http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0226/hentoff.phpYou would think this grassroots movement to secure our liberties would be of interest to the national media, but I have seen little of it on television or in the print press. To find out about these campaigns around the country, and about a range of organizing tools, you can visit the Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee's Web site, and its links: http://www.gjf.org/NBORDC

If Bush lied to the United Nations, the American people and Congress to gain support for war, his "witting effort to put American soldiers in harm's way, guaranteeing the deaths of some," is arguably an impeachable offense

"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's 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.'" -Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense? By John Dean

Lie - 1. To make an untrue statement with intent to deceive. 2. To create a false or misleading impression. -- Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition

"There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." -Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia

"we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." " -Paul Wolfowitz

Fake President Uses Fake Documents to Justify Fake War-Senator Seeks FBI Probe of Iraq Documents

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI on Friday (March 14) to investigate forged documents the Bush administration used as evidence against Saddam Hussein and his military ambitions in Iraq.

An investigation should "at a minimum help to allay any concerns" that the government was involved in the creation of the documents to build support for administration policies, Rockefeller wrote in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has denied the U.S. government had any hand in creating the false documents. "It came from other sources," Powell told a House committee Thursday. "We were aware of this piece of evidence, and it was provided in good faith to the inspectors."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia asked the FBI to determine the source of the documents, the sophistication of the forgeries, the motivation of those responsible, why intelligence agencies didn't recognize them as forgeries and whether they are part of a larger disinformation campaign.

The documents indicated that Iraq tried to by uranium from Niger, the West African nation that is the third-largest producer of mined uranium, Niger's largest export. The documents had been provided to U.S. officials by a third country, which has not been identified.

Rockefeller said U.S. worries about Iraqi nuclear weapons were not based primarily on the documents, but "there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

FBI Looks Into Fake Evidence on Iraq -The FBI is looking into the forgery of a key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program, including the possibility that a foreign government is using a deception campaign to foster support for military action against Iraq.

The phony documents -- a series of letters between Iraqi and Niger officials showing Iraq's interest in a laundry list of equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons -- came to British and U.S. intelligence officials from a third country. The identity of the third country could not be learned yesterday.......- Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt - Washington Post Staff Writers - March 13, 2003

[Here's the fall guy "game". Mysterious country duped us all, oh well. THESE documents were used by the BUSH/BLAIR/POWELL group to Deceive the UN into Res 1441, and further Deception by POWELL before the UN explicitly. We can't IMPEACH Blair, but we can sure START with Powell and move up the Chain of Command. The American People demand the Truth and those who use forged documents to start a war should be help accountable for their actions! Editor, Take Back The Media]

Democrats in Congress who think they'll accomplish more for the country by pretending lies are "intelligence failures" and appeasing Bush and his anti-democratic, neo-conservative administration are in denial. What's needed now is for the Democratic leadership and all Americans with conscience to get themselves informed enough to notice we're in another time of crisis.

The best way to do that is to acquire news from the wide variety and vast number of newspaper and magazine articles published on the Internet, and to visit the many quality political Internet web sites. As those of us who already get our news online know, you won't be adequately informed if you rely on TV news programs or a single newspaper for information about the damage the Bush cabal is doing and the extent of their manipulation. It would also be helpful for those of us who get our news online to pass it along to offline friends and others.

There are times we good, gentle liberals can sit in the Lotus position, just breathe, and send loving vibes to everybody. But there are other times the optimal thing is to get out there and (quoting Frederick Douglass) - "agitate, agitate, agitate." This is one of those "agitating" times. --06.07.03 -Carla Binion

How Administration Lies Become Public Policy (As Reported by U.S.News and World Reports)....

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bullshit."....

Just how good was America's intelligence on Iraq? Seven weeks after the end of the war, no hard evidence has been turned up on the ground to support the charge that Iraq posed an imminent threat to U.S. national security--no chemical weapons in the field, no Scud missiles in the western desert, no biological agents. At least not yet. As a result, questions are being raised about whether the Bush administration overstated the case against Saddam Hussein.....The question remains: What did the Bush administration know--or think it knew--on the eve of war?....Interviews with more than a dozen officials reveal that many pieces of intelligence--including information the administration had already cited publicly--did not stand up to scrutiny and had to be dropped from the text of Powell's U.N. speech.

Vice President Cheney's office played a major role in the secret debates and pressed for the toughest critique of Saddam's regime, administration officials say. The first draft of Powell's speech was written by Cheney's staff and the National Security Council. Days before the team first gathered at the CIA, a group of officials assembled in the White House Situation Room to hear Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, lay out an indictment of the Iraqi regime--"a Chinese menu" of charges, one participant recalls, that Powell might use in his U.N. speech.....

The team, at first, tried to follow a 45-page White House script, taken from Libby's earlier presentation. But there were too many problems--some assertions, for instance, were not supported by solid or adequate sourcing, several officials say. Indeed, some of the damning information simply could not be proved.

Veteran intelligence officers were dismayed. "The policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day," says an intelligence official. In September 2002, U.S. News has learned, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons. It concluded:

"There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons . . . ."

At about the same time, Rumsfeld told Congress that Saddam's "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas." Rumsfeld's critics say that the secretary tended to assert things as fact even when intelligence was murky. "What we have here is advocacy, not intelligence work," says Patrick Lang, a former top DIA and CIA analyst on Iraq.

Powell was so unimpressed with the information on al Qaeda that he decided to bury it at the end of his speech, according to officials. Even so, NSC officials kept pushing for Powell to include the charge that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. He refused.

Some 300 sites have been inspected so far; there are an additional 600 to go, and the list is growing, as captured Iraqis provide new leads. But what if those leads turn up nothing? "It would be," says a senior administration official, "a colossal intelligence failure." - U.S. World and News Report

How the Administration Fabricates Lies to Include in its Reports....
As the Pentagon scours Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to Al Qaeda, it's increasingly obvious that the Bush Administration either distorted or deliberately exaggerated the intelligence used to justify the war against Iraq.

Can you imagine how hacked off the folks in the Pentagon, who told Rumsfeld, Cheney and W it would be like this and they would need many more soldiers for peacekeeping, are today?

As this writer pointed out earlier, we have two different major examples of either mendacity or incompetence (or both) on the part of the administration.

He adds: Now, honestly folks, why is it that people want to vote for these guys?

Bartcop reviews the basics:
Doesn't anybody remember the lesson of Watergate - "Follow the money?" It all goes into the pockets of the people who stole the 2000 election..... bc,vol 1082

Yes, let's review the basics and look at the finacial windfalls that came to Bush the Lesser and his cronies because they told lies to start a war....

War - What Is it Good For? By BOB HERBERT
When the George Bushes and the George Shultzes were banging the drums for war with Iraq, we didn't hear one word from them about the benefits that would be accruing to corporate behemoths like Bechtel. And we didn't pay much attention to the grotesque conflict of interest engaged in by corporate titans and their government cronies who were pushing young American men and women into the flames of a war that ultimately would pour billions of dollars into a very select group of corporate coffers.

Now the corporations (not just Bechtel by any means) have a lock on Iraq, and U.S. taxpayers are obliged to pay the bill…..

The blatant war-mongering followed immediately by profiteering inevitably raise questions about the real reasons American men and women have been fighting and dying in Iraq. President Bush told us the war was about weapons of mass destruction and the need to get rid of the degenerate Saddam. There was also talk about democracy taking root in Iraq and spreading like spring flowers throughout the Arab world.

The two things that were never openly discussed, that never became part of the national conversation, were oil and money. Those crucial topics were left to the major behind-the-scenes operators, many of whom are now cashing in….

The favoritism, the secretive method by which the contracts are being awarded and the arrogant and unconscionable exclusion of the United Nations and even close U.S. allies from significant roles in the administration and reconstruction of Iraq all contribute to the most cynical interpretation of American motives.

The men and women who fought bravely in Iraq, for reasons they felt were noble and unassailable, deserve better.

Halliburton subsidiary wins Iraqi oil firefighting contract Tue Mar 25, 3:50 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US army said it gave the main Iraqi oilwell firefighting contract to a unit of Halliburton Co., a firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, without any bidding

Topple the War Profiteers 04/20/2003 @ 6:47pm John Nichols …Recent days have brought news of the awarding of a contract worth up to $680 million to rebuild Iraqi roads, schools, sewers and hospitals damaged in the war.

Bechtel, which is jokingly referred to in business circles as Bushtel, donated $1.3 million to political candidates during the last two election cycles -- with most of it going into the coffers of Republican campaigns, including the 2000 Bush for President effort. Surely, Bechtel is an attractive target for a Congressional investigation of war profiteering--like those begun after World War I and during World War II…

if Congress is going to get serious about war profiteering, there is no better place to begin than the Texas-based Halliburton Corp. energy conglomerate that Vice-President Dick Cheney once headed. According to a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers released this week, a Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as $7 billion over two years…. The federal government and the Pentagon have paid the firm tens of millions of dollars to build cells for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. And the company is earning hundreds of millions as the exclusive logistics supplier for the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation. The best accounting so far available suggests that, between October 2000 and March 2002, the government awarded (Halliburton subsidiary) Kellogg Brown & Root work worth more than $624 million.

Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil!

Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.....Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

His latest comments follow his widely reported statement from an interview in Vanity Fair last month, in which he said that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government
bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction."

Prior to that, his boss, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had already undermined the British government's position by saying Saddam Hussein may have destroyed his banned weapons before the war.

Mr. Wolfowitz is viewed as one of the most hawkish members of the Bush administration. The 57-year old expert in international relations was a strong advocate of military action against Afghanistan and Iraq. -Guardian of London

We are poor little sheep who have lost our way....

Bush uses "Psychological Warfare" against Americans, with full help from the Media. -www.counterpunch.com

One generally doesn't think of psychological warfare as something waged against the home population; but this is perhaps the best way to appreciate the US experience during the past few months. The objective of such a campaign was to stifle dissent, garner unquestioning support, and rally people around a common symbol. Americans, and to a lesser extent Europeans, have been subjected to a propaganda barrage in an effort to neutralize opposition to the war, and this fits directly into a psyops framework.

…Given that the war didn't have an accepted justification, the propagandists opted to stress the "support our troops" refrain, paralleling the "support our team" chant…. Presenting the war as a sports event enabled the propagandists to circumvent the thorny issue of why the US was so eager to engage in this war in the first place.

Propaganda highlights: The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue the discovery of a "suicide-belt factory"--with the suicide outfits neatly hung in dry cleaner's plastic. The Pentagon (use of) embedded journalists…

NB: the Pentagon views the media as a "force multiplier". These journalists were stitched onto the military machine to sell its war, and perhaps unwittingly they became part of the machine…. For those seeking to avert future wars, there must be a realization that organizing marches or using the political process is not enough. Besides these means, it is essential to obtain independent media outlets, so that the power of the established media conglomerates may be challenged. This war exposed the corporate media networks as adopting a unified role in selling this war by shutting out dissent and beating the war drums. Such a media structure will not in itself challenge the new American Imperial role, and it has equally disturbing implications for democracy everywhere.

The Bush administration's unprecedented war on public information - and how the major news media are going along. -Camille T. Taiara

Here are the connections between CLEAR CHANNEL and the BUSH FAMILY….

There are close ties between Clear Channel and President Bush.

The Vice Chair of the company is Tom Hicks, a member of the Bush Pioneer club for elite (and generous) donors. The relationship between Bush and Hicks goes back even further, however. The two were embroiled in scandal when Hicks, as University of Texas Regent, was responsible for granting endowment management contracts of the newly created (under legislation signed by Bush) UT Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO). The contracts were given to firms politically connected to both Hicks and Bush, including the Carlyle Group - a firm which has the first President Bush on the payroll and had the second one on the payroll until just weeks before receiving this lucrative business.

The board of UTIMCO also included the Chair of Clear Channel, L. Lowry Mays. In addition, Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers from George Bush, making him a wealthy man through a deal that was partially sweetened by a shiny new taxpayer financed stadium, which included valuable land obtained at below market rates through the use of eminent domain.

Whether or not the close ties between the radio behemoth Clear Channel and the president have anything to do with their rallying support for his policies is unclear. If it were a small company it would not much matter. But Clear Channel is a media giant, dominating the radio and promotion industries. The potential for the alignment of big media and the government should concern us all, especially as FCC Chair Michael Powell continues to push to reduce the barriers to even further media consolidation.

.Media lies and war crimes: the instructive case of Julius Streicher
Eleven leading members of Hitler's Third Reich were sentenced to death for their role in instigating a world war that claimed the lives of tens of millions of people as a result of military slaughter and death camps.

There was one man sent to the scaffold, his name was Julius Streicher. Streicher was convicted for promoting aggressive war and atrocities against the Jews in his newspapers-the vile anti-Semitic weekly Der Stürmer, and later a daily, Fränkische Tageszeitung. The court found that this propaganda for war and genocide made the newspaper publisher more culpable than many of those defendants who were more directly involved in the workings of the Nazi regime.

The historic crimes of that regime, the tribunal found, could never have been carried out without the preparatory work he and others like him did in warping the public consciousness of the German people with a relentless barrage of anti-Semitic and militarist propaganda. As the prosecution stated at Nuremberg: "Without him the Kaltenbrunners, the Himmlers, the General Stroops would have had nobody to carry out their orders."

What of those who play an analogous role to that of Julius Streicher today? The American media has worked as an essential instrument of the Bush administration in deceiving and terrorizing the American people in preparation for war. In many cases-Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages and countless barking commentators on both network and cable talk shows-they have approached the degraded level of Der Stürmer in promoting an invasion of Iraq and justifying mass murder.

The media as a whole, with very few exceptions, has obediently turned itself into an extension of the Pentagon's propaganda machine, serving as a conduit for psychological warfare against both Iraqis and Americans. The scoundrels who control what passes for news in the US have parroted all of the administration's lying justifications for war, celebrated its onset, and censored the images of carnage and suffering that are being seen throughout the rest of the world. They share a major portion of guilt for this illegal act.

The FCC Has Acted, Will We?
Will media become an ongoing political issue or remain a complaint? Will activists organize around it, move on the media and press the press, or just resign themselves that media companies can do what they will.

The challenge to all of us is: Will we get involved to demand a higher level of restraint over media monopolies and more accountability and responsibility by media companies? Will we inform ourselves about media issues and realize that our cultural environment needs protecting just as our natural one does.

The airwaves are going, going, going. Will we all wake up before they are totally gone?

"There ought to be limits to freedom." --G.W. Bush, Press conference, Texas State House, 1999.

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." --G.W.Bush, December 18, 2000

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it." - George W. Bush, July 26, 2001

"You can fool some of the people, all of the time -- and those are the ones you have to concentrate on." -George W. Bush, 2001

"I do not need to explain why I say things." -George Bush, From an interview conducted by Bob Woodward, 20 November 2002

"fas-cism (fash'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Through the 1930s Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany (used) government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war.

America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours….

Much to her surprise, the federal government is promising to do everything Los Angeles
Congresswoman Maxine Waters has spent years fighting for.

Education for the neediest souls will be transformed, quality health care will be guaranteed, damaged roadways and bridges will be rebuilt, and millions of dollars will be spent to spur new business.

Waters just never figured the beneficiaries would be residents of Iraq….There's a dirty secret no one has told you, and here it is: This war is not about changing Iraq, it's about changing America.

The world according to Bush - William P. Pfaff, a syndicated columnist. 4/19/2003 The Bush administration wants a new international regime of democratic coalitions, which it says would possess a legitimacy the UN lacks and could deal expeditiously and effectively with threats to international order. Colin Powell says US interventions would come only on international request or when US interests are directly involved. But Colin Powell is not a neo-conservative…. Put simply, the Bush administration envisages a world run by the United States, backed by as many states as will sign on to support it.

Tide turns against Bush -THOMAS WALKOM
The Iraq crisis is no longer about stopping Iraq. It is about stopping the United States.

This is the real significance of what is going on now at the United Nations, of the peace marches around the world, of the political turmoil that rocks staunchly pro-U.S. leaders such as Britain's Tony Blair and Australia's John Howard.

Most countries outside the U.S. are no longer worried about rogue Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. They are worried about rogue American President George W. Bush.

The Bush administration has plans for nothing less than world empire - and feels so emboldened right now because it is succeeding so well, and so completely beneath the radar of American public awareness. They've taken Bill Clinton's plan for destroying Al Qaeda and turned it into an instrument for establishing military control over the Caspian Sea oil reserves of Central Asia. No real assistance for Afghan nation building seems forthcoming, but military bases by the dozen are being built to guard oil and gas pipeline routes. This has been thoroughly, if gently, reported by some of our more responsible media sources, such as the LA Times and ABC's Nightline. --Kent Southard (You might have to scroll down the page to read the piece)