I’ve been busy lately with local politics [in Georgia, it’s always about water – that’s our "issue"]. But I’ve kept up enough to know that "scandal fatigue" is setting in again. The destroyed C.I.A. Water-Boarding Tapes thing is just business as usual with this Administration – Blackwater, Halliburton, Gitmo, N.S.A. Spying, the War, etc. It’s all so unimaginable that one misguided President and his trusty sidekicks could do so many horrid things in their time allotted to rule [we used to say "serve"]. But I’m still preoccupied with one single aspect of all of it. I think they knew they were going to do it all – that they planned it in advance.
Two weeks after the inauguration, Cheney had an Energy Conference attended by the Oil Barrons. The proceedings remain secret [Cheney went to the Supreme Court personally to make sure of that], though the maps they used were of Iraq’s oil fields. The Presidential Executive Order to block access to Presidential records came in their first year. According to Paul O’niell, they were talking about War with Iraq in their first Staff Meeting. The suspension of the Geneva Conventions and the "torture policy" came even before the War, back in the first days of Afghanistan. Cheney started balking at oversight very early. Signing Statements to invalidate Congress came in the beginning. The list just goes on and on, and points to a premeditated takeover of the government – nowhere more apparent than in the area of the Justice Department and the legal opinions that have poured out of the White House.
There is little question in my mind about the identity of the architect of this willful takeover. George Bush is just not smart enough to know how to do it. Karl Rove is a political operative, not a policy person. The only choice is Dick Cheney. As much as we’ve read and written about him, about his Paranoia, about his arrogance, I’m beginning to think of him as a character out of a movie – a "bad guy." I can think of no one who could have manipulated Congress, the Justice Department, the Intelligence Agencies, or the Military so effectively as Cheney. Nor can I think of anyone who would have acted so irresponsibly in a position of power. He’d already done it in the decade he spent in the House of Representatives. But it’s hard to accept that he could have figured all of the ins-and-outs all by himself. He’s had David Addington with him the whole time, but I expect that his friends at the American Enterprise Institute have been with him the whole way too.
It’s equally hard for me to imagine that I could ever have written something like this – that the Vice President took over our government and directed us down such an abberent path. A younger me, the Psychiatrist, would’ve suspected that the older me had gone Paranoid. But I don’t think so. You don’t go Paranoid in just one little spot, it bursts out everywhere, and I don’t feel Paranoid about anything else. I actually believe that all of the previously unimaginable things that have gone on in the last seven years were planned in advance, planned by Dick Cheney – including the way that any effective prosecution or investigation of the Administration is currently being blocked.
For many months, I have said that the Democratic candidates have to use for their mantra, the list of all the destruction the current president of the United States has done to destroy our democracy as we knew it. You write about whistleblowers coming forward but Bush and Cheney have trashed the whistleblower rules that were designed to protect whistleblowers. Congress hasn’t been doing it’s job for a long time because they have allowed this injustice. I wrote you a while ago about how we needed someone like Colin Powell to step forward and announce to the country that this president and vice president are doing terrible damage to the troops and the people of this country with this Iraq War in order for the country to demand stopping it. Well, now I know the reason Powell has not really stepped forward to condemn Bush and Cheney and it doesn’t have anything to do with protecting the leaders of our country but it does keep the mainstream media from bringing up the real reason General Powell didn’t run for president. I thought he said it was his wife Almas concerns etc. Consortiumnews.com has an article from Nov. 28,2007 that explains a lot of things I didn’t understand it’s titled “The Truth About Colin Powell” by Robert, Sam, And Nat Parry. If any of this is true, it makes a lot of sense for why Powell has not been more forceful in his defense of the soldiers fighting this endless war. I can’t think of a more loved hero on both sides of the political parties than Colin Powell. Both the Democrats and the Republicans wanted him to run for president, much like they did when Eisenhower was convinced to run for president after Truman.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/112807a.html
It’s sad to read this. Colin Powell, by this well-documented account, was knee-deep in a series of shady goings on – in Viet Nam, in the Iran Contra Affair. His answers in the Iran-Contra Hearings sound like Alberto Gonzales – the “I don’t recall” defense. I suppose the article is saying that Colin Powell either has a not-so-savory past or not-so-savory moral code and that’s why he’s laid so low.
I wanted him to be what he appears to be. But, these days, the truth is all that really matters. Thanks for sending this dose of reality my way. It actually makes his behavior make more sense. I was personally told “I thought he said it was his wife Almas concerns etc.” by an Army colleague of Powell’s some time back. This man was a retired Army Special Operations type, who I suspected had been involved in a lot of unsavory things himself. If all this article reports is true, Colin Powell’s shameful U.N. speech in the lead-up to the Iraq War is more in line with this previous behavior.
These are not the times in which one is going to develop much of a polly-anna view of the world, and how it works.