- Dear Jeff,
-
- Thank you for alerting us yesterday to the obvious possibility
that Saddam may be assassinated soon. In view of recent standard White
House/British/Israeli practices, I am surprised that I did not consider
this possibility before.
-
- You can not imagine my horror when I read in my Sunday
paper this morning the enclosed article. (see below)
-
- It is of utmost importance to raise public awareness
to the need to protect Saddam, so that we could use him in the future as
a witness against Blair and Bush. If we lose Saddam before he testifies,
say goodbye to what's left of our American 'democracy'.
-
- "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for
people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." --Noam Chomsky
-
- Once Saddam testifies, we should leave him in a cage
in the middle of Baghdad and let every Iraqi who suffered by him, to settle
his disagreement with Saddam, personally.
-
- Some suggested that Blair and Bush should be left in
cages in Baghdad, too. I violently disagree, as it is illegal according
to our 'Patriot Act' which was designed to protect our politicians from
us, the ordinary citizens. Just because Bush and Blair acted similarly
to Saddam at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, there is no reason for us respected
Americans to lower ourselves to this level.
-
- I am planning to consult Alan Dershowitz regarding if
it would be legal, as some suggested, to leave Bush in a cage on the main
street in front of the White House in Washington and let every American
parent who lost a child in Iraq, go and 'talk' to him, personally.
-
- If Dershowitz got O J Simpson out of the electric chair,
he could easily put Bush 'in a cage' and I bet he would charge for tickets,
too. (Unless all the rumours I heard lately that Dershovitz is a Neocon
are true.)
-
- Dershovitz, who in the opinions of many, single-handedly
destroyed our American Justice System in the Simpson case, has a once in
a lifetime opportunity to salvage his credibility, and save our American
democracy - 'just get Bush into the cage.' ...just as Bush found justification
to insert simple Afghanis, British and Australians non-combatant civilians
into the Guantanamo cages.
-
- "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.
BUT cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable,
for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst
those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the
alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears
not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears
their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep
in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly
and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects
the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear."
-
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Statesman, philosopher and
orator (Speech in the Roman Senate)
-
- The easiest way to save our country from traitors, is
to protect Saddam. In a bizarre way, Saddam is now a main pillar of the
remnants of American democracy. We must protect him at all costs and give
him the fairest of trials.
-
- I am warning you America...the US WITHOUT Saddam would
be like Iraq WITH Saddam...and VERY SOON!
-
- Sincerely,
-
- Sarah Levinger
-
- San Luis Obispo California
-
-
- Memo Offers Bush Critics Hard Evidence Of
Prewar Intelligence
-
- By Dick Pollman
San Luis Obispo.com
6-12-5
-
- PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - Shortly
after his November triumph, President Bush declared that voters had endorsed
his prosecution of the war in Iraq. In his words, "We had an accountability
moment, and that's called the 2004 elections."
-
- But today, with U.S. casualties rising and military recruitment
falling, it is clear that Bush's accountability moment has been extended.
Even though he won't run for office again, voters continue to assess the
signature decision of his presidency; in growing numbers, they are voicing
dissatisfaction.
-
- And amid all this unease - for the first time, a majority
of Americans say that the war launched in March 2003 has not made this
nation safer - a growing grass-roots movement is spotlighting a once-secret
British government memorandum, written in the summer of 2002, that depicts
Bush as having already decided to wage war, even though the case against
Saddam Hussein was "thin."
-
- Americans are probably more conversant about Angelina
Jolie than about the contents of the so-called Downing Street memo, which
was leaked in London seven weeks ago to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday
Times. But if the chaos in Iraq continues (80 U.S. troops and 700 Iraqis
died last month), the awareness gap may narrow - because the memo states
that as Washington was preparing for war, "the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy."
-
- This is one of the few pieces of hard evidence that supports
critics who contend that Bush hyped a non-existent threat - Saddam's purported
weapons of mass destruction - as his justification for waging war.
-
- Liberal Internet blogs, and roughly 90 House Democrats,
have sought publicity for the memo, and last Tuesday, for the first time,
the Washington press asked Bush about it. He didn't dispute its authenticity.
He didn't address the observation that his intelligence was being "fixed."
He did deny that he had opted for war in the summer of 2002, saying "there's
nothing farther from the truth."
-
- Other Bush defenders have gone further. Ken Mehlman,
chairman of the Republican National Committee, insisted on NBC last weekend
that numerous U.S. probes have "discredited" any suggestion that
Bush's war planners fixed the intelligence. And Jim Robbins, who teaches
foreign policy to military officers at the federal National Defense University,
dismisses the memo as "personal opinions based on unsubstantiated
impressions from unnamed sources."
-
- But this document - actually, the minutes of a meeting
attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top security aides - is viewed
seriously by a range of U.S. policy experts. Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq
specialist at the Brookings Institution, said Thursday that "the memo
is right" and "hard to dispute."
-
- Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a
war analyst at Boston University, said: "The memo is significant because
it was written by our closest ally, and when it comes to writing minutes
on foreign policy and security matters, the British are professionals.
We can conclude that the memo means precisely what it says. It says that
Bush had already made the decision for war even while he was insisting
publicly, and for many months thereafter, that war was the last resort.
-
- "This is no longer a suspicion or accusation. The
memo is an authoritative piece of information, at the highest level."
-
- The meeting was conducted on July 23, 2002. One key participant
was Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 (equivalent to our CIA). The
minutes say: "(Dearlove) reported on his recent talks in Washington
(with CIA chief George Tenet). There was a perceptible shift in attitude.
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and
WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
There was further discussion about the "intelligence and facts."
The memo recorded concerns expressed by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw: "It
seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even
if the timing had not been decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not
threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of
Libya, North Korea, or Iran."
-
- Straw therefore suggested, according to the memo, that
Bush needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force."
Blair's idea was that Bush should go to the United Nations; this was a
"political strategy to give the military plan the space to work."
But the problem was that "the NSC (Bush's National Security Council)
had no patience with the U.N. route."
-
- Subsequently, Blair was instrumental in persuading Bush
to go to the United Nations. But, in the view of many Iraq experts, the
memo shows that Bush went to the United Nations not as a means to avoid
war (his public stance) but as a way to gain more political support for
the war he intended to wage. Indeed, after the United Nations balked at
passing a second war resolution, Bush went ahead anyway.
-
- The memo's reference to "fixed" intelligence
is noteworthy. It's not a new issue. It has long been clear that Bush's
depiction of Saddam as a grave menace was overstated. Among many examples:
Bush said, on Oct. 7, 2002, that Saddam intended to use unmanned aerial
vehicles "for missions targeting the United States," a distance
of 6,000 miles. It later turned out that the UAVs had a range of 300 miles.
-
- But the Bush camp is working hard to deny the memo's
fixed-intelligence passage - a sign that the White House is sensitive about
the issue. Last weekend, GOP chairman Mehlman stated: "That (memo)
has been discredited. Whether it's the 9/11 commission, whether it's the
Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort (by Bush's
war planners) to change the intelligence at all."
-
- Mehlman's claim is undercut by the facts. The Sept. 11
commission never looked at the administration's behavior; commission vice
chairman Lee Hamilton said last year. "(Under the law) we were to
focus our attention on 9/11 and those events, and not on the war in Iraq."
-
- And while a 2004 Senate panel did criticize the prewar
intelligence as "a series of failures," it didn't look at whether
the Bush team had misused the material. That task was postponed until after
the election; today, in the words of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas,
it's still "on the back burner."
-
- As yet, however, there's no sign that the memo will politically
embarrass the GOP. None of the likely 2008 Democratic presidential contenders
- Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Evan Bayh, John Edwards - have made it a
cause celebre. The most prominent critic is in the House, where Democrats
are virtually powerless, but where Michigan Democrat John Conyers plans
to conduct a public forum Thursday, with interest stoked by a grass-roots
Web site called afterdowningstreet.org.
-
- Party strategist David Axelrod explained the Democratic
wariness: "We already fought that battle (over Bush's veracity) and
we lost. He got elected again. So even though the memo is important, there's
a sense that people don't want to revisit the lead-up to war. Although
I'm not sure I agree with that, when you look at the number of Americans
dead today."
-
- Bacevich, the retired Army colonel, said, "Despite
our love of democracy, we as a people have bought the idea that foreign
policy should be made behind closed doors, based on secret information
that mere mortals can't handle, without a full national debate. This memo
shows the danger of that attitude. And that we should find it unacceptable."
-
- http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/nation/11877957.htm
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