Book: Patriots, Stand-Up!

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Read the First Chapter of 'Patriots, Stand-Up!'

 

 

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H & b=181530

 

Book: Patriots, Stand-Up!

 

Chapter One: Integrity versus Lies and Deceit

 

by Russell Peterson

 

The true value of a community, a nation or a business evolves from the

integrity of its members, from their ability to distinguish between

right and wrong and to adhere to moral principles. Integrity is

learned from the teachings and examples of one's parents, teachers,

associates and leaders, and from the give and take of life

experiences. Integrity is protected by a society that practices

justice through law.

 

Over the years the United States of America has benefited from

citizens of integrity who built a society that became the envy of most

of the world. Now, however, as we begin the twenty-first century,

America is suffering from a disastrous loss of integrity at the

highest levels, in both government and business. Of special concern

is the lying and deceit that currently plague our White House and

Congress. The right-wing Republicans who now lead those institutions

have abandoned the truth, representing as true what is known to be

false and doing it so effectively that what is false is widely

accepted as being true. In so doing they are seriously transforming

the choice way of life Americans created over many decades.

 

It is time for American patriots to stand up and fight for their

cherished way of life.

 

Extremism has been festering for years in the right wing of the

Republican party, but it has grown steadily more dangerous, now

infecting the party's national leadership. Some Republicans noted the

existence of these extremists years ago and opposed them, but not

until one of their own, David Brock, defected and described in detail

in Blinded by the Right the inner workings and the players in that

gang, that cabal, did I realize the enormity of their threat to the

American way of life. Read it and learn about the extremists now

working in or advising at the highest levels of our federal

government, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Trent Lott, Newt

Gingrich, Kenneth Starr, Tom Delay, John Ashcroft, Ted Olson, Spencer

Abraham, Clarence Thomas, Bob Bork, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson,

Grover Norquist, Paul Wolfowitz and the billionaire extremist who

financed much of this movement, Richard Mellon Scaife.

 

Brock describes how he helped " create a highly profitable, right-wing,

big lie machine that flourished in book publishing, on talk radio and

on the Internet through the 1990s, gaining him standing ovations at

right-wing gatherings. He relates how his bestseller book, The Real

Anita Hill, " was almost precisely the opposite of the truth. " He

points out how leading conservatives including Newt Gingrich, Rush

Limbaugh, Richard Mellon Scaife and Bob Tyrell " said one thing in

public and did the opposite in private. "

 

The Bush administration plays a similar game of deception. Part of

their game is to label a program to appeal to the people and then do

the opposite. It started with the president's campaign implying he

was a moderate by calling himself a " compassionate conservative. "

After almost three years the compassion has yet to surface, while his

right-wing conservatism flourishes. He promotes programs that

downgrade environmental protection and gives them pro-environment

titles—Healthy Forests, Clear Skies, Freedom Car—and describes them as

helpful to the environment.

 

He promises " to leave no child behind " but then under funds his

education program, causing major problems for schools nationwide. He

runs what have been called " Robin Hood in reverse tax policies, "

taking from the poor and giving to the rich. He declared, in his

January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, " This tax relief is for

everyone who pays income taxes, " but analysis shows that 8.1 million

taxpayers with lower incomes will not benefit. He says he champions

civil rights and appoints judges whose records clearly show they do

not support such rights.

 

Beware of how the members of his administration use the term " jobs. "

They and their business colleagues say they will create hundreds of

thousands of jobs, but instead foster legislative proposals that will

have little or no impact on jobs. They oppose environmental

regulations that actually create jobs, claiming they will cause the

loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. The list goes on and on, but

it reached the pinnacle when the president personally, supported by

all his key subordinates, misled the American people and the world

community repeatedly about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.

The administration began laying the groundwork for this war early on.

On September 8, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney and National

Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice reported on national television that

Iraq was secretly importing aluminum tubes to be used in producing

weapon grade uranium; and National Security Adviser Rice warned, " We

don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. " Statements like

this proliferated until, in his 2003 State of the Union address,

President Bush also stated, " Year after year Saddam Hussein has gone

to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build

and keep weapons of mass destruction. "

 

He followed this on March 17, 2003, in a televised speech to the

nation, where he said, " Intelligence gathered by this and other

governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess

and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. " This view

was reinforced by Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion, " Simply

stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass

destruction. " Cheney also warned that, " One of the real concerns

about [saddam Hussein] is his biological weapons capability. "

 

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's statement, " No terrorist state

poses a greater or more immediate threat to our people than the regime

of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, " further reinforced the president's statements.

 

" They just don't seem concerned about the difference between what they

say and what really is, wrote Independent Progressive columnist

Adrianna Huffington. " The best explanation I can come up with is that

we are being governed by a gang of out-and-out fanatics. The defining

trait of the fanatic–be it a Marxist, a fascist, or gulp, a

Wolfowitz–is the utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as

evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief. "

 

" Deception and Democracy, " the lead article in the June 2003 New

Republic notes that, " In the summer of 2002, Vice President Cheney

made several visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters, which were

understood within the Agency as an attempt to pressure the low-level

specialists interpreting the raw intelligence. 'That would freak

people out,' said one former CIA official. 'It is supposed to be an

ivory tower. And that kind of pressure would be enormous on these

young guys.' "

 

That same month, Paul Krugman's June 3, 2003, article The New York

Times stated, " Suggestions that the public was manipulated into

supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that

misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for

this administration, which–to an extent never before seen in U.S.

history–systematically and brazenly distorts the facts. "

 

Here are seven reasons the Bush administration has given for going to war:

 

1. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction

2. It is an immediate threat to our security

3. It is linked to al Qaeda

4. It has secretly procured aluminum tubes that could be used in

producing uranium

5. It has recently sought significant quantities of uranium from

Niger

6. It has mobile labs for producing biological weapons

7. It has killed thousands of people with poison gas

 

Today all seven now are known to be false.

 

Prior to the war, the United Nations Security Council did try to

discover whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction by

sending its highly experienced, professional inspection team under

Hans Blix back into Iraq to search, but they found no sign of any.

The UN team wanted to continue searching, but the U.S. leaders blocked

such action. After all, they were already committed to going to war

and needed to get on with their promise to protect Americans from

attacks by Iraqi terrorists whose weapons, according to information

supplied by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, could reach us in

forty-five minutes.

 

When Hans Blix retired on June 30, 2003, he expressed his belief that

the Iraqis had destroyed their weapons of mass destruction, as they

contended.

 

The Bush administration was nasty to France, because—instead of

supporting the United States—France had led fellow Security Council

members Russia, Germany, and China in opposing a UN resolution to

sanction an invasion of Iraq. I believe the Council did so because

they knew the Bush administration was not telling the truth about its

reasons for invading. After all, these three powerful, experienced

countries do have excellent intelligence agencies of their own.

 

Just before the war, in a February 14, 2003, New York Times op-ed

piece, the French Ambassador to the United States explained his

country's caution about taking the offensive with Iraq: " Although we

believe that the biggest threat to peace and stability is al Qaeda, we

haven't seen any evidence of a direct link between the Iraq regime and

al Qaeda. " He pointed out that Iraq was not an immediate threat and

that it would be difficult to bring democracy to a country as complex

as Iraq, warning " You can't create democracy with bombs. " And finally

he pointed out that " a war in Iraq could result in more frustration

and bitterness in the Arab and Muslim worlds. "

 

Both diplomatically and with regard to security, it was unwise to

antagonize two atomic powers, Russia and France, because they didn't

support the United States decision to " protect " itself from a country

seven-thousand miles away that had no nuclear capability. According

to James Risin's June 18, 2003, column in The New York Times, a

Defense Intelligence Agency report in November 2002 stated that Saddam

Hussein was not likely to use his weapons of mass destruction " short

of an all out invasion of Iraq, " or if " regime survival was imminently

threatened. " This supported George Tenet's earlier letter to Congress

in which he wrote, " Iraq might use its weapons but only if attacked. "

 

If anyone had any doubt about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass

destruction, it should have been dispelled when the United States and

Britain invaded and overwhelmed the Iraqi forces. Can you imagine a

brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, with his whole empire collapsing

around him, not unleashing his most powerful weapons, his weapons of

mass destruction? Certainly not, because he didn't have any. And

that's why 150,000 American troops scouring Iraq haven't found any.

And that's also why the warning from President Bush and his team that

Iraq was an imminent threat to American security was so shamefully untrue.

 

The Bush team has repeatedly attempted to exploit the 9/11 terrorist

attack by contending there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. For

example the president, in his victory speech from the deck of the

aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, proclaimed that with their 9/11

attacks on the United States, " the terrorists and their supporters

declared war on the United States, and war is what they got. " In

other words, Iraq was one of those supporters so we got even.

 

But no one, including British intelligence, has been able to validate

an Iraq-al Qaeda link. The United Nations terrorism committee, after

an extensive study of Osama bin Laden's operations worldwide, found no

connection with Iraq. Dafna Linzer of the Associated Press, on June

27, 2003, quoted Michael Chandler, the terrorism committee's chief

investigator as saying, " Nothing has come to our notice that would

indicate links between Iraq and al Qaeda . " The first they heard of

possible links was from Secretary Colin Powell when he addressed the

Security Council in February 2003.

 

Syndicated columnist Bill Press wrote on May 31, 2003, " There is zero

evidence of any link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. No

paper trail. No bank accounts. No training camps. No telephone

logs. Yes, the al Qaeda network is still alive and still planning

acts of terror from inside Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

But it apparently never was inside Iraq. "

 

It also was well known that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein came

from different Muslim sects and hated each other, so it is unlikely

they would have helped each other. James Risin in The New York Times

on June 9, 2003, reports that according to several intelligence

officials, " Two of the highest ranking leaders of al Qaeda in American

custody have told the CIA in separate interrogations that the

terrorist organizations did not work jointly with the Iraqi government

of Saddam Hussein. " One of them told his questioners that " the idea

of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among

Qaeda leaders but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals . .

.. because he didn't want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein. "

 

In his 2003 State of the Union Address, the president stated, " Our

intelligence sources tell us that he [saddam Hussein] has attempted to

purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons

production. " Soon his own Departments of State and Energy proved him

wrong. The Department of Energy concluded after consulting with its

nuclear experts, that the tubes were the wrong specification to be

used to enrich uranium. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence

and Research concluded that these tubes, which were openly purchased

on the Internet, were to be used for a UN-approved

multiple-rocket-launching system. The International Atomic Energy

Agency agreed.

 

The president also said, " The British government has learned that

Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from

Africa. " A few days thereafter the International Atomic Energy Agency

informed the world that the British story was based on forged

documents. This seemed a mere mistake—until it became known that the

administration was aware of the spuriousness of this scare ten months

before the president delivered his speech. The best evidence comes

from former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV in the July 6, 2003, New

York Times. He had served for twenty-three years as a career foreign

service officer and ambassador, and had worked in Iraq and Niger, the

two countries allegedly involved in uranium ore purchase. Wilson

reports how, in February 2002, he was told by the Central Intelligence

Agency that it had been asked by Vice President Cheney's office to

check out an intelligence report on the Niger to Iraq issue. The CIA

asked Wilson to travel to Niger to do so. He concluded it was

extremely doubtful that the alleged transaction occurred, and Niger

formally denied the charge. Wilson provided detailed briefing to both

the CIA and the State Department's African Affairs Bureau. The CIA

reported back to the vice president.

 

In view of all the information showing the Niger to Iraq postulation

phony, someone needs to explain how it got in the president's speech.

Was it a slipup or the work of one of the hawks around the president?

Wilson said in a Washington Post interview, " It really comes down to

the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a

fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question,

what else are they lying about? "

 

What better place to learn of the integrity (or lack thereof) of the

Bush administration on intelligence matters than the intelligence

community itself? These proud professionals are so embittered by the

way their work has been grossly distorted and manipulated by the war

hawks running our country that many are now coming forth to say so.

Nicholas D. Kristof, in his June 1, 2003, column in The New York Times

reports, " The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so

widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence

Professionals for Sanity that wrote to President Bush this month to

protest what it called 'a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental

proportions.' " Kristof further notes that, " While there have been

occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped

for political purposes... never before has such warping been used in

such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into

voting to launch a war. " The political advantage such deceit has

gained for our leaders so far is frightening indeed.

 

The United States claim that Iraq has mobile facilities for producing

biological weapons also is highly questionable. The idea of using

such facilities was explored many years ago by the U.S. military as a

backup for germ warfare manufacturing plants it was operating.

Presumably the United States terminated all such activities when we

signed the 1975 global treaty banning the use of bio-weapons.

 

In 1999 an Iraqi engineer who had defected told U.S. officials that he

had been involved with a mobile bio-weapon plant. Shortly thereafter,

according to a July 2, 2003, New York Times story, the United States

constructed a mobile plant to train Special Operations Units. It was

" real in all its parts but never actually plugged in, " they said.

This background led U.S. leaders to speculate that Iraq had such

mobile units. So when our troops found two mobile labs in Iraq that

might have been used for a part of a germ-manufacturing process, our

leaders called them a " smoking gun. " No evidence has been found to

indicate the trailers were ever used to make a biological weapon

precursor.

of Central Intelligence George Tenet, however, concluded that

the trailers were meant for that purpose. The State Department's

intelligence bureau sent a classified document to Secretary Powell on

June 2, 2003, questioning Tenet's appraisal and suggesting that a

possible intended use of the trailers was for refueling anti-aircraft

missiles. Nevertheless, President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair,

and Secretary of State Colin Powell have continued to use these

trailers as support for their claim that weapons of mass destruction

have been found. Iraqis, however, have shown United Nations

inspectors many photographs and videos of a variety of purposes for

which Iraq has been using such mobile units. Regardless of the use

for which these sterile trailers might have been intended, it is hard

to envision how anyone could honestly claim that they had found in

them the weapons for which they were searching.

 

James Dao and Thom Shanker reported in The New York Times on May 30,

2003, that Lt. Gen. James Conway, Commander of the First Marine

Expeditionary Force in Iraq, told reporters that he was amazed that

Iraq did not fire biological or chemical weapons on the American

forces marching toward Baghdad. They quote Conway as saying, " It was a

surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not

uncovered [such] weapons in some of the forward dispersal sites.

Again, believe me, it's not for lack of trying... What the regime was

intending to do in terms of its use of the weapons, we thought we

understood. We were simply wrong. "

 

Five of Saddam Hussein's most prominent scientists, who had been

involved in Iraq's earlier work with bio-weapons, have been in U.S.

custody for months, undergoing intense interrogation. They have been

promised safe haven outside Iraq. All five separately and repeatedly

testified that Iraq had destroyed its banned weapons after the Gulf

War when the Security Council so ordered and have never resumed

production. This explains the failure of the United Nations

inspectors and the United States and British military to find any.

 

A further example of misinformation used by the White House in the

buildup for war was that Saddam Hussein was responsible for killing

thousands of his own citizens with poison gas at Halabja in northern

Iraq. Stephen C. Pelletiere, in an op-ed piece in The New York Times

on January 31, 2003, throws a different light on this. He explains

that he was the senior political analyst on Iraq for the Central

Intelligence Agency during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq,

served as a professor at the Army War College from 1988-2000, and

headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would conduct a

war against the U.S. Both this investigation and one by the U.S.

Defense Intelligence Agency immediately after the Iran-Iraq war

reported in depth on the Halabja affair. Both reports are in the U.S.

intelligence community's files.

 

In 1988 Iran captured Halabja, a Kurdish site just inside the Iraqi

border and one which commands the major source of water for the

Persian Gulf states. Iraq counterattacked. Both sides used gas—Iraq

a mustard gas and Iran a cyanide-based gas, the latter a much more

deadly agent. But, as Pelletiere writes, " The condition of the dead

Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood

agent—that is, a cyanide & #8209;based gas—which Iran was known to use. The

Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are

not known to have possessed blood agents at the time. "

 

Pelletiere goes on to state, " I am not trying to rehabilitate the

character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of

human- rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at

Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the

information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved

battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justification for

the United States to invade Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them. "

 

Despite being aware of this information, the Bush administration

continued to misrepresent what occurred at Halabja as part of the

planned build-up to war. In consequence of this and other known

falsifications, America's most trustworthy and creditable newspaper,

The New York Times, editorialized on June 8, 2003. " If the

intelligence is wrong, or the government distorts it, the United

States will squander its credibility. Even worse, it will lose the

ability to rally the world, and the American people, to the defense of

the country when real threats materialize. " To this I add my own

opinion that such consequences would be even more serious than

removing a sitting president.

 

Few people are better informed on that subject than former White House

counsel John Dean, who blew the whistle on President Nixon. Robert

Scheer in the June 20, 2003, Los Angeles Times quoted John Dean's June

6 contribution to the web site Federal Law: " To put it bluntly if Bush

has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information,

he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security

intelligence data, if proven, could be a 'high crime' under the

Constitution impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of

federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy

statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States or

any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.' "

 

Now that it is obvious that the Bush administration leadership has

deceived us into war, what are we, the American people, going to do

about it?

 

Disturbingly, most of our political leaders are doing nothing about

it. Paul Krugman's, June 24, 2003, New York Times column said this is

" because they don't want to face the implications. If you admit to

yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to

demand accountability—and to do so in the face not only of a powerful,

ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready

to believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain,

it's a scary prospect. "

 

" Yet if we can't find people willing to take the risk—to face the

truth and act on it—what will happen to our democracy? " Shouldn't the

American people and the world community demand that those guilty of

this deception be held accountable?

 

The principal architect of the lying and deceit that is a hallmark of

the Bush administration is fifty-three-year-old Karl Rove. He has

practiced this evil trait all his professional life, even taught it as

a professor at the University of Texas. He excels at it. His

greatest accomplishment in using it was transformation of an

ill-equipped, perennial failure and fellow Texan into governor of

Texas, then president of the United States and leader of the free

world. Rove's skill is not in promoting his candidate, but in tearing

down the opposition with a barrage of outrageous falsifications. His

tactic, a serious affront to democracy, has made him feared and

admired by Republicans and Democrats alike. His unprincipled but

successful approach has led to his becoming the primary adviser to the

president and the president's men and women on a wide variety of

issues. Some say that the president is so indebted to Rove that his

ears are wide open to Rove's whisperings. In any case, he is one of

the big five at the head of our government who practice the Rove

technique: the president, Rove himself, Vice President Cheney,

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Rice.

Secretary of State Powell is also a powerhouse, but he is not one of

them. I wonder why he stays there.

 

If you would like an in-depth, firsthand review of the Machiavellian

methods that brought Rove to the pinnacle of power, read Bush's Brain:

How Karl Rove made George W. Bush Presidential. The authors, James

Moore and Wayne Slater, two journalists who have served Texas and

national politics for years, traveled extensively on George W. Bush's

gubernatorial and presidential campaigns and saw Karl Rove in action.

One incident they relate describes well the Bush-Rove team at work.

In the 2000 South Carolina primary battle between George Bush and John

McCain, who had just walloped Bush in New Hampshire, Bush repeatedly

proclaimed his determination to observe high campaign standards. But

his people " leveled a savage direct-mail and phone campaign against "

the war hero John McCain, and even questioned his loyalty. When

McCain challenged him, Bush reached over to grasp his rival's hand,

and said the two should put their acrimony behind them. " Don't give

me that shit, " said McCain, " and take your hands off me. "

 

Negative campaigning has been with us ever since Colonial days, but it

has never been practiced so skillfully, extensively, and brutally as

by Karl Rove—nor has it ever before had so many tens of millions of

dollars to use in spewing its evil through the news media. The time

has come to blow the whistle—to hold accountable both Karl Rove and

those who clearly hold office because of him.

 

After the president, in his 2003 State of the Union message,

proclaimed to the world the now well-known forgery about Iraq ordering

uranium from Niger, a well-established string of mea-culpas sounded

from his team—first from CIA Director George Tenet, then from Deputy

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and then from Hadley's boss,

Condoleezza Rice. Finally the anchor man for this relay to the top,

the president himself, said in a nationally televised press

conference, " I take personal responsibility for everything I say. "

You bet he does. And we will hold him to it, even when it's written by

Karl Rove.

 

Fellow patriots, I ask you to recall the inspiring words of Thomas

Jefferson, inscribed for all to see in his memorial in our nation's

capital: " I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against

every form of tyranny over the mind of man. " Our current leaders

should give serious consideration to these words.