Before the dawn: America's Oz moment

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

As your grandmother told you, "It's always darkest before the dawn." History provides so many instances of this old saw retaining sharp teeth that one should never have lost hope over the past five years of the Bush Nightmare. From the first moment Bush was forced on us by the Supreme Court in January 2001 -- after losing the popular vote by 500,000, give or take tens of thousands of votes in Florida thrown out by his henchmen -- a horrible precedent was set, undermining the entire superstructure of American history. If one were naive enough to care about democracy, believe the words of the Declaration of Independence and consider the Constitution inviolable, then one felt as Ralph Waldo Emerson did the day after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850: "I wake up in the morning with a painful sensation, at the smell of infamy in the air."

Was there, then, a darker moment than Nov. 3, 2004, when the tricksters pulled another fast one on the American people, and Bush -- the greatest failure in American history -- was awarded a second term? It was, as one of my readers put it in a poster that still hangs over my desk, "A Day of Mourning For Our Country."

But, history has a way of inexorably and implacably moving toward moments that prove your grandmother knows best. In the East they call it karma. Here we call it justice.

And justice is on the move in America. Tom DeLay faces criminal proceedings for running a money-laundering Mob-style election-fixing racket. DeLay's shadow, Bill Frist, may face criminal proceedings for insider-trading and perjury (lying to Congress about his "blind trust") -- the same offenses that landed Martha Stewart in prison. More importantly, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has inexorably and implacably built his case against the Bush White House in the matter of Valerie Plame's "outing" -- a felony, perhaps treason -- and dawn will break soon when he issues indictments against, in all likelihood, Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and Ari Fleischer. Most importantly, Dick Cheney -- the Wizard of Oz of American politics -- stands squarely in Fitzgerald's crosshairs and, ultimately, so does George W. Bush.

This is our Wizard of Oz moment, when Dorothy pulls back the curtain to reveal the Wizard as a frightened fat old man with a bum ticker. Though some people are surprised that it happened "so fast," those of us in the reality-based community saw it coming three years ago when Bush began preparing for a war that, in a free country, should never have been allowed to start. It feels somewhat the same as when the invincible "evil empire" of the Soviet Union developed a crack in its iron curtain. Gorbachev let some light and oxygen enter, in hopes of healing the rift, but the crack grew and the Berlin Wall fell and the dawn broke, snap, just like that. It collapsed like the house of cards it always was. That's exactly what's happening at the White House now. It may be shocking to some how quickly this invincible team of Mayberry Machiavellis are going down, but it's no surprise to your grandmother.

Were the GOP run by decent people who have the best interests of the nation at heart, then they'd call for resignations and initiate a process of Truth and Reconciliation, as per Nelson Mandela. But, in 2005, the GOP is run by creaky apparatchiks like Dennis Hastert and knuckle-draggers like Trent Lott and they take orders from cranky end-timers like James Dobson and lend an ear to dottering psychopaths like Pat Robertson. The GOP will, similarly, sink under the weight of its own cronyism, corruption and incompetence.

The Democrats stand to be the undeserving recipients of this karmic swingback of history. That is, they stand to gain a few seats in the Congress in 2006. But they are fools if they don't see they had nothing to do with this new dawn. In fact, were this Europe in 1945, we'd be holding citizens' tribunals to determine the level of each Democrat's collaboration with the GOP in dragging us into this war, prolonging it, sanctioning torture, looting our Treasury and not once raising a convincing opposition.

As we wait for justice to take its full course, we're at an impasse. One thing's for certain: we can't waste any more time.

Hurry up dawn.

http://hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:130427

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.
We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.

We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic. Because far too many of us know and are aware of the crimes committed by our government in our name, we are unlikely to settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats. The last thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our government or the people we have elected but our constitution is still very much alive and we choose to believe that destiny has placed Patrick Fitzgerald at this time and this place in our history to save us from the people we elected. If the law cannot get to the truth of what has happened to the American people under the Bush administration, then we all may begin to hear the early death rattles of history’s greatest democracy.

Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a copy of the Italian government’s investigation into the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the forged documents. The blatantly fake papers, which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, turned up after a December 2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s intelligence agency SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defense minister.

If Fitzgerald is examining the possibility that Ledeen was executing a plan to help his friend Karl Rove build a case for invading Iraq? Ledeen has long ties to Italian intelligence agency operatives and has spanned the globe to bring the world the constant variety of what he calls “creative destruction” to build democracies. He makes the other neo-cons appear passive. He brought the Reagan administration together with the Iranian arms dealer who dragged the country through Iran-Contra and shares with his close friend Karl Rove a personal obsession with Machiavelli. Ledeen, who is almost rabidly anti-Arab, famously told the Washington Post that Karl Rove told him, “Any time you have a good idea, tell me.”

The federal grand jury has to at least consider whether Ledeen called Rove with an idea to use his contacts with the Italian CIA to hatch a plan to create the rationale for war. Ledeen told radio interviewer Ian Masters and his producer Louis Vandenberg, “I have absolutely no connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen them. I did not work on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing about them, don't think I ever wrote or said anything about the subject.” It is strictly coincidence then that some months after he and his neo-con consorts and Italian intelligence officers met in Rome that the Niger embassy was illegally entered and nothing was stolen other than letterhead and seals. And equally coincident that forged papers under those letterheads were slipped to Elisabetta Burba, a writer for an Italian glossy owned by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, and a backer of the Bush invasion scheme. Unfortunately for the pro-war neo-cons, even an Italian tabloid would not publish the fake documents and turned them over to the CIA and US government in Rome.

The other American attendees at Ledeen’s Roman Holiday are also worthy of scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently arrested for leaking classified US government information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Ledeen sprang quickly to his defense but Franklin faces prosecution next year and is most probably cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald. Harold Rhode, the other American actor in this tragicomic affair, worked the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Department of Defense for Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Characterized as a “counter-intelligence shop,” OSP simply interpreted intelligence in a manner that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the CIA gathered data that said otherwise, OSP analyzed it differently or ignored the facts and then reported to the vice president precisely what he wanted to hear. Rhode also was the liaison between Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted embezzler the Bush administration was using to feed information to them and Judy Miller about the distortions and lies required to fuel the rush to war.

No great extrapolation is necessary to assume that OSP, sitting inside the CIA, got early word that Joseph Wilson was being dispatched to Niger to investigate the sale of low-grade uranium to Iraq. Rhode needed only to pick up the phone and call the vice president’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, who would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How hard is it for even Republicans to believe, at this point, that Rove is capable of launching a plan to discredit Wilson and punish him by exposing his wife? Rove and his boss were not simply in danger of losing the prime cause for the war; they faced an even graver political wound of being discovered as covert agents who defrauded the government and the public.

I have seen the spawn of Rove’s tortured mind and watched a hundred of his political scams unfold and I am confident I know how this one played out. Rove might have brought it up with his fellow big brains in the White House Iraq Group, a propaganda organization set up to disseminate information supporting the war. There was likely a consensus to move the plan to smack down Wilson out of the White House. Rove always keeps a layer of operatives between himself and the person he gets to pull the trigger. Libby was probably told to manage it out of the VP’s office to protect the president because Karl always takes care of his most prized assets. Libby then likely ordered John Hannah and possibly David Wurmser to call the ever-friendly Judy Miller at the New York Times and columnist Robert Novak to give them Valerie Plame’s identity. Rove knew that Miller would call Libby of Aspen for confirmation and his old friend Novak was certain to call Rove who, as an unidentified senior White House official, would confirm the identity on background only. Because Novak is a partisan gunslinger, he wrote more quickly than Miller and when she saw the firestorm his story created, she backed off and has since been trying to cover for herself and Libby. Miller’s later claim that she cannot remember who gave her the “Valerie Flame” name is as much dissembling as Rove’s unconvincing argument that he “forgot” he met with Time reporter Matt Cooper. Karl Rove can remember precinct results from 19th century presidential elections. He neither forgets nor forgives.

There you have it, Mr. Prosecutor. To quote an unreconstructed former Republican presidential candidate, “You know it. I know it. And the American people know it.” We expect you also to have sufficient evidence to prove all of this. There are many of us who are on the verge of losing faith in our democracy. We are convinced that there are people within the highest ramparts of American government who are willing to put our country at great risk to advance their geo-political vision. We want our country back. And all we have left is the power of the law. From what we know, you are the right man come forth at the right time.

Prove to us we still live in a democracy and a nation of laws.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/the-most-important-crimin_b_9183.html

[gunns]

The most disturbing thing about this administration are the people that know what is going on and say nothing. How appropriate that the brainless Bush surrounds himself with supposed brains such as Rove and Cheney and they may ultimately aid in his downfall.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The most disturbing thing about this administration are the people that know what is going on and say nothing. How appropriate that the brainless Bush surrounds himself with supposed brains such as Rove and Cheney and they may ultimately aid in his downfall.

Yep.

What is absolutely amazing is that BushCo seems to be the corrupt Harding, Grant, Nixon and Reagan admins all rolled into one. I really am hoping this moron takes the Rethug party the way of the Whig party...oblivion.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v615/delano/legs.jpg

[W*GS]

I really am hoping this moron takes the Rethug party the way of the Whig party...oblivion.

As long as the Dean/Moore/Soros wing of your party is in control, the Democrats will be in oblivion first - they're partways there already.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

http://www.bartcop.com/tom-det-Jones.jpg