P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Political Asylum
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Political Asylum Publicly Debate Politics, War, Media.

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 26-06-06, 03:31 PM   #1
multi
Thanks for being with arse
 
multi's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The other side of the world
Posts: 10,343
Default NY Times Frank Rich shines light on the massive corruption of Bush Gov't

Quote:
If we had honored our grand promises to the people we were liberating, Dick Cheney's prediction that we would be viewed as liberators might have had a chance of coming true. Greater loyalty from the civilian population would have helped reduce the threat to American soldiers, who are prey to insurgents in places like Yusufiya. But what we've wrought instead is a variation on Arthur Miller's post-World War II drama, "All My Sons." Working from a true story, Miller told the tragedy of a shoddy contractor whose defectively manufactured aircraft parts led directly to the deaths of a score of Army pilots and implicitly to the death of his own son.

Back then such a scandal was a shocking anomaly. Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, the very model of big government that the current administration vilifies, never would have trusted private contractors to run the show. Somehow that unwieldy, bloated government took less time to win World War II than George W. Bush's privatized government is taking to blow this one.
link
__________________

i beat the internet
- the end boss is hard
multi is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 26-06-06, 04:43 PM   #2
multi
Thanks for being with arse
 
multi's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The other side of the world
Posts: 10,343
Roll eyes 1


Nonprofit Groups Funneled Money For Abramoff



Quote:
Newly released documents in the Jack Abramoff investigation shed light on how the lobbyist secretly routed his clients' funds through tax-exempt organizations with the acquiescence of those in charge, including prominent conservative activist Grover Norquist.
__________________

i beat the internet
- the end boss is hard
multi is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 28-06-06, 08:49 AM   #3
Sinner
--------------------
 
Sinner's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Canada
Posts: 3,379
Default

__________________
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend
Sinner is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 28-06-06, 02:59 PM   #4
multi
Thanks for being with arse
 
multi's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The other side of the world
Posts: 10,343
Thumbs up



The Republican Rap Sheet

This weekend, Democrats in Congress moved quickly to oust Louisiana Representative William Jefferson from his seat on the powerful House Way and Means Committee. Facing strong opposition from the Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi showed that Democrats would be quick to punish ethical transgressors within their ranks. The contrast with the Republican culture of corruption could not more stark.

Jefferson, who housed $90,000 in cold cash from a Nigerian bagman in his freezer, is the exception that proves the rule. Inextricably linked to an unprecedented reign of bribery, influence peddling and dirty deals in Congress, in the White House, in state houses and on K Street, the Republican Party has protected its wrongdoers by blocking investigations, denying access to records and even politicizing the definition of crime itself.

Politicizing the Definition of Crime

With the 2006 mid-term elections looming, the Democratic leadership acted swiftly against the miscreants in its ranks. West Virginia Congressman Alan Mollohan, who directed lobbyist funds to a host of associated non-profits, stepped down from the House ethics committee. On May 25th, Pelosi wrote to Jefferson demanding his immediate resignation from the Ways and Means Committee. Arthur Davis (D-AL) of the Congressional Black Caucus concurred, "If there is significant evidence you've been involved in criminal activity and you misused your office, you stand to be denied privileges in the House."

In contrast, the Republicans have resorted to semantic games to define away the very criminality of their members. This is summed up by the classic "criminalization of politics" sound bite offered by Republican leaders and their amen corner in the conservative media. (Republican silence on their misdeeds is also aided by a second, Plame scandal sound bite, citing an "ongoing investigation.")

The mobilization of the conservative commentariat around the "criminalizing politics" talking point has been complete. In just the latest example, former prosecutor and right wing water carrier Joseph DiGenova called for President Bush to pardon Scooter Libby, and branded Fitzgerald's prosecution of Libby "the epitome of the criminalization of the political process." His fellow travelers have long been singing from the same hymnal. As early as April 2005, Tom Delay attacked the "left-wing syndicate" for "the criminalization of politics." On October 3rd, Delay ally and Karl Rove PlameGate confidant Robert Novak penned a column not coincidentally called "Criminalizing Politics." An October 14th segment on Fox News, always a reliable tool of the Republican Party, featured host Stuart Varney and Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus pressing guest David Corn of The Nation on prosecutor Ronnie Earle's supposed "criminalization of politics" in regard to charges against Tom Delay.

Protecting Their Positions

Of course, the Republicans meet accusations of their own wrongdoing not just with words, but with deeds. Chief among their actions is taking steps to preserve the positions of their threatened partisans.

Former House Majority Tom Delay provides a case in point. After the House Ethics Committee admonished Delay three times in 2004 (including his 2003 use of the FAA to track down renegade Texas Democrats who left the state to avoid a quorum over the Hammer's redistricting plan), the House GOP leadership move to handcuff the ethics process. First, the GOP replaced the committee chairman Joel Hefley with the more agreeable Doc Hastings. Then, the Republican leadership team effectively shut down the ethics committee altogether, preventing it from digging into Delay's voluminous rap sheet. In previous months, the Congressional GOP revised its leadership rules, doing away with previous practice that barred an indicted member from serving as majority leader. Eventually, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert delayed the start of 2006 session of the 109th Congress in the ultimately fruitless hope that Texas courts would throw out the indictments against Delay. It is altogether fitting that Hastert's Republican majority will hold the shortest session since the "Do-Nothing" Republicans of 1948.

The conservatives' circling of the wagons around their ethically challenged extends to the states as well. In Kentucky, Governor Ernie Fletcher has been indicted on charges stemming from a Republican patronage operation he led featuring a group of advisers derisively referred to as "the Disciples." But like Tom Delay, Fletcher has refused to step down, declaring "we're not going to let these folks run us out of town" and imperiling his own Republican majority in the state. Meanwhile in Ohio, Governor Robert Taft, the grandson of "Mr. Republican," remains in office despite pleading guilty to four misdemeanor ethics violations arising from his dealings with CoinGate swindler and convicted Bush Pioneer Tom Noe.

And let's not forget the fanatical rear-guard action by the White House and its allies to protect Karl Rove at all costs. As the scandal over the outing of Valerie Plame broke in the fall of 2003, a coy President Bush concluded on October 7, 2003, "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official." Only two weeks earlier, press secretary Scott McClellan assured White House reporters that Rove had no role, "I've said that it's not true. And I have spoken with Karl Rove." (Rove himself denied any involvement to ABC News in 2003.) That, of course, turned out to be untrue.

But despite his 2000 campaign pledges to "uphold the honor and dignity of the office" and to do "not only what is legal, but what is right - not just what the lawyers allow, but what the public deserves," President Bush reversed course on ousting Rove. In June 2004, a confident Bush had answered "Yes" when asked if he would fire anyone found to have leaked Plame's name. By July 2005, the standard changed to indictment in an "on-going investigation."

Blocking Investigations

As the Delay case demonstrated, a staple in the Republican corruption playbook is avoiding, halting or misdirecting investigations of any kind. With its effective control of all three branches of government, that approach has been quite successful indeed.

The imbroglio over the 2003 passage of the President's Medicare prescription drug plan offers a compelling example. In 2004, it was revealed that Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, was threatened with dismissal by then-agency chief Thomas Scully if he answered questions from congressional Democrats about the true cost of the Medicare reform bill. (In 2003, Foster estimated the price tag at $550 billion over 10 years, and not the $400 billion as reported to Congress.) But while then HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson launched a cursory investigation, neither the Justice Department nor the Republican Congress chose to act.

This cowardice has been even more pronounced when its come to the unending series of intelligence and civil liberties scandals engulfing the Bush administration. The Bush White House, of course, initially opposed the creation of both the 9/11 Commission and the Robb-Silberman Commission on Iraq WMD before succumbing to public pressure on each. The request for a Justice Department investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame came from the CIA itself. And with the mushrooming domestic spying programs, the NSA has effectively squelched inquiries by both the FCC and the DOJ by denying the needed security clearances for reviewing key classified documents.

In these efforts, the Bush administration has been ably aided and abetted by its allies in Congress. Despite occasional threats from Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, the Republican Congress has given Bush carte blanche on the illegal domestic spying by his National Security Agency. (As of this writing, Specter is backing a bill codifying that abdication of oversight, giving discretion on FISA warrants to the White House and offering amnesty to violators.) In their defense of the administration, GOP Senators Cornyn, Sessions and Roberts have joined in a chorus of "you have no civil liberties if you are dead" in response to calls for investigations.

Kansas Republican Senator Pat Roberts has been especially effective in stonewalling inquiries into the misdeeds of the Bush administration. It was Roberts who led the successful effort by his Senate Intelligence Committee to split its investigation of the uses and misuses of pre-war Iraq intelligence into two phases. While the Committee reported back in the summer of 2004 on the failings of the U.S. intelligence community, Roberts' deferred the so-called "Phase II" report on possible political manipulation of intelligence by the White House until after the 2004 election. Unsurprisingly, that Phase II report has never been delivered, even after Minority Leader Harry Reid took the Senate to closed session in protest.

Denying Access to Records

Another hallmark of Bush-era ethics damage control is withholding access to records that might shed light on Republican wrongdoing.

The comedy of errors over the Jack Abramoff White House visits highlights the lengths to which the administration will go to avoid embarrassing disclosures. Initially, former press secretary Scott McClellan denied GOP uber-lobbyist and Bush Pioneer Abramoff had visited the White House, at least, not for anything other than holiday visits. When Abramoff himself admitted to "dozens of meetings" in an email exchange with the Washingtonian magazine (including visits to Bush with some of his tribal clients later shown in photographs), McClellan began to change course.

Ultimately, a lawsuit by Judicial Watch forced the Secret Service to release its records. Luckily for President Bush, the Secret Service earlier changed its methods for recording White House visits and as a result, showed only two Abramoff trips. As TPMMuckraker details, perhaps dozens of other Abramoff visits are detailed in yet-to-be released White House CD ROMs now in storage in the National Archives.

The Abramoff logs, of course, aren't the only embarrassing records of inappropriate White House visits still being withheld by the Bush team. 18 months after the fact, Americans still don't know how often male escort-turned-faux journalist Jeff Gannon journeyed to the White House. Moreover, we still don't know who authorized Gannon's unprecedented press credentials in the first place.

(It is worth contrasting Bush's stonewalling with the Clinton White House. The Clinton team provided detailed records of the controversial Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers, as well as information central to the Lewinsky affair.)

Size Matters

The isolated cases of Jefferson and Mollohan show that Republican corruption and the party's response to it doesn't merely differ in kind, but in degree. The sheer scale of wrongdoing by the governing Republican majority is simply unmatched politically - or historically.

In Congress, the taint of Republican scandal extends far beyond Tom Delay. Ohio Congressman Bob Ney is, after all, "Representative #1" in the Abramoff case. San Diego Republican Duke Cunningham is now serving 8 years in prison for taking 2.4 million in bribes from defense contractor MZM and its bagmen Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes.
more..
__________________

i beat the internet
- the end boss is hard
multi is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 28-06-06, 03:39 PM   #5
albed
flippin 'em off
 
albed's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: the real world
Posts: 3,231
Default

Wow, another massive copy and paste.


How can anyone think someone's an idiot when they can actually right click their mouse? I am sooo impressed! It's amazing!!
albed is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 28-06-06, 03:43 PM   #6
multi
Thanks for being with arse
 
multi's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The other side of the world
Posts: 10,343
Arrow

LOL
go suck a lemon...

heres some more


TREASON: “FIRING SQUAD” FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES?

The Right Wing has gone hog-ass wild over the New York Times’ “shocking” report that the Bush Administration is actually tracking terrorists’ money transfers. Oh my!

The fruitcakes are in flames! “Stand them in front of a firing squad or put them in prison for the rest of their lives,” says one pinhead on Fox TV.

For what? The stunning news that the government is hunting the source of al-Qaeda’s cash? “Osama! You must stop using your ATM card! Condi Rice is reading our bank statements!“

Somehow, I suspect bin Laden already assumes his checkbook is getting perused.

It is worth noting that the fanatic screeching for a “firing squad” is a guy who claims to be a former CIA agent. No one can confirm his claim of course, but this character, Wayne Simmons, has made his career blabbering away juicy intelligence secrets to sell himself as an “expert,” stuff far racier than the Times’ weak report. Well, hypocrisy never stood in the way of the Foxes in the news house.

You want to talk “treason”? OK, let’s talk treason. How about Dick Cheney telling his creepy little hitman ‘Scooter’ Libby to reveal information that led to the naming of a CIA agent? Mr. Simmons, do you have room in your firing squad schedule for the Vice-President?

And no one on Fox complained when the Times, under the by-line of Judith Miller, revealed the secret “intelligence” information that Saddam was building a bomb.

Yes, let’s talk treason. How about this: Before the 9/11 attack, George Bush’s intelligence chieftains BLOCKED the CIA’s investigation of the funding of al-Qaeda and terror.

The “Back-Off” Directive

On November 9, 2001, BBC Television Centre in London received a call from a phone booth just outside Washington. The call to our Newsnight team was part of a complex pre-arranged dance coordinated with the National Security News Service, a conduit for unhappy spooks at the CIA and FBI to unburden themselves of disturbing information and documents.

The top-level U.S. intelligence agent on the line had much to be unhappy and disturbed about: what he called a “back-off” directive.

This call to BBC came two months after the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Towers. His fellow agents, he said, were now released to hunt bad guys. That was good news. The bad news was that, before September 11, in those weeks just after George W. Bush took office, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel were told to “back off” certain targets of investigations begun by Bill Clinton.

The agent said, “There were particular investigations that were effectively killed.”

Which ones? His reply was none too comforting: Khan Labs.

On February 11, 2004, President Bush, at an emergency press briefing, expressed his shock — shock! — at having learned that Dr. A. Q. Khan of Pakistan was running a flea market in fissionable material. But, we knew that from the agent’s call — nearly three years earlier. As the intelligence insider told us, the Khan investigation died because the CIA was not allowed to follow down the money trail … to Saudi Arabia.

Apparently, the Saudis, after Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in 1991, switched their funding for an “Islamic bomb” from Iraq to Pakistan. Dr. Khan used the Saudi loot to build and test his bomb — then sell off the blueprints and bomb-fixings to North Korea and Libya. This was, one might say, a somewhat dangerous situation. But Bush’s spymasters made it a policy to “See No Saudi Evil” — so the investigation died.

What You “Ought Not to Know.”

Closing the agencies eyes to the Khan bomb was not the only spike. That same week in November 2001, unhappy FBI agents “accidentally” left an astonishing dozen-page fax on the desks of our NSNS colleagues. It was marked, “199-I — WF” and “SECRET.”

The code “199-I” means “national security matter” in FBI-speak. It was about what the FBI deemed “a suspected terrorist organization.” What made the document special — and earned the anger of the two agents who “lost” it for us — is that it indicates that the “suspected terrorist” activities were not investigated until September 13, 2001, despite a desire by agents to investigate these characters years earlier.

Who was exempt from investigation? That was on page 2 of the 199-I document. The FBI was hunting in Falls Church, Virginia, for “ABL,” Abdullah bin Laden, nephew of Osama. They were also seeking another relative, Omar bin Laden (or “Binladden” in the alternative translation of the Arabic name). But by September 13, when the restrictions on agents were removed, the bin Ladens were gone.

Why did buildings have to fall before the FBI could question the bin Ladens? Because, frustrated agents noted, the “suspected terrorist organization” was funded directly by the Saudi Royal family.


More..

__________________

i beat the internet
- the end boss is hard
multi is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 11:26 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)