Post NIE-tal Thoughts...Congressional Medals of Honor, Journalistic Testicles, Impeachment Urgency and Pelosi's Treason.

Post NIE-tal Thoughts...Congressional Medals of Honor, Journalistic Testicles, Impeachment Urgency and Pelosi's Treason.

Post NIE-tal Thoughts... lead to Congressional Medals of Honor, Journalistic Testicles, Impeachment Urgency and Pelosi's Treason.

A day after Bushie pontificated on the NIE, some thoughts trickle down.

There's been talk that the way the Iran war would be prevented would be that the military leaders would refuse the orders to start the war-- that they would cirtually mutiny. Well, we forgot about the intelligence community. I believe it would be accurate to say that the NIE was produced in direct opposition and disobedience to the orders that Cheney and Bush's surrogates. There are some heroes behind that NIE who one day should be awarded congressional medals of honor for bravery in the face of traitors who would have lied and deceived the public and congress to start a war-- Bush and Cheney.

No-one-- absolutely no-one believes that Bush just got wind of this a week earlier. This time around, his lies are so baldfaced, so... insulting... not one person in the media indicated this was worthy of belief. Sy Hersch says nine days before the release Bush briefed Israel's Ehud Olmert on it.

The POTUS's level of incompetence, the incapacity to lead, to communicate and persuade was so screamingly obvious at Bush's press conference. Bush needs surrogates, like Scott McClellan or Dana Perrino to do his lying for him. He's no good at it.

We saw a few Whitehouse journalists, male and female, discover they had journalistic testicles yesterday. Let's hope their courage primes the pump. Kudos to all of them who asked Bush some challenging questions. There's still plenty of room for improvement, but it's a start. I've been telling my kids and students, for decades-- "There are many things that you can do that you haven't done yet. Try."

After this collection of events and developments it is clearer than ever that Bush and Cheney must be impeached. Their disregard for intelligence, for reality, for facts, their willingness to lie and deceive, make them dangerous, immediate threats to the safety and continued survival of not just the US but the planet. With more than a year remaining on their terms of office, the damage they can still wreak is unimaginable.

Once impeachment hearings are started, subpoenas cannot be refused based on presidential privlege. That doesn't apply to impeachment hearings. The poor excuse given by the dem congress that it will take up too much time is a lie-- A LIE! The truth is that impeachment hearings will take up too much ATTENTION, away from... what?
Maybe, back in November, when Harry and Chuck, Nancy and Stenny planned the next year, they decided they would get wonderful things accomplished. Well, eleven months later, Harry's list of accomplishments is pretty lame, and the list of failures and un-finished efforts weighs more heavily than achievements. It is time for this invertebrate congress to stand tall.

The excuse that freshmen red-state dems will be put at risk is pure cowardice. Impeachment hearings are absolutely required as part of the oath to defend and protect the constitution. Bush and Cheney engaged in treason and multiple violations of the constitution. Hearings will prove this. Pelosi, if she fails to put impeachment back on the table, after all the evidence that has come out already, if she fails to allow investigations to proceed, will be almost as guilty of treason as BUsh and Cheney-- an accomplice on the inside, protecting the guilty. We expected it of rubberstamp republicans, not the democrats who were elected to power to end the war and clean up the corruption.

I'll say it again. If Nancy Pelosi continues to personally block impeachment from proceeding to the step of holding hearings, SHE will go down in history as a accessory to the crimes Bush and Cheney commit and allow to occur on their (Bush, Cheney and Pelosi's ) watch.

Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.

Beyond Treason; The Call for A Congression Investigation

Beyond Treason; The Call for A Congression Investigation

By Timothy V. Gatto

I couldn’t sleep last night. Its 4:49AM and I have a headache and a knot in my stomach. I just watched a movie called Beyond Treason. It’s about how the U.S. Military has used it’s soldiers as guinea pigs in many outrageous experiments, the last being one that is continuing, the exposure to ionized radiation by using depleted uranium in munitions. Many people out there know me by my writing, but what people don’t really know about me is that I have been exposed to ionizing radiation and I know what it can do to a person. I have had cancer, I have peripheral neuropathy, constant pain and I take over 13 medications for the side effects.

The point is that this government, from George Bush Sr. to Clinton and now to Bush Jr. has known about the effects of depleted uranium and the ionizing radiation that comes from it. Soldiers from the First Gulf War have had over 200,000 cases of VA certified disability from their service. That is a 60,000% increase over previous wars. In the first Gulf War we used over 340 tons of depleted uranium. In Afghanistan, over 1,000 tons to date, in the Second Iraq War we have used 2,400 tons of the stuff.

Uranium gives off Alpha, Beta and Gamma rays. The Uranium that is dispersed after vaporizing on the target can be as small as .1 micron. That means that ionized uranium is in the air, the soil and the water, and it has a half-life of 4.5 Billion years! This means that the two countries that we invaded will forever be contaminated, and the contamination will never pass. Not only is the land contaminated, but our soldiers who enlisted to help fight this “Global War on Terrorism” will pass this on to their families by their semen. They will infect their wives and any future children. Many Veterans have had children that were born healthy but fail to thrive. In some cases the hearts of their children burst at 4 or 5 months old. This is fighting a war on terrorism? It sounds to me like since we didn’t find weapons of mass destruction, we brought our own.

That’s exactly what the World Court ruled. It is against the U.N. Charter to use weapons of mass destruction and that’s exactly what we are doing. Not only on the so-called “enemy”, but on our own troops that feel the effects of “Fallout”. Yes, you read me right, fallout. This is exactly the same result of a “Dirty Bomb” that the U.S. Government keeps threatening the people of this nation might happen if a “terrorist” explodes radioactive material with a bomb.

Why haven’t you heard this on the “Mainstream Media”? The reason you haven’t is because the MSM is controlled by the same people that make their money in the Defense Industry. GE and Westinghouse own many outlets; ABC, Sci-Fi Channel, History Channel, MSNBC, CBS and a host of others. The rest are owned by supporters of this corrupt and treasonous administration that thinks nothing of killing off their soldiers for profit and gain. Your sons and daughters will eventually have to deal with this problem we have created.

I am calling for a Congressional Investigation into the scope and breadth of the problem of Depleted Uranium used by our Armed Forces in direct violation of the UN Charter. I am calling on The Veterans Administration to come clean about ionized radiation, a problem they have known about since 1950. No more diagnosis of “PTSD” in soldiers who are sick. These soldiers aren’t stressed out, they are sick! Don’t fool yourself for a minute, the President knows about this. This could possibly be the reason that 120 Veterans are taking their lives each week according to a report by CBS that got past the censors’.

This President and the two preceding President’s should be charged with treason. They should be charged, tried and imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives. They have not only ruined the future of the men and women that have served them, but they have also contaminated Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq forever. There is no “clean-up” operation that can be done. They are guilty of genocide, no different than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. Through their own arrogance and extraordinary powers that we give the Executive Branch, they have used this nation as a killing machine. We kill not just the enemy, but our allies and our own soldiers.

We have been ruled by criminals since Ronald Reagan left office. I have something on him too that I’ll write about in another article. The problem of killing our own soldiers and whole nations aren’t the only crime they have committed. They have also stolen this nation’s wealth and put it into their own pocket, but that’s another article.

Please help me to get Congress to launch a full-scale investigation into the use of depleted uranium. I will write to my Congressional leaders and I pray that you will write too. I don’t care if you are a Conservative Republican or a Liberal/Progressive Democrat or hate them all. This is a matter of utmost urgency to stop the indiscriminate loss of life in these countries and to get the Veterans that served us the care they deserve. As an American you can do nothing less, and if you can’t do this, we WILL have nothing left.

That’s the way I see it.

Authors Website: http://liberalpro.blogspot.com

Authors Bio: Former Chairman of the Liberal Party of America, Tim is a retired Army Sergeant. He currently lives in South Carolina. A regular contributor to OpEdNews, he is the author of Kimchee Kronicles and is currently at work on a new novel.

Bush Commits Treason

Bush's Plame-gate Cover-up By Robert Parry November 21, 2007

In early fall 2003, George W. Bush joined in what appears to have been a criminal cover-up to conceal the role of his White House in exposing the classified identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

That is the logical conclusion one would draw from a new statement by then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan when it is put into a mosaic with previously known evidence.

McClellan says President Bush was one of five high-ranking officials who caused McClellan to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby of any responsibility for the leak of Plame’s employment as an undercover intelligence officer.

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” McClellan said. “So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”

McClellan’s comments were part of a press release from his publisher regarding McClellan’s memoir, which is scheduled to reach the book stores next April.

Though the press release didn’t add more details about Bush’s role, earlier evidence already had implicated Bush in the outing of Plame after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had gone public in July 2003, disclosing that Bush had used false information to frighten the American people about Iraq’s alleged nuclear program.

To discredit Wilson, Bush administration officials began telling reporters about Plame’s CIA job to suggest that an early 2002 investigation that Wilson undertook for the CIA into reports about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger was the result of nepotism.

Though several reporters balked at blowing Plame’s covert identity, right-wing columnist Robert Novak revealed it in a column on July 14, 2003. It was later learned that Novak was relying on information from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, Karl Rove. Libby and other White House officials had been peddling the same information to other journalists.

At the time, the smear campaign represented a classic dirty trick by Bush’s White House, which was becoming famous for using hard-ball tactics against political adversaries. However, this time, the collateral damage included the destruction of a sensitive intelligence network that Plame managed.

CIA Protest

The case took another serious turn in September when CIA officials, angered by the damage done to Plame’s spy network, struck back. They lodged a complaint with the Justice Department that the leaks may have amounted to an illegal exposure of a CIA officer.

But the initial investigation was under the control of Attorney General John Ashcroft, considered a right-wing Bush loyalist. So, the President and other White House officials confidently denied any knowledge of the leak. Bush even vowed to fire anyone who had leaked the classified material.

“The President has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration,” McClellan said on Sept. 29, 2003. “If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.”

Bush personally announced his determination to get to the bottom of the matter.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush said on Sept. 30. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role.

Also, since the various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the know, they would have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what they did. In early October, press secretary McClellan said he could report that political adviser Karl Rove and National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams were not involved in the Plame leak.

That comment riled Libby, who feared that he was being hung out to dry. Libby went to his boss, Dick Cheney, and complained that “they’re trying to set me up; they want me to be the sacrificial lamb,” Libby’s lawyer Theodore Wells later said.

Cheney scribbled down his feelings in a note to press secretary McClellan: “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others.”

In the note, Cheney initially was ascribing Libby’s sacrifice to Bush but apparently thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and putting the clause in a passive tense. On Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added Libby to the list of officials who have “assured me that they were not involved in this.”

So, Libby had a motive to lie to the FBI when he was first interviewed about the case. He had gone to the mat with his boss to get his name cleared in the press, meaning it would make little sense to then admit involvement to FBI investigators.

“The White House had staked its credibility on there being no White House involvement in the leaking of information about Ms. Wilson,” a federal court filing later noted. For his part, Libby began claiming that he had first learned about Plame’s CIA identity from NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert after Wilson had gone public.

This White House cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003, Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Deputy Attorney General James Comey picked Patrick Fitzgerald – the U.S. Attorney in Chicago – to serve as special prosecutor.

Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively. Over the next three-plus years, the Plame-gate affair would become a slow-growing infection eating away at White House credibility, despite the best efforts of the President’s political and media allies to confuse the issue or to shift the blame onto Wilson.

In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five counts of lying to federal investigators and obstructing an investigation. Libby was convicted on four of five counts in March 2007 and sentenced to 30 months in jail, but Bush commuted Libby’s sentence to spare him any jail time. That also eliminated any incentive for Libby to turn state’s evidence against Bush and Cheney.

Now, however, McClellan has become the first White House insider to acknowledge the original lies that senior administration told about the Plame-gate affair – and to put the President in the middle of the cover-up.

The next question might reasonably be: what are the Democrats in Congress going to do about it?

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Time to Apologize to Wilson/Plame" or our new book, Neck Deep.]