- Even as one is continuously numbed by the steady flow
of lies, fraud, deception and misspeak emanating from the Bush administration
as concerns the need for the war in Iraq, and proven as such by the recently-discovered
Downing Street and related memos exposing President Bush's personal desire
to bring down Saddam as the sole justification for the invasion, reports
of a more sinister and despicable deception are beginning to surface.
-
- I was told of this Bush program by an acquaintance that
offered that a former Marine who had served in Vietnam had just attended
the funeral of the son of a friend and called the Bill O'Reilly radio show
to relate his story. Apparently, the young man had been killed in Iraq
and the former Marine overheard a conversation involving some military
officers who were at the funeral. What he heard disturbed him so that
he called the show and O'Reilly offered that he "would look into the
matter."
-
- This latest Department of Defense outrage exposes the
total callousness of the neoconservative cabal that continues to control
our military under Bush. It helps to explain the heavy secrecy surrounding
the news reporting and statistical accuracy of the number of our fallen
and injured heroes who have been needlessly placed in harm's way.
-
- Is there irrefutable evidence of yet another ongoing
deliberate fraud and approved deceptive policy of the Bush administration?
Of course not - how can there be given all the Bush-ordered secrecy, intimidation
and control of the press? But please consider the deceptive phases beginning
with the assertions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the backpedaling
now made understandable by the Downing Street Memo. What harm would there
be in not releasing true figures as regards the dead and wounded relative
to this noble war?
-
- Foremost, the harm comes in the form of the standard
Bush impeachable offense, lying to the American people. Deemed impeachable
by Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, it involves
not only lying US into an unnecessary war, but now exacerbates that effrontery
with false casualty statistics, which are almost as consequential as the
initial lies that launched the war.
-
- Bush and Sharon are pushing for an invasion of Iran and/or
Syria, and deliberately low-balling the casualties would help drive the
secret objective of launching a draft as well as blunting a growing public
renunciation of the war in Iraq. Unquestionably, Bush administration policies
and actions constitute war crimes, and are certainly impeachable. But
as Karen Kwiatkowski
points out, impeachment, given the Republican majority in American government
today, is at best a pipedream.
-
- But that's because, even with an increasing number of
voices in the mainstream corporate media now reporting on Downing and the
other memos, there is still no public outcry because of the general distrust
of the "liberal" media fostered by Rush Limbaugh and FOXNews,
and bolstered by the despicably untrustworthy New York Times.
-
- The issue regarding this most recently uncovered possibility
of yet another Bush administration secret operation, which consists of
the deliberate plot in underreporting of body counts as discussed at that
aforementioned funeral, and now cited as well on the Information
Clearing House website, is a critical one as regards a potential public
outrage of major magnitude. The article link is to Arianna Huffington's
The Huffington Post, and writer Jim Lampley's piece entitled, "The
Ultimate Deception?" links as well to the original source
of his information.
-
- Lampley offers, "A Bush-watcher website identified
as TBRNews.org is reporting under the byline of 'domestic intelligence
reporter' Brian Harring that the Department of Defense is using a cynical
tactic to mislead the public regarding the true death toll for American
military personnel in Iraq. Harring claims he has an internal pdf. file
from the DoD which establishes that nearly 9000 Americans have died in
Operation Iraqi Freedom, but that the official number has been held to
1713 by designating as Iraq deaths only those who perish on Iraqi soil.
The remainder, he says, are military personnel who have died en route
to Germany or in German hospitals - casualties of the war, but not listed
in the official death toll."
-
- Consider how this secrecy involving casualties affected
the intentions of US Senator Joseph Biden [D-Del.]. Biden
related on CBS how the DoD policy of casualty secrecy prevented him from
complying with a grieving military family's request for his presence at
Dover Air Force Base at the time of the delivery of their son's remains
in a flag-draped casket. My, how Amerika has been thoroughly Nazified!
-
- Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer.
|
