Americans want inquiry into "war on terror" tactics

Our attention may be focused on the economic meltdown swirling around us, but we aren't suffering from amnesia and we're not ready to let the Bush administration off the hook. A new USA TODAY - Gallup Poll finds most of us favor investigating whether the Bush administration broke the law in its tactics in the "war on terror."

Close to two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants. Almost four in 10 favor criminal investigations and about a quarter want investigations without criminal charges. One-third said they want nothing to be done.

Even more people want action on alleged attempts by the Bush team to use the Justice Department for political purposes. Four in 10 favored a criminal probe, three in 10 an independent panel, and 25% neither.

Groups like the ACLU are pressing for inquires into whether the Bush administration violated U.S. and international bans on torture and the constitutional rights to privacy, and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers has called for a panel to gather facts and make recommendations, which could possibly lead to prosecutions.

Senator Patrick Leahy has also proposed a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate abuses, including the use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and executive overrides. According to Leahy...

Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. The best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again.

Thousands of Americans lives were lost in Iraq, along with billions of dollars and our country's moral authority. We can't turn our back on that page in history as though it never happened. We deserve answers.

Click here to sign Leahy's online petition urging Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses.

Gallup says, "At this point, it is unclear whether investigations into possible Bush-era wrongdoing will in fact take place," but when asked about Leahy's plan, President Obama said he would look at it.

Sign the petition and send the message that letting the Bush administration off the hook is wrong.


(Cross posted at Blogging for MI.)

Liberators or Liars?

Wednesday marks the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. This is what President Bush said about Iraq five years ago today:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people.

The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda.

The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.

This is what the media reported last week:

A detailed Pentagon study confirms there was no direct link between late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda network, debunking a claim President George W. Bush's administration used to justify invading Iraq.

Coming five years after the start of the war in Iraq, the study of 600,000 official Iraqi documents and thousands of hours of interrogations of former Saddam Hussein colleagues "found no smoking gun (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and Al-Qaeda," said the study, quoted in US media Thursday.

And this is what McCain and Cheney told Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki today:

...both Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Vice President Cheney vowed “that the U.S. would maintain a long-term military presence in Iraq until al-Qaida is defeated there.”

So much for "Mission Accomplished," and Bush said that on May 1, 2003.

(Cross-posted at BFM. Also check out the great pictures WK posted from the anti-war march held over the weekend by the local chapter of SDS.)

A question for Rep. Vern Ehlers

Lew Scannon wrote his representative, Vern Ehlers (R) MI, and asked him to get behind Rep. Kucinich's call for impeachment. In his letter, Lew asks Ehlers a question that deserves serious consideration.

Our political system has a series of checks and balances to prevent the types of abuses that the current administration is involved in. So I ask of you: Which is more important, the constitution and the country it protects, or the party for which you belong?
If you say the former, than I urge you to contact Rep Conyers and agree to start impeachment proceedings. Then, if there is just cause for impeachment, I ask you to vote for it, just as I would expect you to vote against it if there is no cause.
If you say the latter, then I hope you remember this missive when in the future, another president continues the arrogant abuses first conceived by the current administration, and your children, or perhaps your grandchildren ask you why our country has strayed so far from it's original intentions, that you had an oppurtunity to stop this now, but chose instead to be loyal to your party moreso than to the constitution you swore to uphold. Thank you. [emphasis added]

I hope Lew shares Ehler's response, although I'm not optimistic that Ehlers will do what's right for the country and our constitution. Can you say rubber-stamp?

Levin on Cheney: There he goes again

Yesterday, it was Lee Iaccoca blasting Bush, and today it's Sen. Carl Levin calling Cheney on his lies.

From the LA Times: Tell us another one, Mr. Vice President

TO PARAPHRASE President Reagan, there he goes again.

On Rush Limbaugh's radio program last week, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi and stated: "He went to Baghdad. He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al Qaeda operations inside Iraq…. This is Al Qaeda operating in Iraq and, as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq."

It is incredible that more than four years after the invasion, the vice president is still trying to convince the public that Saddam Hussein's regime was connected to Al Qaeda and that Zarqawi's presence in Iraq was evidence of a connection.

While the vice president doesn't say directly that there was a tie between the two, his clear purpose is to blur the line between Al Qaeda — the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks — and the Iraqi dictator in order to justify the war in Iraq.

The problem is, that's simply not supported by the facts or by our intelligence community — and everyone except the vice president acknowledges it. In September, for example, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that Hussein was "distrustful of Al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from Al Qaeda to provide material or operational support." And the CIA reported a year earlier, in October 2005, that the Iraqi regime "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates." As the Intelligence Committee report noted, the Iraqi intelligence service was actually trying to capture Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad under an alias. Is the vice president willfully ignoring what the rest of the government has concluded? Or does he have access to information he hasn't shared with us? If so, he should produce it.

The vice president has a clear, documented pattern of overstating and misstating information with regard to Iraq. He also, for instance, continued to claim that 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta may have met with an Iraqi agent in Prague — long after the intelligence community believed otherwise. Again, his obvious purpose is to link Hussein's regime with Sept. 11, even though the rest of the world has concluded that no such link exists.

The vice president has made so many outlandish statements that the country barely raised an eyebrow at his false statement last week. The public has stopped believing the words of a man who promised, before we invaded Iraq, that we would be "greeted as liberators" and reassured us nearly two years ago that the insurgency was in its "last throes."

But his comments continue to erode our credibility with the international community, which has already been severely damaged by our rush to war with Iraq with little international support. If, in the months ahead, we face a crisis over Iran's weapons programs and need to rally the international community, we may find that the world has little interest in trusting an administration that misstates facts.

By all accounts, Dick Cheney is one of the most powerful vice presidents in our history, if you define power as influence over policy. We need to ask ourselves: What does it mean for our country when the vice president's words lack credibility, but he still wields great power?

It means too many voters are taking at face value the ideas they're being fed instead of reading, investigating and thinking for themselves. Thankfully, Levin doesn't fall in line that easily. He voted against the war from the start (against popular opinion) and played a key role in determining that the connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda was intentionally misleading.