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Over the past few months, as the Democratic presidential race has heated up, we have received a number of complaints about critical stories we have written about Barack Obama and, especially, Hillary Clinton.
A common theme in the complaints is that we should lighten up on the Democratic frontrunners and concentrate more on John McCain and the Republicans. Some readers have accused us of sounding like the MSM in our reporting on Sen. Clinton in particular.
John Yoo, the author of the infamous Aug. 1, 2002, "torture memo" that formed the legal basis for so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques against high-level terrorist detainees, used a statute governing health benefits when he provided the White House with a legal opinion defining torture, according to a former Justice Department official.
Yoo's legal opinion stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee results in injury "such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" than the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture.
Hillary Clinton, who has built her case for the presidency on her superior “ready on Day One” management skills, burned through almost $130 million of campaign money, had to kick in $5 million from her own murky family funds, and is now pressing her chief financial backers to find creative ways to raise more money.
Some of those financial schemes appear to skirt the law – as some backers consider putting money into “independent” entities that can spend unlimited sums but aren’t supposed to coordinate with the campaign – while other ideas are more traditional, like appealing to wealthy donors involved with the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby.
By forcing repeat combat assignments to Iraq and Afghanistan – and by winking at torture and indiscriminate killings – George W. Bush is degrading the reputation of the U.S. military, turning enlisted soldiers and intelligence officers into murderers and sadists.
For instance, on Feb. 10 at Camp Liberty in Iraq, Army Ranger Sgt. Evan Vela was sentenced by a U.S. military court to 10 years in prison for executing an unarmed Iraqi detainee who – along with his son – had stumbled into a U.S. sniper position last year.
One painful irony of the Obama-Clinton showdown is that it could end up with middle-aged women – who are determined to elect the first female president – stomping on the dreams of their own children, who have shaken off years of political apathy to rally behind Barack Obama.
What makes this dilemma particularly poignant is that many of these Hillary Clinton supporters themselves experienced the stomping on their dreams four decades ago in the pivotal election of 1968.
To fully understand the present manifestation of the Bush family and its excesses, one must consider its history over several generations, a difficult and painful undertaking since it reveals so much about the self-destructive apathy of the American people.
James Madison wrote passionately in the Federalist Papers that in order for a democracy to function and not descend into a tyranny of the wealthy and the well-connected, the citizenry must stay well informed. In Madison’s view, a democratic society was wholly dependent on an informed citizenry.
Only days before the make-or-break “Super Tuesday” primaries, Hillary Clinton dipped into her personal finances to lend her campaign $5 million, a move she kept secret until the day after she had battled Barack Obama to a standstill in the coast-to-coast voting.
If she had disclosed the loan before Super Tuesday, it might not only have generated troubling questions about the financial health of her campaign; it might have focused unwanted attention on the sources of the Clintons’ money.
After one spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not normally throw one off balance. But I found the events of Thursday to be an acid test of my equilibrium.
I missed the National Prayer Breakfast—for the 45th time in a row. But, as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:
As Campaign 2008 reaches a critical point, George W. Bush’s top intelligence officials are raising new alarms about a revitalized al-Qaeda recruiting Westerners, possibly including Americans, to carry out terror attacks inside the United States.
At a Feb. 5 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bush’s Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said al-Qaeda was refining “the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.” by training Western recruits, who could blend in with American society and carry out attacks on U.S. targets.
It is a difficult anniversary to “celebrate” – Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity’s first publication, a same-day critique of Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003, UN address – since what he said helped grease the skids for incalculable death and destruction in Iraq and brought shame on our country.
A handful of former CIA intelligence officers formed VIPS in January 2003, after we could no longer avoid concluding that our profession had been corrupted to “justify” what was, pure and simple, a war of aggression.
To make his case before the U.N., Bush dispatched the most credible official in his administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell.
By the time Powell was assigned to make the case for war, he counted himself among the growing list of officials nervous about the quality of the WMD intelligence. Indeed, Powell may have been one of the best positioned officials to know that the threat from Iraq was being exaggerated.
“The Stepford Wives” tells the chilling story of once smart, independent women who get abducted and turned into tamed, mindless robots.
I have a theory about a similarly subversive process that turns grown men once capable of independent and reasoned thought into robotic extremists. Call them Stepford Republicans.
Barack Obama argues that the Democrats will have a better chance for victory in November if they have a presidential nominee who opposed the Iraq War from the start and who can contrast that judgment against John McCain’s enthusiasm for a centuries-long U.S. occupation of Iraq.
What Sen. Obama didn’t say out loud, but what Democratic voters surely recalled was the endless baiting of John Kerry for having been “for the war before he was against it,” earning a place – as George W. Bush put it – “in the flip-flop hall of fame.”
Watching Attorney General Michael Mukasey evade the obvious fact that waterboarding is torture – and the reluctance of Democrats to press him – I was reminded of how the first President Bush got away with an earlier batch of national security crimes.
Indeed, one of the common questions I’ve been asked over the years is – if the evidence really does show that the Reagan-Bush crowd was guilty of illegal dealings with Iran, Iraq and the Nicaraguan contras – why didn’t the Democrats hold those Republicans to account?
“For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more — always more — even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the ‘haves.’ ”
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Finally, the truth is seeping out. Contrary to how President George W. Bush has tried to justify the Iraq war in the past, he has now clumsily — if inadvertently — admitted that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was aimed primarily at seizing predominant influence over its oil by establishing permanent (the administration favors “enduring”) military bases.
At midnight, heading into the fateful day of Jan. 31, 1968, 15 Vietcong gathered at a greasy car repair garage at 59 Phan Thanh Bian Street in Saigon.
Wearing black pajamas and red arm bands, they were part of the elite 250-strong J-9 Special Action Unit, formerly known as the C-10 sapper battalion. They were mostly born in Saigon and were familiar with the streets of the teeming city.
With one year to go in George W. Bush’s presidency, the national Democrats are on the verge of the same miscalculation that they made about his father after his defeat in Election 1992. Instead of doing the hard work to hold the Bushes accountable, the Democrats are “leaving it to the historians.”
In other words, the national Democrats seem ready to let the junior George Bush stroll off into the sunset with his legacy relatively intact, much as the senior George Bush was allowed to do.
There’s a cynical old saying that the victors write the history. CBS’s “60 Minutes” demonstrated how that process works on Jan. 27 in airing Scott Pelley’s interview with the FBI agent who de-briefed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
In a world of objective reality, a reporter might say that the United States launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, under the false pretense that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, even after Iraq had repeatedly – and accurately – announced that its WMD had been destroyed in the 1990s.
