This is what this Country, the United States, should be doing now or had already done during the previous administration, investigating towards Impeachment and possible Indictments, depending on what evidence of crimes and lies surfaced. Especially if we really are what we like to think and demand others to believe we are and if our Constitution still exist as the leading Representative Democracy on this planet. But leave it up to ‘Old Europe’, hopefully, to seek answers that should be in the light of day and a part of the physical history added to the already known.
But it’s never to late for us to try and minimize the blowback from our extremely destructive policies, or is it!
Ray McGovern is a retired CIA officer. McGovern was employed under seven US presidents for over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. McGovern was born and raised in the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, received an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, and graduated from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.
In this interview McGovern talks with Real News Network CEO Paul Jay about the paper trail on the Iraq war, as revealed in the British “Downing Street Memo”.
It appears we had a f..king religious nut as President who lied to obtain support for the invasion of Iraq in order to bring the end times closer. Cheney and Rumsfeld manupulated the “boy king” by playing to his religious delusions.
Former President George Bush explained to then-President of France Jacques Chirac that that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated. It apears that Bush told Chirac that invasion of Iraq was willed by God in order to usher in the “end times.”
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins“.
Whenever I read a piece like the one last night from McClatchy News Service, “Cheney’s speech contained omissions, misstatements”, I often wonder where they’ve been for the last 8 years, pre-Obama? To its credit though, McClatchy had far better reporting going on than AP and Reuters during the Bush years. This one is just scorching… HOT! It’s the kind of reporting we all lusted after, but never got, while Cheney was in office.
Cheney said that “the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence,” but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA , the Defense Intelligence Agency , the State Department , the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.
I envision Yosemite Sam, right after Bugs blows him up with gunpowder or something, still smoldering.
– Cheney said that only “ruthless enemies of this country” were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.
A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.
This piece, written by reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, is to be applauded. It’s nice to see some media not afraid of Dick Cheney.
There’s so much more at the link. For your viewing pleasure (don’t miss it!):
Wikipedia defines a war of aggression as a military conflict waged absent the justification of self-defense. Waging such a war of aggression is a crime under the customary international law. It is generally agreed by scholars in international law that the military actions of the Nazi regime in World War II in its search for so-called “Lebensraum” are characteristic of a war of aggression.
San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law Professor and president of the National Lawyers Guild Marjorie Cohn in a 2004 Truthout article contextualized a little more bluntly with:
Following the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war “essentially an evil thing . . . to initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Former UK diplomat Carne Ross, who was Britain’s leading expert on Iraq at the United Nations for four years before the war and had quit his job after giving secret evidence to the UK’s 2004 Butler inquiry into the use of intelligence, is now urging a full inquiry into the legality of the 2003 US led invasion according to UK newspapers yesterday and this morning.
A full public inquiry into the decision to invade Iraq is needed because “a lot of facts still have to come to light”, a former diplomat has told MPs.
Carne Ross said it was “disgraceful” of ministers to “pretend” the Butler and Hutton inquiries told the full story.
…
“A lot of decision-making, a lot of facts have still to come to light in the run up to this war, which should come to light, which the public deserves to know.”
Asked what this information was, he said he was “happy” to let his evidence to the Butler inquiry “stand as my view”.
A former diplomat at the centre of events in the run-up to the Iraq war revealed yesterday that the government has a “paper trail” that could reveal new information about the legality of the invasion.
Carne Ross, who was a first secretary at the United Nations in New York for the Foreign Office until 2004, told MPs: “A lot of facts about the run-up to this war have yet to come to light which should come to light and which the public deserves to know.” There were also assessments by the joint intelligence committee which had not been disclosed, Ross told the Commons public administration select committee.
He told the inquiry that the intelligence made it “very clear” that Saddam Hussein did not pose a significant threat to the UK, as was being claimed at the time by ministers, and that tougher enforcement of sanctions could have brought his regime down.
By now, we all know that former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is publishing a book and apparently telling some truth about George Bush and his minions. Karl Rove doesn’t like it:
“First of all, this doesn’t sound like Scott. It really doesn’t,” he said. “Not the Scott McClellan I’ve known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger.“
Wikipedia defines a