Sunday, May 14, 2006

The Real Patriots Are Calling Out the Real Traitors

Today, as he so often does, Frank Rich asks the question that is on the tip of the national tongue, Will the real traitors please stand up?
Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes.
Rich says, "The public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco" on the journalists who have exposed the incompetence of our current leadership. Bush, Cheney, William Bennett, Porter Goss and the administration's mouthpieces Faux News and the Wall Street Journal have all been pillorying 'leakers' and 'irresponsible publications' for aiding and abetting the 'enemy'.

Rich says Americans are increasingly more persuaded by the message than the messengers.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about.
This has been said before, and it's the message that richly deserves to be catapulted!

6 comments:

  1. Following your link, I see that Rich pounds on Porter Goss and his track record of polices in countervention of American national interests. Pointing out that Goss served the Bush-Cheney dictum of politics above policy, Rich demonstrates Goss's anti-American sabotage of the CIA satisfied his role as assigned by the White House. Rich's conclusion, which should be ours as well, is that whatever the Bush wrecking crew does, or whomever they appoint, should not be above suspicion, ipso facto.

    ReplyDelete
  2. With Bush's numbers sinking like few presidents before I'm starting to worry that some "October surprise" might be in the works to raise the Repubs chances in November. It's clear to me that Bush/Cheney will do anything to keep power and nothig they do will be good.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A very pregnant point you just made, B.B. When I find some time to put the synapse you just triggered in my head on paper, I'm definitely going to credit this comment!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Not sure why Frank Rich is the
    authority on who's a traitor and
    who's a patriot. I would like
    to see more substance and less
    name calling in discussion of
    topics, but I don't seem to get
    my way that often.

    "anti-American sabotage of the CIA"
    is a strong accusation. Do you have
    any specifics, or are we expected
    to accept such hyperbole as truth?

    0pinon

    ReplyDelete
  5. Muggins, since you asked about my use of "anti-American":

    Generally speaking, the White House is supposed to rely on the CIA and the State Department for intelligence abroad.

    Under Bush's watch, Cheney and Rumsfeld set out to circumvent this process so completely that it came to resemble a virtual reality circus with four features:

    ·They would construct a new intelligence agency based in the Pentagon

    ·They would bypass the usual State Department intelligence controls

    ·Cheney would go up against CIA Director Tenet and get him to cherry-pick and even alter raw intelligence reports.

    ·Finally, by the creation of a black propaganda shop, they would erase the usual divide between political and secret intelligence.

    For the first function, Rumsfeld created the Office of Special Plans (OSP), run by William Luti and headed by neocon Douglas Feith. The OSP did not just select questionable intelligence out of context.

    The same process occurred in the State Department. The neocons knew that they had to find a way around Secretary of State Powell. There, John Bolton became their Douglas Feith.

    The last part of this superimposed intelligence structure was Rumsfeld's black propaganda machine, originally titled Office of Strategic Intelligence (OSI).

    CIA chief Tenet let all this happen on his watch and called it a "slam-dunk". After Tenant got his Medal of Freedom for keeping his mouth shut, Porter Goss was assigned to purge all of the leakers who dared to whisper the truth about how Cheney and Rumsfeld stampeded the CIA like so many cats into making up the intelligence to suit the policy.

    Because the policy of invading Iraq was (a) detrimental to American national interests and (b) based upon demonstrated lies (c) deliberately conceived, I call this mistreatment of the CIA by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Goss, as anti-American.

    Question asked and answered.

    ReplyDelete
  6. One of the strategies for fighting
    the terrorists is being carried
    out in Iraq. The U.S. Army,
    Navy and Air Force cannot alone
    defeat al Qaeda. The reason
    is that al Qaeda has advanced
    asymmetrical warfare, which is
    another way of stating that
    they've improved upon guerilla
    tactics.

    The terrorists don't do their fighting on battlefields. They don't wear uniforms. They hide
    in impenetrable frontiers and
    in neighborhoods that are foreign
    to uniformed troops from western
    nations.

    We don't know exactly where they
    are, and neither do we know where
    they'll strike next. The whole
    point to savage terrorism is to
    defeat the enemy by eroding their
    will to fight.

    So, how do we fight al Qaeda?
    We do it by establishing and
    promoting democracy in the Middle
    East, and hopefully around the
    world. Because, given the choice
    between the Taliban-style
    dictatorship and the failed
    dictatorships there were in Iraq,
    or is now in Syria and Egypt,
    the common man will not want to
    get involved. Why should he
    risk his life for one dictatorship
    or another? But with democracy,
    he might see that finally a
    nation will focus itself on
    the welfare of the entire country,
    and that a man can be free,
    speak his mind, and his children
    might grow up in a country where
    the economy has a chance to
    thrive. Demaocracy offers a
    choice to the people who now
    stand by and let al Qaeda set
    up in their neighborhoods.

    That is the importance of an
    Iraqi democracy. That's why
    al Qaeda does not want Iraq
    to become a democracy.
    Democracy is a key strategy
    in fighting these terrorists.

    So, it was not traitorous to
    invade Iraq. As much as the present Administration in Wash DC
    is incompetant, it inherited a
    depleted and disfunctional CIA
    from prior Administrations. It's
    just now, with this world war
    we're in, that the awful organization of the U.S. intelligence community, along with
    the intel in other countries,
    has been such a dismal failure.
    This failure is personified by
    George Tenet of "It's a slam dunk"
    fame, who Bush should have replaced
    his first day in office. Bureacracies are difficult to manage, and the biggest bureacracies
    are the most difficult.

    ReplyDelete