The defense took the offensive (oxymoronic, I know) in the Scooter Libby case today, bringing forth testimony from several witnesses that, in the attempt to save Libby's life, tightened the noose around much of the Bush White House. Columnist Robert Novak, one whom earned the reputation as an acerbic puppet for the WH, claimed that the two WH officials who gave him the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame were Dick Armitage and Karl Rove. Libby's already on the stand for lying; Rove has claimed all along that he is not connected to Plamegate; Bush has stated that he would fire anyone connected with Plamegate; prosecution testimony places Cheney at the center of the leak scandal; where, in fact, does this stop? While not Nixonian in scope, this scandal continues to paint the Bush White House and, truly, legacy, as an administration hell-bent on carrying out politics over policy. Whether it's energy or foreign policy, the Bush White House clearly has attacked the nation in the last six years with an ideological fervor just shy of messianic. The neoconservative foreign policy and the Reaganesque spend spend spend cut cut cut actions have driven this government further towards bankruptcy. To show that the media is focussed not on progress being made but damage being done by Bush, stories of a divided Iraq continue to beat out the apparent disarming of North Korea. A member of the 'Axis of Evil' disarming? If I were the president (wouldn't want the pay cut), I'd be running this in every speech every day of the week, claiming to have toppled two of the three. However, what continues to unfold is the collapse of the first nation and an impending military conflict with the third nation in the Axis, Iran. The U.S. presented conventional weapons of mass destruction yesterday in Baghdad to a sceptical Iraqi nation; these weapons had been in U.S. possession for nearly two years and their exact origins are unknown. What is known, or at least raising a lot of questions, is, why now is this issue being raised publicly? Sy Hersch in the New Yorker wrote of the growing military clashes between the U.S. and Iran nearly a year ago; all along, many foreign policy experts claimed that Iraq simply posed as a launching point for U.S. forces to hit Teheran. If and most likely when the U.S. engages openly with Iran, further fingers will point at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the architect of yet another unprepared disaster. That he and VP Cheney literally threw the U.S. into Iraq less than twenty-four hours after the 9/11 attacks is well-documented. That the military raced to catch up with ill-conceived war plans has been deadly apparent. The army that we have and not the one we want has experienced 3,100 deaths and tens of thousands of casualties thus far and yet continued presence in Iraq strains the military at all ends. Bush's "all-volunteer" army will need some volunteers to be signed up even without consent at the rate tensions with Iran heat up. All of this because Bush wanted to hit the guy who, "remember," tried to kill his dad?
Further testimony poured out of Washington possibly pinning the leak on former press secretary Ari Fleischer, the one man who has immunity in this trial. How well will this immunity hold up in the court of public opinion, when, upon Libby's acquittal, will Americans see that the Bushies cooked everything up simply for this quixotic and suicidal invasion? Finally, to add further insult to injury, the Pentagon this week released a study stating what most everyone in Washington already knew: the Bush team cherry-picked pre-war intelligence. Deliberately. Deceitfully. This isn't the Gulf of Tonkin, this isn't the Zimmerman Note. This is Havana. This is, from a governmental action, William R. Hearst stuff. This is a permanent historical stain on the name of the United States; even had we succeeded in recreating Iraq, history would show that the ends can and shall never justify the means. The Bush Administration not only lied but manipulated and deceived all for a vainglorious attempt of carrying out a failed and dead foreign policy. For this, not only should the Republicans deserve to lose the 2008 election, every one of the Bushies should be impeached and tried and removed from their positions of power. Why the press and public continue to allow Bush to remain in office is beyond me. Truly, a travesty of our nation's government and a massive abuse of power.
