Red State Renegade

PISSES ME OFF!

In the aftermath of the bridge collapse, CNN spent a half hour blathering today about our crumbling architecture and the money required to fix it.

There are 70,000 more bridges in our country that have been rated structurally deficient, and engineers estimate that fixing these bridges will take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.

$188 billion just for bridges!

N.Y. City has exploding 100-year old steam pipes. The New Orleans levees will never be rebuilt to the level of promises made. Roadways and interstates are starting to fall apart. And forget about our water systems.

What pisses me off is that the answer is plain as day: The money’s all going to Iraq! Well not to the iraqis per se…just the contractors, arms dealers, oil companies, and friends of Dick Cheney’s that have profited obscenely from our ‘mistake’ in the Middle East.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers:

“It will cost $9.4 billion a year for 20 years to eliminate all bridge deficiencies. Long-term underinvestment is compounded by the lack of a Federal transportation program”

Well we are spending $10 billion A MONTH in Iraq. That’s such an unreal number it means nothing to us anymore. But it equates to about $200,000 per minute!

The National Priorities Project has more information on what could be done with this money in the areas of housing, education, health, and college scholarships.

Perhaps the Bushies are determined to enrich themselves even at the cost of making us a third-world country?

While the administration and the media keep scapegoating Iran and Syria for the mayhem in Iraq:

Some media outlets report that the insurgency is largely made up of Iraqis, and that foreign fighters are but a small minority of the EDTWAUHIWDFTT.** (In effect, the ‘evil-doers’ are simply Iraqis who are fighting the occupation of their land by a hostile foreign power).

The LA Times reports in a sobering article that the overwhelming majority of the inurgensts come not from Syria or Iran but from our “Ally,” Saudi Arabia. (Coincidentally, 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers also came from Saudi Arabia).

And finally, our own government released a study this week which basically said that we cannot account for 190,000 guns issued to Iraq security forces in the last two years (not to mention hundreds of thousands of helmets and body armor pieces).

So tell me again who is arming the insurgents?

**EDTWAUHIWDFTT: ‘Evil-Doers-That-Will-Attack-Us-Here-If-We-Don’t-Fight-Them-There’

Iraqi legislators pass a law designed to (possibly) end the occupation of their country

How does this go unreported?

What kind of fucking proof is needed that this occupation is not desired (as claimed) by the Iraqis!

Long story short: A bill passed this week by the Iraqi parliament requires their government to seek parliamentary permission for asking the United Nations to extend the mandate of U.S.-led forces in Iraq when the existing request expires in December.

It reflects growing disenchantment with the U.S.-backed government, and particularly Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. How odd that the democrats are too paralyzed with fear to get us out, yet a contentious, 2 year old parliament may come to the rescue.

It may not be making ANY news now, but let’s see what happens in December…

YIKES…How do these people live with themselves now?

As far as I am concerned, it’s been well proven from many angles that the Iraq war was a wet dream of the Boy King, who was set on attacking Iraq and simply needed to find a way to justify it.

The icing on the cake was the Downing Street documents, a series of memos prepared in 2002 by the British Intelligence service in which they admit that the claim that Iraq had links with al Qaeda was ‘frankly unconvincing,’ but since George was determined to invade Iraq, ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

Old news. Yet the evidence continues to come out.

A very important, yet little-noted book appeared on the scene about a month ago, keying on the intelligence leading up to the ‘Yellowcake Uranium’ claims in the State of the Union speech that were later debunked - the same claims that led to the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA Agent.

The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq covers Alan Foley, who, as the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), was a front-and-center cheerleader for the Iraq war.

WINPAC led the CIA’s analysis of Iraq’s purported WMD, so Foley himself was at the center of the effort to drum up support for the dubious war.

The book, written by award winning authors Peter Eiser and Knut Royce, reports:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Other books back up this assertion. In A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, James Bamford reports on a high up CIA case officer who spent years running agents overseas. He had been reassigned to the unit charged with finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but told Bamford that no one in his group ever found any indications of WMD in Iraq.

Bamford continues:

Nevertheless, there was a great deal of pressure to find a reason to go to war with Iraq. And the pressure was not just subtle; it was blatant. At one point in January 2003, the person’s boss called a meeting and gave them their marching orders. “And he said, ‘You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so’… He said it at the weekly office meeting. And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, would be outraged’…He said it to about fifty people. And it’s funny because everyone still talks about that — ‘Remember when [he] said that.’”

In Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, Lindsay Moran comes out like a female Jack Bauer in a real life “24” series.

She writes:

During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States. Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I’d solicited about the connection between Al-Qa’ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said, “They both have the letter q?” And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, “Let’s face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it.”

A work in progress - more reasons why Bush should be impeached. Even though I am sticking to a few key points, it’s hard to write this and keep it all timely.

I get anxious wondering if the Bush house of cards will fall on it’s own before I get to finish. Luckily there’s only one more part (I hope)…Then I can send it, thus ensuring another dispatch of the black helicopters:

CONTINUED FROM PART 2, posted May 20:

…Equally questionable is the President’s use of signing statements to openly disregard legislation passed by Congress.

Normally, an administration having serious concerns about a bill can use the presidential veto to express dissatisfaction, a tool allowing congress to re-examine or rewrite the legislation.

But until recently this president has never vetoed a bill, and has instead used such signing statements to effectively exercise a line item veto, a tool deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1988.

The Court declared that the line item veto violates the Constitution’s Presentment Clause, which says that after a bill has passed both Houses, but “before it becomes a Law,” it must be presented to the President, who “shall sign it” if he approves it, but “return it” (veto the bill in its entirety), if he does not.

While other presidents have issued an occassional signing statement, George Bush has issued nearly 800 such statements. Worse, while predecessors used such statements largely as a means of interpreting legal ambiguities or clarifying a law’s purpose or significance, Bush’s statements blatantly assert that he has the right or the intention to disregard or ignore numerous sections of the bills because of powers accorded to him by the Constitution.

Examples of laws quietly nullified in this manner include the much-debated ban on torturing detainees, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, restrictions against using US troops in combat against rebels in Colombia, and numerous requirements to provide information to Congress.

An American Bar Association task force of legal experts (including a former FBI director, a former federal appeals court chief judge, and former Republican officials) resolved that Bush should stop issuing signing statements to bypass the law, and declared that:

“The use, frequency, and nature of the President’s signing statements demonstrates a ‘radically expansive view’ of executive power which ‘amounts to a claim that he is impervious to the laws that Congress enacts’ and represents a serious assault on the constitutional system of checks and balances.”

One panel member (a formal federal prosecutor) declared that these practices, if continued, “threaten to throw this country into a constitutional crisis.”

Will they ever learn?