MICHAEL CARMICHAEL, AAPC, EAPC, IAPC

archived: 31 Oct - 5 Nov, 2005         Back                 Next

UPDATED: November 1, 2005

                        WHAT DID THE PRESIDENT KNOW, AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? 

“I actually see something smaller tripping (Bush) up; this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things that get you; something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents.”  Gore Vidal 

Encirclement.  Hitler called it, “Einkreissung,” and stated it was the reason for the expansion of the Third Reich.  Today, the Bush-Cheney White House is encircled by investigators and grand jurors seeking the truth in the Iraqgate scandal.  The circle of suspicion is tightening, and the president’s top men are all endangered by an explosion of legal jeopardy. 

The Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has finally struck his first blow, the indictment of ‘Scooter’ Libby on five felony counts.  While Libby has the place of honour as the first centurion to fall on his sword to protect his Caesar, all the president’s men are now in the frame of the prosecutor, fixed and startled in the crosshairs of Fitzgerald’s implacable and ongoing investigation.  Karl Rove remains under deep suspicion and active investigation.  Dick Cheney appears in the grand jury indictment as the person who informed Libby of the identity of the CIA agent at the root of the crime.  If Libby comes to trial, Cheney will be compelled to testify under oath in open court.  This circumstance clearly places the Vice President in danger of impeachment.  This dreadful situation does not leave Bush out of the target area, for his three top advisors, Rove, Cheney and Libby, are now dangling in the harsh wind of a serious criminal investigation which could lead to the impeachment of the president. 

While Scooter Libby is undeniably the patsy of Iraqgate, all the president’s top men are now targets of justice.  That means that everybody who is anybody in the Bush-Cheney White House is sweating bullets, and that clearly includes the president.  At this point in the story, George Bush and Dick Cheney are standing shoulder to shoulder in the dock of history. A sword of Damocles is dangling dangerously over the head of Dick Cheney.  A second sword of Damocles is swinging slowly above the head of Karl Rove. These swords of Damocles are threatening to fall breaking open the skulls of these two men, exposing their brains to the glaring lights of publicity and branding them forever with the unmistakable mark of criminality. 

A dark and growing cloud of suspicion is hovering above the White House.  The indictment of Scooter Libby deeply damages the Bush-Cheney White House, because this case goes straight into the heart of the core policy of this disastrous presidency, the war in Iraq.  Like the Vice President’s weak heart, Iraqgate may be the trigger that launches the implosion of neoconservativism and the final destruction of the Bush-Cheney Era. 

The Iraq war is going on trial with Scooter Libby.  Yesterday, Silvio Berlusconi met with Bush in the White House to negotiate the Italian withdrawal from Iraq.  Two days ago in Rome, Berlusconi told the press that he had pleaded with Bush not to invade Iraq, but his pleas had fallen on deaf ears.  This revelation is damning for the rationale behind the war.  Silvio Berlusconi is the wealthiest head of state in the world today and – until yesterday – he was regarded as Bush’s staunchest ally in Europe.  The war in Iraq has never enjoyed the support of the Italian people, and Berlusconi is facing re-election in five months time.  Bush’s coalition of willing is collapsing at the very moment when the insurgency has escalated to a frightening level, and America has announced that over 20,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since January, 2004, which is well after the initial shock and awe operations that left untold tens of thousands of innocent civilians, men, women and children dead in the dust and sands of Iraq.  With American support for Bush’s handling of the war at an all time low, and public acceptance of the war in America cratering, this is the issue that will drive the neoconservatives into the dustbin of history. 

So, where is the opposition?  Last week, John Kerry made a major speech calling for the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of next year.  This merely brings Kerry into line with dozens of Democratic congressmen and at least two Republicans, but he is actually the first major figure in the party to break ranks with the Democratic Leadership Council who recently circulated a newsletter supporting Condoleezza Rice’s draconian proposals for a ten year commitment to the military occupation, a trillion more dollars in direct expenditures and the tacit sacrifice of another 10,000 American lives in pursuit of Bush’s agenda in Iraq – whatever that is - since we now know that the original agenda had nothing whatsoever to do with weapons of mass destruction, and equally that Iraq will never be a western democracy in any sense of the term as we were led to believe by Bush in 2003.  

America must face reality.  The Democratic opposition to Bush is weak and virtually undetectable.  At the same time, the public perception of the Bush administration has never been more damning.  This situation leads to the inescapable conclusion that the Democrats are just as much in need of political reorganization as the Republicans. 

In the pursuit of truth and justice, the Iraqgate investigation should be asking one central question.  It is a famous line from a critical period in our nation’s history.  Senator Howard Baker was a ranking minority member of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities known as the Watergate Committee, and when evidence of a cover up became unmistakable, Baker defined the over-arching objective of the investigation.  “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Baker intoned, and Richard Nixon experienced a cold shudder that rippled through his body and his brain as he sat at his desk in the Executive Office Building.  George Walker Bush is now experiencing cold shudders as he paces around his desk in the Oval Office.  He feels the weight of history bearing down heavily upon him, and he does not like what he feels.  Baker’s single, simple, central demand for truth led to the justice at the end of the Watergate Era.  I wonder whether our system is as vital today as it was only thirty years ago, and I seriously doubt it. 

Iraqgate parallels the two premiere scandals of the post war period:  Watergate and Iran-Contra.  For starters, Watergate began with what Nixon termed, “a third rate burglary.”  It ended with the first resignations of a president and a vice-president in American history and the indictment, prosecution and conviction of more than a dozen government officials who worked at the White House.  To this date, we still do not know what intelligence the original burglary sought as its target.  Now that the identity of Deep Throat has become public knowledge, this question:  “Why on earth did the Committee to Re-Elect the President seek to burglarize the Democratic National Committee?” hovers like a compelling mystery over the landscape of American history.  It is clear that the burglars were searching for intelligence, but what that intelligence was has never been defined.  While Nixon was never indicted, his handpicked successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him for any and every act of criminality he had committed in the course of his presidency.  This was truly and seriously outrageous, for it pardoned Nixon for crimes over, above and beyond the Watergate conspiracy.  Much remains classified about the Nixon presidency, and much more information connecting him to ghastly crimes will definitely be made public in the future. 

In 1986, Iran Contra was a much more serious criminal operation.  A rogue team of high-ranking officials in the government of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush decided that they needed to break the law in order to support a group of thuggish warlords called ‘Contras’ in Central America.  They devised a truly convoluted conspiracy.  They would sell weapons through a back channel to the Iranians who were then at war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and they would use their ill-gotten gains to fund the Contras.  It did not matter to them that the Contras had murdered nuns and priests and were running battalions of death squads in pursuit of a goal.  Their political orientation (read “fascist”) appealed to the extremist right-wingers in charge of the Iran-Contra scandal.  Elliot Abrams, Caspar Weinberger, William Casey, Clair George, Robert McFarlane, Richard Secord, John Poindexter and Oliver North were some of the conspirators indicted in the scandal.  

North was indicted on sixteen felony counts.  Weinberger, the longest serving Secretary of Defence in US history, faced five felony counts, while Poindexter faced seven.  After six years of investigation and trials, most of the remaining conspirators were pardoned by then lame duck president George H. W. Bush on Christmas Eve, 1992, after he had been ousted by Bill Clinton.  This was unquestionably the most outrageous application of the presidential pardon in American history.  What Bush was actually doing was pardoning himself, for the men whom he pardoned were facing trials wherein they would necessarily have testified about his personal role in the Iran-Contra conspiracy.  Bush, Sr. and his coterie of admirers were hypocritical in the extreme when they criticized Bill Clinton for issuing over one hundred pardons when he was on his way out of office.  None of Clinton’s pardons were aimed at protecting him from future embarrassment as Bush’s clearly were. 

Over the course of the past five years, America has fallen from its high seat.  Five years ago, America lost its status as a republic when the outcome of the presidential election was decided by the US Supreme Court in direct violation of Article II of the constitution.  In that decision, the Supreme Court voted a strict party line.  It is worth remembering that disastrous outcome was orchestrated, choreographed, rehearsed and written by the sitting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Glover Roberts, while he worked as a private attorney for the Republicans.  The degradation of the highest court in America into a partisan political pressure group is really and truly the final nail in the coffin of democracy and the republican ideals of the founding fathers. 

Mr. Fitzgerald’s probe has done its damage to the constitutional fabric woven in 1776 as well.  He has attacked the First Amendment more forcefully than it has ever been attacked in court before.  He did so in pursuit of criminals who violated a law that is tantamount to espionage for a foreign power – the outing of a CIA agent during wartime.  That Fitzgerald did require and compel testimony of members of the press who had been embedded with the right-wing government is no justification for ripping and shredding and burning the fabric of the First Amendment which guarantees the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. 

The rise to power of the second Bush administration has totally obliterated the America’s self-proclaimed exalted status as a constitutional democracy.  That Bush and Cheney have resorted to their mantra of rationalizing their disastrous war to reshape the Middle East as their attempt to spread democracy at the point of a sword is infinitely ironic.  That Condoleezza Rice mouths the same mantra today in her increasingly strenuous efforts to strong arm support for further US military interventions in Syria and Iran means that there will be no return to constitutional democracy in America for the foreseeable future. 

While we can all appreciate the prophecy of Gore Vidal at the head of this column that precisely predicted the implosion of the Bush White House through the Iraqgate scandal, we are still facing the legacy of five years of constitutional, cultural and political devastation.  At this point in time, the Democrats are AWOL, while the American people are demanding change from the culture of deceit, corruption and the unmistakable slide into dictatorship that is the irrefutable legacy of the Bush-Cheney Era.   

Source 

Uncensored Gore Vidal
http://www.alternet.org/story/17442

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Last Update: 03/23/2006