary Jacoby
Salon, September 2, 2004

NEW YORK—Before there was Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family’s political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George H.W. Bush phoned his friend and asked a favor: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W. Bush?

“The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy’s wing,” Allison's widow, Linda, told me. “And Jimmy said, ‘Sure.’ He was so loyal.”

Linda Allison’s story, never before published, contradicts the Bush campaign’s assertion that George W. Bush transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 because he received an irresistible offer to gain high-level experience on the campaign of Bush family friend Winton “Red” Blount. In fact, according to what Allison says her late husband told her, the younger Bush had become a political liability for his father, who was then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the family wanted him out of Texas. “I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him,” Linda Allison said. . . .

George the uniter . . .

Even the newest veterans have organized themselves—reminiscent of John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War—to speak out against Bush’s illegal, insane, hopeless, self-defeating and heartbreaking war on the Iraqi people, in time for the hokum show being put on by the Republicans in New York:
Veterans of Iraq war join forces to protest US invasion
Marcella Bombardieri
boston.com, September 2, 2004

. . . The massive protest in Manhattan on Sunday marked one of the first public appearances of a new group called Iraq Veterans Against the War. Though it is still small, numbering about 40, its members are taking tips from more established veterans groups, and because of their war experience, they seem likely to take a prominent role in debate about the Iraq war. . . .

“We have a currency no one else has,” said Mike Hoffman, 25, of Trenton, N.J., a Marine veteran who is the national coordinator of the group. “We’ve been there, we’ve seen stuff out there that no one else has, and nobody can argue with that.” . . .

They were in good company on Sunday, as “a half a million people angrily denounced [G.W.Bush]”

His image was depicted goateed and swathed in head scarves, dubbed “The Real Terrorist.” A half-dozen presidential imitators walked the streets, one dressed in a “Mission Accomplished” flight suit, another with silver duct tape wound around him, holding this sign: “Protect America with duct tape.” His face leered out of a thousand posters reading, “He Lied. They Died.”

Some were more personal. “Bush lied, my son died,” said the sign carried by Al Zappala, 64, of Philadelphia, who this spring buried his adopted son, Sherwood, a National Guardsman killed in Iraq.

During the week, protesters hung the president’s name off the Plaza Hotel, floated it with balloons into the starry ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, and draped it across Brooklyn rooftops so that sightseeing conventioneers couldn’t escape the near-universal outrage he has engendered in this, the host city. As the first contingent of Sunday’s marchers neared the convention site at heavily guarded Madison Square Garden, a burst of pink taffeta, shaped into a giant woman's slip, emerged from the roof of a 20-story building. “Bush lied, fire him,” it read, as demonstrators cheered and waved.

Scores of cardboard coffins draped in American flags and carried shoulder-high by marchers were backed up in the throng along Seventh Avenue. A pair of Brooklyn men, film animator Michael de Seve and designer John Lake, had created the coffins after deciding that something needed to be done.

“This is the picture they tried to suppress,” said de Seve, 41, whose work includes the Beavis and Butt-head film. “People haven’t been able to see the cost of this war. Here is the invoice.” . . .

More protest pictures, links, and discussion here.

Adding to the multitudinous clamor, the inimitable William Rivers Pitt leaves no stone unturned in telling off GWBush:
Brain Dead, Made of Money, No Future at All
truthout, August 17, 2004

. . . I'm pretty bored with those commonly accepted standards that are supposed to be applied in the treatment of a sitting President. Too many people have been playing patty-cake with you over the last three years, George. Too many journalists looking to keep their sweet seat in the press crunch at the White House, too many television news anchors who think research and context is for other people, too many media outlet owners—read: ‘massive corporations’—whose profit margins are intimately wed to your suicidal policies, and, frankly, too many politicians for the ‘loyal opposition’ who have been tested in the forge of true crisis these last years, and been found to be sorely wanting. . . 

A wiser man once wrote this:

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . if, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I can see it, if you don't.’ ”

The wiser man who wrote these words was Abraham Lincoln . . .

You fancy yourself a war President, right? “I’m a war President,” you said on television not long ago. “I make decisions in the Oval Office with war on my mind.” Your war in Iraq is a war of choice, not of necessity. It had nothing to do with September 11, weapons of mass destruction, or bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. It had nothing to do with defending the American people.

Your boys wanted to get paid. Cash money on the barrelhead for Halliburton, right? Almost twelve billion dollars they’ve made to this point. Hey, it’s good work if you can get it. All you had to do was use September 11th against your own people for months, scare them to death, denigrate the work of the weapons inspectors you agreed to send in there, flap around some claims about weapons of mass destruction (26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, per your own words from your 2003 State of the Union Address), and then fly onto an aircraft carrier and declare victory while your people were still dying.

As if that wasn't bad enough, you’re also losing your war of choice. . . 

The gap between you and Abraham Lincoln is so wide, George, that it cannot be measured by any scientific instruments currently known to modern science. Abe had you pegged, though, 156 years ago. You were allowed to make war at your pleasure, and the world entire is desperately wondering how you can be stopped.

You might have heard, George, about a fellow named Hugo Chavez winning the referendum on his Presidency in Venezuela. Millions of poor people flooded out of the hills to cast their votes for him, because he uses his nation’s oil revenues to pay for their food and education. Quite a novel idea, yes? How many schools could we have built—schools like citadels—with the twelve billion dollars you have thrown at Halliburton? How many hungry people in your own country could have been fed? How many jobs programs could have been funded? How many catastrophically polluted Superfund sites could have been cleaned?

That apparently wasn’t on your program, George. You have eviscerated OSHA regulations—those pesky things that keep workers from getting injured and killed on the job—because you want to appear ‘business-friendly.’ The $1.5 million you got from the chemical industry in campaign funding compelled you to lower the safety standards for chemicals used in the production of superconductors, chemicals that are believed to cause miscarriages in pregnant workers. You eliminated overtime pay for six million workers, going so far as to have tips for employers posted on your administration’s Labor Department website which will help them screw employees out of the wages they earn. You have obliterated environmental protections across the board. . . .

I worry about you, George. You live in a stark black-and-white world, and you actually think God speaks to you. There are a lot of people in padded rooms, wearing coats that button up the back, because they have had similar delusions. You see monsters everywhere. Some of them do exist, to be sure, but I am forced to remember the words of Frederich Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

You have become a monster, George, and the abyss is staring into your eyes. I wonder what it sees there. I know what I see.

Every aspect of G. “Wretched” Bush’s military service was a fraud

Still Unreported: The Pay-Off in Bush Air Guard Fix
Greg Palast, August 28, 2004

In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men’s sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the ‘champagne’ unit of the Texas Air National Guard. There, Top Gun fighter pilot George Dubya was assigned the dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.

This week, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes of Texas ‘fessed up to pulling the strings to keep Little George out of the jungle. “I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas Air Guard—and I'm ashamed.”

THE PAY-OFF

That’s far from the end of the story. In 1994, George W. Bush was elected governor of Texas by a whisker. By that time, Barnes had left office to become a big time corporate lobbyist. To an influence peddler like Barnes, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth its weight in gold—or, more precisely, there’s a value in keeping the info secret.

Barnes appears to have made lucrative use of his knowledge of our President’s slithering out of the draft . . .

Chickenhawk goldbrick campaign strategy: split the country over Vietnam

The Rambo Coalition
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, August 24, 2004

Almost a year ago, on the second anniversary of 9/11, I predicted “an ugly, bitter campaign—probably the nastiest of modern American history.” The reasons I gave then still apply. President Bush has no positive achievements to run on. Yet his inner circle cannot afford to see him lose: if he does, the shroud of secrecy will be lifted, and the public will learn the truth about cooked intelligence, profiteering, politicization of homeland security and more.

But recent attacks on John Kerry have surpassed even my expectations. There’s no mystery why. Mr. Kerry isn’t just a Democrat who might win: his life story challenges Mr. Bush’s attempts to confuse tough-guy poses with heroism, and bombast with patriotism. . . .

After 9/11, Mr. Bush had a choice: he could deal with real threats, or he could play Rambo. He chose Rambo. Not for him the difficult, frustrating task of tracking down elusive terrorists, or the unglamorous work of protecting ports and chemical plants from possible attack: he wanted a dramatic shootout with the bad guy. And if you asked why we were going after this particular bad guy, who hadn't attacked America and wasn't building nuclear weapons—or if you warned that real wars involve costs you never see in the movies—you were being unpatriotic.

As a domestic political strategy, Mr. Bush's posturing worked brilliantly. As a strategy against terrorism, it has played right into Al Qaeda’s hands. Thirty years after Vietnam, American soldiers are again dying in a war that was sold on false pretenses and creates more enemies than it kills.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Mr. Bush—who must defend the indefensible—has turned to those who still refuse to face the truth about Vietnam. . . .

Please read the rest.