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Ref. : Civic Events
Ref. : Arts & Education Events
Ref. : Public Service Notices
05.17 Why American Colleges Are Becoming a Force for Inequality
05.17 Why Private Schools Are Dying Out
Ref. : Letters to the editor
05.18 Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection
05.17 New Jersey Hospital Is the Costliest in the Nation
05.17 Angelina Jolie has done something extraordinary
05.17 Obama must Make Fighting Climate Change National Project, or Die the death of a thousand Scandals
05.17 Study: Why Pot Smokers Are Skinnier
05.16 What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It?
05.16 How Drug Companies Keep Medicine Out of Reach
05.15 Don't Look Now, but Our Medicare Spending Projections Are Plummeting
05.15 No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet
05.15 Why the world faces climate chaos
05.14 US Supreme Court finds for Monsanto in seed patent battle (Update 2)
05.13 Austerity and the Unraveling of European Universal Health Care
05.13 Global Warming: Halfway to a Mass Extinction Event?
05.13 Coming Corporate Control of Medicine Will Throw Patients Under the Bus
05.12 The giants of the green world that profit from the planet's destruction
05.11 Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle
Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries
05.11 Ongoing rule: Once a demon, always a demon!
05.11 FCC: Fronting For Corporations?
05.11 FCC: Fronting For Corporations?
05.11 The news media is even worse than you think
Daily FAIR Blog
The Daily Howler
05.18 Senator wants U.S. in oil price-fixing probe
05.18 Timothy Geithner Is Key To IRS Scandal
05.16 Why Won't the SEC Rein In the Firms That Tanked America's Economy?
05.16 Elizabeth Warren to Obama Administration: Take the Banks to Court, Already!
05.15 The IRS should do more, not less, scrutinizing of political groups
05.15 Did the IRS illegally target the Tea Party? Seven questions answered.
05.14 IRS kept shifting targets in tax-exempt groups scrutiny: report
05.12 Authorities Announce tax Haven Investigation
05.17 The Great American Descent into Plutocracy
05.17 The Real Benghazi Scandal
05.16 Take Politics Away From the I.R.S.
05.16 Should 501(c)(4)’s Be Eliminated?
05.16 What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct'
05.12 The Assault on Food Stamps Takes Legislative Form, and Jamie Dimon Profits!
05.11 The Military’s 40-Year Experiment
05.11 Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less
05.11 'Purity' culture: bad for women, worse for survivors of sexual assault
05.11 At Least 71 Kids Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown
05.11 Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address [15:05 video]
05.11 The Good, the Bad and the Crazy [6:05 video]
05.18 Pope blames tyranny of capitalism for making people miserable[1:00 video]
05.18 A Simple Graph That Should Silence Austerians and Gold Bugs Forever [graph]
05.18 The Savings Heist
05.18 Sheila Krumholz and Danielle Brian on How Money Rules Washington [20:31 video]
05.14 10 Scenes From The Economic Collapse That Is Sweeping Across The Planet
05.14 The Vicious New Bank Shakedown That Could Seriously Ruin Your Life
05.14 Neo-liberalism – the antithesis to democracy [charts]
05.14 Bloomberg: "Coup d’Etat to Trade Seen in Billionaire Toxic Lead Fight"
05.13 Mel Watt, Nominee to Head FHFA, Opposes Administration by Voting to Deregulate Derivatives
05.12 IRS Blunder Gives Republicans Ammunition in Effort to Defund the Agency
05.12 Visualizing the World’s Tax Havens [Infographic]
05.11 A New Era for Worker Ownership, 5 Years in the Making
Ref. : Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair [25:35 video]
Ref. : Nurses vs. High-Speed Traders
Ref. : We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income
05.18 Hans Rosling: the man who's making data cool [3:19 video]
05.18 Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent
05.17 Egypt 'suffering worst economic crisis since 1930s'
05.16 Catholic Church Finally Decides That Austerity is Bad
05.15 Retirement: How They Do It Elsewhere
05.15 Europeans disillusioned and divided by debt crisis, survey finds
05.14 Interview: NATO Supreme Allied Commander on Syria and Soft Power
05.14 Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can
05.14 Cayman Islands Spars With Sachs Over Hedge Fund Directorships
05.13 Cornel West: 'They say I'm un-American'
05.13 27% of Spaniards are out of work. Yet in one town everyone has a job
05.11 U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars ... That It Will Publicly Admit
05.11 Tax evasion still crippling Africa as rich countries fail to deliver support
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WHICH SCANDALS WILL BE INVESTIGATED?
Bush's Belated Accountability Moment
The President echoed that sentiment two weeks before this year's Nov. 7 balloting, rejecting the notion that the midterm elections could serve as a check on his administration. Accountability, Bush said, is “what the 2004 campaign was about.”
Though handicapped in his earlier investigations, the Michigan Democrat unearthed and documented a staggering array of White House deceptions that led the United States into war, as well as evidence of other abuses such as torture, warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, and erosion of civil liberties.
The “single overriding characteristic running through all of the allegations of misconduct ... has been the unwillingness of the Bush Administration to allow its actions to be subject to any form of meaningful outside review,” the report said.
“Not only were 122 Members of Congress unable to obtain any response to their questions posed regarding the Downing Street Minutes,” the report goes on, “but neither the House nor the Senate has ever engaged in any serious review of the facts surrounding the NSA domestic spying programs.”
That dynamic could change with the new make-up of Congress. Not only will Conyers be chairing the Judiciary Committee, but Henry Waxman, D-California, will be taking over the House Committee on Government Reform.
Complementing Conyers’s investigations into pre-war manipulations of intelligence have been Waxman’s investigations into administration favoritism toward Halliburton, which was formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Texas-based company has profited handsomely by securing no-bid contracts for everything from rebuilding in Iraq, to supplying U.S. troops with food, to repairing government facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina, to building detention facilities in the U.S. [For more information on the latter, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Mysterious ‘New Programs.’”]
According to an analysis by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey, these no-bid contracts have contributed to the value of Cheney’s Halliburton stock options rising by more than 3,000 percent. In 2005, Cheney’s stock options increased in value from $241,498 to over $8 million.
“It is unseemly,” noted Lautenberg, “for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his administration funnels billions of dollars to it.”
Another issue that could be explored by Waxman’s committee is the content of the Energy Task Force meetings during the early days of the Bush administration. Though ordered by a federal judge to release the task force records completely, the administration heavily redacted the 13,500 pages of documents.
Before turning the records over to the Natural Resources Defense Council as ordered by the judge, the administration removed extensive portions of information. “Some pages were empty,” said the NRDC. “Whole strings of correspondence were stripped to just a few words.”
Nevertheless, the records revealed that energy industry lobbyists played a pivotal role in developing the administration’s national energy strategy, and actually wrote much of it themselves.
“The administration sought the advice of polluting corporations early and often and then incorporated their recommendations into its policy, sometimes verbatim,” according to the NRDC.
In 2004, reporter Jane Mayer disclosed a National Security Council document dated Feb. 3, 2001. It instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney’s Energy Task Force, explaining that the task force was “melding” two previously unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”
Mayer’s discovery suggests that the Bush administration in its first days recognized the linkage between ousting the likes of Saddam Hussein and securing oil reserves for future U.S. consumption. In other words, the Cheney task force appears to have had a military component to “capture” oil fields in “rogue states.” [For details on Mayer’s document, see The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004.]
The NSC document reinforced allegations made by Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, who described a similar early linkage between invading Iraq and controlling its vast oil reserves.
In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill described the first NSC meeting at the White House only a few days into Bush’s presidency. An invasion of Iraq was already on the agenda, O’Neill said. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.
O’Neill said even at that early date, the goal of invading Iraq was clear. The message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, who was forced out of the administration in December 2002.
Combined with the Downing Street Minutes, O’Neill’s account provides substantial evidence that the Bush administration had decided early on to invade Iraq, and simply decided on weapons of mass destruction as the most convenient pretext for war.
Although many Bush defenders now claim that no one could have foreseen what a disaster the war would turn out to be, there were those who urged caution before the invasion, including members of Bush’s own administration.
Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under George H.W. Bush and chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005, said a strike on Iraq “could unleash an Armageddon in the Middle East.”
Also, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who served as a Middle East envoy for George W. Bush, warned in October 2002 that by invading Iraq, “we are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started.”
America’s closest ally in the invasion, the United Kingdom, also had strong reservations. Although publicly British officials supported Bush’s calls to forcibly “disarm” Iraq, behind the scenes, they worried that the war was poorly conceived, possibly illegal and potentially disastrous.
Internal government documents disclosed in 2005 by British journalist Michael Smith indicate that British officials foresaw a host of problems, including weak intelligence on Iraq, lack of public support for war and poor planning for the aftermath of military action.
The investigations by John Conyers and Henry Waxman – both armed with subpoena powers – could connect the dots linking Cheney's Energy Task Force, oil companies, Halliburton, pre-war deceptions and poor post-invasion planning.
The results of that investigation might shock the American people, adding to public pressure for impeachment.
Already, there are those such as former Nixon administration counsel John W. Dean who argue that Bush-Cheney’s crimes are worse than Richard Nixon’s and are grounds for impeachment.
There is also a fledgling grassroots movement for impeachment that could gather force in the coming months, emboldened by the Democratic victory. In Philadelphia, activists, lawyers and a former member of Congress held a forum this weekend to launch a new movement for impeaching Bush and Cheney.
Pelosi’s own constituents in San Francisco voted decisively on Election Day to endorse Bush and Cheney’s removal from office. Proposition J, which called for impeachment, passed with the 59 percent of the vote.
In his presidential news conference the day after the election, Bush was asked if he was “prepared to deal with the level of oversight and investigation that is possibly going to come from one chamber or two in Congress?” Bush replied that the Democrats “are going to have to make up their mind about how they’re going to conduct their affairs.”
If it is left up to the likes of Conyers and Waxman, who seem to have already made up their minds, Bush might finally learn what an “accountability moment” really means.
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This story was published on November 13, 2006.
