By Allan P. Duncan
New Hope, PA
June 15, 2003 OpEdNews.com
Code Red!...Code Red!...Dick Cheney's pants are on fire and the entire White House is in danger of being totally engulfed and consumed!
Call out the National Guard! Call out Homeland Security! But PLEEEEEEASE don't notify NORAD or scramble fighter jets because they won't know what to do or how to respond!
Call FEMA and the Red Cross out to Kennebunkport too"Bush just fell off of his Segway scooter because of earthquake like rumblings epicentered in Washington DC as a result of the raging inferno in Cheney's pants!
Seriously folks, have you been following the feeble attempts this past week to shield the President and members of his administration from being held accountable for their lies and propaganda regarding Iraqi WMD's? It's been downright melodramatic I tell you.
Nicholas Kristoff from the New York Times reported yesterday (June 13th), that in late 2001, Cheney asked the CIA to look into claims that Iraq was trying to secure tons of uranium "yellow cake" from Niger. The CIA apparently launched an investigation and sent a former ambassador to Niger in late February 2002 to look into this matter. In March of 2002 the former ambassador briefed the CIA and told them that the intel was bogus and that the document that it came from was a forgery. The CIA followed up with another investigation and came to the same conclusion.
Both Kristoff and Walter Pincus from the Washington Post report that the findings were sent to the White House in March of 2002. Kristoff went as far as claiming that the info was sent to the vice presidents office and to members of the National Security Council.
Condaleeza Rice claimed on "Meet the Press" this past Sunday that the White House did not know the info was bogus until after Bush's State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003. Incredibly, Cheney claims he never heard anything about the results of the investigation that he himself asked for, until after Kristoff's column came out on May 6, 2003.
On June 5, 2003, Walter Pincus reported that Cheney and his top aide made multiple personal trips to the CIA to question analysts on Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to Al Qaeda. It's hard for me to believe that Cheney never once thought to ask about the status of the investigation he himself asked for. Did he simply forget about it? Was he distracted by more pressing issues? I certainly don't know why, but I think someone should press Cheney into answering why he never thought to follow up.
This information is important because the President of the Unites States specifically mentioned this bogus intel in his State of the Union address. His reason for mentioning it was no doubt to build a stronger case for going to war with Iraq. If someone in his administration was informed that the intel was bogus and didn't inform the President before he announced it to the world, then this clearly documents the fact that that the communication system within the White House is seriously damaged and that these flaws jeopardize our National Security and ruin our credibility as a nation.
This is not new for Bush and Cheney, however. On May 8, 2001, Bush appointed Cheney to lead a high level task force to look into US vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks and to find ways to solve the problems identified by the task force. The White House then claims that it had no idea that it could possibly be attacked by hijacked planes prior to 9-11 and yet Bush was briefed and warned by the CIA on August 6, 2001 at his ranch in Crawford, on just this type of threat by Al Qaeda.
Operations like MASCAL which took place on November 3, 2000, which was a drill to prepare for a possible plane crash into the Pentagon, Amalgam Virgo which took place on June 1-2, 2001 which on the front page of it's program displayed a photo of Osama Bin Laden surrounded by airplanes, and the planned simulated plane crash into a building exercise run by the CIA's Chantilly, Va. based National Reconnaissance Office on September 11, 2001, indicate that our government was well aware that planes could be hijacked and slammed into buildings by people like Osama Bin Laden.
The lies about Iraq's WMD's, I've found, are part of a larger pattern of lies and deception by the Bush White House that goes back it's earliest days, to Cheney's meeting with Energy Company CEO's that helped draft our national energy policy. The White House refuses to release documents about these meetings citing "Executive Privilege". What is the Bush Administration trying to hide from the American people? If everything was above board, why not release the records?
"Executive Privilege" is once again being enacted to keep the 9-11 Independent Commission from knowing what the Bush Administration knew and when it knew it in regards to 9-11. From what I understand, two bones of contention are the Saudi's ties to Al Qaeda and the records of Bush's PDB's (Presidents Daily Briefs), specifically the August 6, 2001 brief which I mentioned above.
Will the Bush Administration once again cite "Executive Privilege" if it is asked to divulge what it really knew about Iraq's WMD's? Will Tenet be forced to fall on his sword to protect Bush as has been reported in several stories the past few days? Will the WMD debacle be called another intelligence failure just as 9-11 was, even though there is ample evidence that many good people within our intelligence services were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing and were blocked from reporting the truth or swayed to fudge it a bit for political reasons?
Time will tell.
In the mean time, will someone please put out the fire in Dick Cheney's pants? I can smell the smoke all the way up here on top of my mountain in New Hope and it's a stench that I just can't tolerate anymore.
Allan Duncan is
a Social Worker who lives in New Hope, PA. This
article is copyright by Allan Duncan ADuncan282@aol.com
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