"I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council," says Col. Larry Wilkerson.
As I have insisted time and time again in this journal, the Bush administration is a criminal conspiracy, intent on turning America into a cash cow for a select few.
Two articles appearing on Information Clearing House provide more clarification on my views. As both are rather lengthly, I will quote only briefly from each, but it behooves you, Gentle Readers, to follow the links and read the articles in their entirety.
The first is from a PBS interview with Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former asistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell, also former Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College. David Brancaccio is Bill Moyer's erudite replacement on PBS's Now television program.
The rest of the interview is here.DAVID BRANCACCIO: We've been talking grand policy. The then director of the CIA, George Tenent, Vice President Cheney's deputy Libby, told you that the intelligence that was the basis of going to war was rock solid. Given what you now know, how does that make you feel?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. I've said in other places that it was --constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: A hoax? That's quite a word.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, let's face it, it was. It was not a hoax that the Secretary in any way was complicit in. In fact he did his best -- I watched him work. Two AM in the morning on the DCI and the Deputy DCI, John McLaughlin. And to try and hone the presentation down to what was, in the DCI's own words, a slam dunk. Firm. Iron clad. We threw many things out. We threw the script that Scooter Libby had given the -- Secretary of State. Forty-eight page script on WMD. We threw that out the first day. And we turned to the National Intelligence estimate as part of the recommendation of George Tenent and my agreement with. But even that turned out to be, in its substantive parts -- that is stockpiles of chemicals, biologicals and production capability that was hot and so forth, and an active nuclear program. The three most essential parts of that presentation turned out to be absolutely false.
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Mike Whitney is an independent investigative reporter. He has some very interesting things to say about Bush's economic policies, with a special tip of the hat to Alan Greenspan, probably the biggest asshole to come out of Wall Street since Teapot Dome.
01/05/06 "ICH" -- President Bush has consistently defended his massive $500 billion tax cuts. He has insisted that deficit spending be a “permanent” part of the national budget. His economic plan has eroded the confidence of central banks around the world and increased the federal debt by a whopping $3 trillion.
Still, he persists in his claim that deficits should be an enduring function of government. Doesn’t this confirm that bankrupting the country is an integral part of the Bush grand strategy? What more proof do we need?
Imagine someone stealing your credit card and running up a $450,000 bill year after year and then defending the theft as necessary to “create more jobs” as the “trickle-down” theorists do? Would you take such a person at his word? Deficits are theft; and the determination to make these lavish tax cuts for the wealthy permanent proves beyond a doubt that it is part of a larger strategy to bring about an economic meltdown that will change the political complexion of the country. What else could it mean?
Dick Cheney recently opined, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t mean anything.”
Liar.
In fact, Cheney was part of the Reagan administration when Reagan’s tax cuts created monstrous $200 billion deficits, up 75% from 1980. The effects were devastating. Unemployment jumped to 10%, the 30 year mortgage skyrocketed to 15%, the economy ground to a standstill, and the nation plunged into the deepest recession since the 1930s. Cheney fully understands the suffering that deficits produce. Now, he wants to continue that misery as a permanent function of government.
[...]
And, what is the relationship between the ocean of debt produced by the Bush team and their strengthening of police-state apparatus like unlimited spying on Americans, the NSS (Bush’s new Secret Police), the uniform Federal ID program, the Patriot Act, and Halliburton’s $385 million contract from Homeland Security to construct new detention and processing facilities within the United States?
Is the ascendancy of the police-state intended to balance the catastrophic effects of economic destruction? Or, do the new instruments of repression anticipate the “political turmoil” (Warren Buffet’s words) that naturally results from financial collapse?
[...]
Regardless of what the public-relation gurus on the business channel say, the state of the union is disastrous. Bush has intentionally looted the treasury and torpedoed America’s economic future. Federal Reserve chief, Alan Greenspan cooperatively kept interest rates low so the greatest swindle in history could take place while the drowsy American public snoozed away.
[...]
Greenspan knew as early as 1996 that the stock market was over-inflated when he warned that “there was a stock market bubble at this point” that is “a problem we should keep our eye on”. (Remember “irrational exuberance”?) Still, he accommodated his friends in Washington and Wall Street by waiting until tens of thousands of Americans had lost their savings (and retirement) before ratcheting up interest rates and cooling down the spec-market.
The final loss to investors was an estimated $7 trillion dollars, an amount that pales in comparison to the current housing bubble which “The Economist” calls “the greatest bubble in history”. Again, it was Greenspan who instigated the housing bubble by dropping rates to a paltry 1.5% following the decline in the stock market.
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More on Greenspan and the financial plottings of this administration here.
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.": Franklin D. Roosevelt - (1882-1945), 32nd US President November 21, 1933 - Source: letter to Colonel E. Mandell House
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