Watergate II : Margolis : Neocons under attack

2005-11-22

Richard Moore

    The FBI's Libby investigation could produce a blizzard of
    embarrassing evidence of how the White House's necon
    Praetorian Guard engineered the US into war. So bad is the
    mood in Washington, a member of CIA's founding families
    calls the neocons 'fifth columnists.'

    Meanwhile, the FBI, intensifying its war against the
    neocons, is investigating two senior officials of the
    Israel lobby, one of Washington's most sacred cows, and a
    necon Pentagon analyst for passing national security
    secrets to Israel. Washington neocons are making frantic
    efforts to suppress these investigations and depict them
    as minor mischance rather than the beginning of a major
    spy scandal.


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http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2005/11/americans_are_r.php


November 14, 2005

AMERICANS ARE RUNNING OUT OF PATIENCE WITH THEIR 'WAR
PRESIDENT'

By Eric Margolis

    Gen Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to Bush's
    father, accused Bush Jr of being 'wrapped around the
    little finger' of Israel's PM Ariel Sharon.

[Award winning author, columnist, and broadcaster Eric S.
Margolis has covered 14 wars.]


WASHINGTON - Who ever advised President George Bush to
escape the storm of criticism he faces over Hurricane
Katrina, Iraq, and the Libby CIA case by flying to3
Argentina for a free trade summit should be sent in chains
to Guantanamo.

Bush's venture was an embarrassing diplomatic failure and
the most humiliating fiasco faced by a US leader in Latin
America since Vice President Richard Nixon got mobbed in
1958. Bush was left looking isolated and confused, while
his nemesis, Venezuela's boisterous merengue-marxist
leader, Hugo Chavez, rallied Latinos to his side and
gleefully mocked the US president.

Now, Bush has returned to Washington rent by factional
warfare, growing outrage over Bush-Cheney's defense of
torture, and new polls showing a majority of Americans
believe the president deceived the US into war.

The long simmering conflict between America's national
security establishment and neoconservative extremists
burst into public with the criminal indictment of VP Dick
Cheney's powerful neocon chief of staff, Lewis Libby, for
perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame
CIA case.

The FBI's Libby investigation could produce a blizzard of
embarrassing evidence of how the White House's necon
Praetorian Guard engineered the US into war. So bad is the
mood in Washington, a member of CIA's founding families
calls the neocons 'fifth columnists.'

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin
Powell's chief of staff for 16 years, publicly charged a
'cabal' of neocons had 'hijacked' US foreign policy and
had driven the nation into a trumped up war - what this
column has said since 2001. Wilkerson branded the Bush
Administration dangerously incompetent,

The 'cabal,' claimed Wilkerson, included Cheney, Defense
Secretary Don Rumsfeld, and former Pentagon desk warrior
neocons Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle.
These figures are the front men for a web of neocon
lobbyists, think tanks, institutes and media outlets in
Washington.

Gen. William Odom, former chief of the ultra secret
National Security Agency, and a leading military thinker,
called Bush's Iraq adventure 'the biggest disaster in the
history of the US.'

Even more shockingly, Republican elder statesman, Gen
Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to Bush's
father, accused Bush Jr of being 'wrapped around the
little finger' of Israel's PM Ariel Sharon.

Scowcroft has finally said aloud what no one in official
Washington or the media dared to utter. His accusation
helps explain much about the Bush Administration's foreign
policies and why they seem so often to damage rather than
promote US interests.

While I was recently in London, leaked cabinet documents
shockingly revealed that shortly before Bush invaded Iraq,
he actually told PM Tony Blair he 'wanted to go beyond
Iraq' by occupying Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This is the
first time we have concrete evidence that two key US
allies were in the White House's crosshairs.

Meanwhile, the FBI, intensifying its war against the
neocons, is investigating two senior officials of the
Israel lobby, one of Washington's most sacred cows, and a
necon Pentagon analyst for passing national security
secrets to Israel. Washington neocons are making frantic
efforts to suppress these investigations and depict them
as minor mischance rather than the beginning of a major
spy scandal.

CIA is deeply split between professional officers furious
national intelligence was corrupted by Cheney and his
neocons to sell the Iraq war, and a minority eager to tell
the White House whatever it desires. This column has
reported for a decade how patriotic CIA officers were
being demoted or fired for daring to oppose the lies being
sold by pro-war neocons.

Moreover, Bush and Cheney now face a Republican and
Pentagon revolt over their disgraceful defense of torture,
and possible trouble from the Supreme Court.

'We do not torture,' Bush insisted from Panama, which his
father invaded in 1989. Of course not, Mr President. You
call it 'forceful interrogation.'

Meaning: being kidnapped, drugged, stripped naked, thrown
into a refrigerated, lightless underground cell, starved,
deprived of sleep (a favorite KGB technique) and sensory
contact, covered with urine and excrement, severely beaten
, anally raped, subjected to mock executions, given
hideously painful electrical shocks, and strapped onto a
special board and immersed in water until confessing or
drowning.

This is what suspects are enduring in America's secret,
outsourced prisons around the world. Abu Ghraib's horrors
were only a foretaste. Adding to the sense of moral
disgrace that hangs over Bible-Belt Republicans, they are
now trying to launch their own criminal investigation of
who leaked reports of secret US prisons in Eastern Europe
most likely Romania, Poland and Bulgaria - instead of
demanding they be shut down at once.

Sen. John McCain, an American war hero, is leading efforts
in Congress to ban torture and compel observance of the
Geneva Conventions which form part of existing American
law.

When I was a US GI, we were taught the Conventions were
sacred. They protected all at war, as CIA's renowned
former chief in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden, so brilliantly
observed in a recent article.

But those little Torquemadas of the modern Inquisition,
Bush and Cheney, who both dodged regular military service
in wartime, claim the Geneva Conventions are bunk.

Bush actually threatened to veto McCain's bill. Cheney
keeps advocating torture. Even KGB would have been
embarrassed. Americans will one day look back on this
period with the same revulsion and shame as they do on
McCarthy's era.
-- 

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