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Saturday, March 31st 2007
Volume 6, No. 6
6 Articles
1. "Impeachment: I'm asking you. Do You Think It's Time?
2. Closing the Gap Between Torturer and Victim
3. Why Do Straights Hate Gays?
4. Bush's Shadow Army (Part 1 of 2 Parts)
5. US Emissions 'Breach Human Rights'
1. "IMPEACHMENT: I'M ASKING YOU. DO YOU THINK IT'S TIME?"
BY
DENNIS KUCINICH
This past week in the Congress of the United States, I noted that the administration has threatened aggressive war against Iran. This is a violation of the UN charter. Charters are treaties. Article 6 of the Constitution of the United States says that treaties are the law of our land, the supreme law of our land. It's illegal to threaten aggressive war against another nation.
My fellow Americans. We are in an interesting condition in this country, where we are told to take impeachment off the table and keep on the table a U.S. military attack against Iran.
This really calls for a new thinking. It calls for us to reconsider very deeply the moment that we're in -- where our Constitution is being trashed, where international law is being violated, where our hopes and dreams for the education of our children, for the health of our people, for housing, for our veterans are being set aside as we go deeper and deeper into war.
We need a whole discussion in America. And with your help, we're about to have one.
This past week in the Congress of the United States, I noted that the administration has threatened aggressive war against Iran. This is a violation of the UN charter. Charters are treaties. Article 6 of the Constitution of the United States says that treaties are the law of our land, the supreme law of our land. It's illegal to threaten aggressive war against another nation.
Iran has no ability to attack us, and they do not have the intention to attack the United States.
We are at a moment in human history where we have to make a decision whether we are going to go deeper into war or whether we are going to take a stand on behalf of peace. I determined a long time ago to take that stand on behalf of peace. And I want to enlist you and enroll you in taking that same stand. We cannot let this administration go any deeper into this journey, into destroying democratic governance, trashing our Constitution, forgetting the very purpose of this nation.
America was never meant to be a nation forever on the warpath. It was meant to be a nation which also had the capacity to “Promote the General Welfare.” We need to reevaluate the direction of this administration by looking at its conduct in office, by determining whether it has faithfully followed the laws of our nation. I'm prepared to start that process. I began this week with a speech on the floor of the House, which warned the administration that its actions toward Iran already constitute a case to ask the question about impeachment.
So I'm asking you, what do you think? Do you think it's time?
2. CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN TORTURER AND VICTIM
BY
JOHN PILGER
In Andrew Cockburn’s new book, Rumsfeld, the gap between rampant power and its faraway victims is closed. Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence until last year and a designer of the Iraq bloodbath, is revealed as personally directing from his office in the Pentagon the torture of fellow human beings, exploiting “individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress” and use of “a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation”. Cockburn’s documented evidence shows that other Bush Mafiosi, such as Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, “had already agreed that Rumsfeld should approve all but the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without restriction”.
In Washington, I asked Ray McGovern, formerly a senior CIA officer, what he made of Norman Mailer’s remark that America had entered a pre-fascist state. “I hope he’s right,” he replied, “because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode. When you see who is controlling the means of production here, when you see who is controlling the newspapers and periodicals, and the TV stations, from which most Americans take their news, and when you see how the so-called war on terror is being conducted, you begin to understand where we are headed ... It’s quite something that the nuclear threat today should be seen first and foremost as coming from the United States of America and Great Britain.”
McGovern was the author of the president’s daily CIA intelligence brief. I interviewed him more than three years ago, and his prescient words are as striking today as Cockburn’s revelation of Rumsfeld’s secret life is illuminating. His description of fascism within a nominally free society recalls George Orwell’s warning that totalitarianism does not require a totalitarian state.
The lies that have caused this extremely dangerous time are understood and rejected by the majority of humanity. This was illustrated vividly on 15-16 February 2003 when some 30 million people took to the streets of cities around the world, including the greatest demonstration in British history. It was illustrated again the other day in Latin America, which George W Bush on tour sought to reclaim for America’s lost “backyard”. “The distinguished visitor,” noted one commentator in Caracas, “was received with fear and loathing.”
There are many connections in Latin America to the suffering in the Middle East. The crushing of popular, reformist governments by the US and the setting up of torture regimes, from Guatemala to Chile, have echoes from Iran to Afghanistan. The current attacks on the Chávez government in Venezuela by the media, which Ray McGovern describes as being “domesticated by their wish to serve”, are essential in disclaiming the right of the poor to find another way.
Elected last December with a record landslide of votes cast by three-quarters of the eligible population – his 11th major election victory – Hugo Chávez expresses the kind of genuine exuberant democracy long ago abandoned in Britain, where the political class offers instead the arthritic pirouetting of Tony Blair, a criminal, and treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of imperial adventures fought by 18-year-old soldiers who, on their return home, are so ill treated that there is no one to change their colostomy bag.
Chávez, having all but got rid of the deadly IMF from Latin America, dares to use the wealth from Venezuela’s oil to unite the Latin peoples and to expel a foreign economic system that calls itself liberal and is the source of historic suffering. He is supported by governments and by millions across South America from whom he derives his mandate.
You would not know this on either side of the Atlantic unless you studied carefully. The propaganda that converts a lively, open democracy to an “authoritarian” dictatorship is written on the rusted crosses of Salvador Allende’s comrades, of whom the same was said. It is disseminated by the embittered effete whose liberal hero was Blair, until he made an embarrassing mess, and who now claim the respectability of “the left” in order to disguise their mentoring by the likes of Wolfowitz, their promotion of Dick Cheney’s ludicrous “world Islamic empire” and, above all, their passion for wars whose spilt blood is never theirs.
3. WHY DO STRAIGHTS HATE GAYS?
(An Aging 72-year-old Gay Man Isn't Hopeful About The Future.)
BY
LARRY KRAMER
Dear Straight People,
Why do you hate gay people so much?
Gays are hated. Prove me wrong. Your top general just called us immoral. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is in charge of an estimated 65,000 gay and lesbian troops, some fighting for our country in Iraq. A right-wing political commentator, Ann Coulter, gets away with calling a straight presidential candidate a faggot. Even Garrison Keillor, of all people, is making really tacky jokes about gay parents in his column. This, I guess, does not qualify as hate except that it is so distasteful and dumb, often a first step on the way to hate. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama tried to duck the questions that Pace's bigotry raised, confirming what gay people know: that there is not one candidate running for public office anywhere who dares to come right out, unequivocally, and say decent, supportive things about us.
Gays should not vote for any of them. There is not a candidate or major public figure who would not sell gays down the river. We have seen this time after time, even from supposedly progressive politicians such as President Clinton with his "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military and his support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act. Of course, it's possible that being shunned by gays will make politicians more popular, but at least we will have our self-respect. To vote for them is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us.
Don't any of you wonder why heterosexuals treat gays so brutally year after year after year, as your people take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood? Why, even as we die you don't leave us alone. What we can leave our surviving lovers is taxed far more punitively than what you leave your (legal) surviving spouses. Why do you do this? My lover will be unable to afford to live in the house we have made for each other over our lifetime together. This does not happen to you. Taxation without representation is what led to the Revolutionary War. Gay people have paid all the taxes you have. But you have equality, and we don't.
And there's no sign that this situation will change anytime soon. President Bush will leave a legacy of hate for us that will take many decades to cleanse. He has packed virtually every court and every civil service position in the land with people who don't like us. So, even with the most tolerant of new presidents, gays will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate. Courts rule against gays with hateful regularity. And of course the Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality, and in the end, it is from the Supreme Court that such equality must come. If all of this is not hate, I do not know what hate is.
Our feeble gay movement confines most of its demands to marriage. But political candidates are not talking about — and we are not demanding that they talk about — equality. My lover and I don't want to get married just yet, but we sure want to be equal.
You must know that gays get beaten up all the time, all over the world. If someone beats you up because of who you are — your race or ethnic origin — that is considered a hate crime. But in most states, gays are not included in hate crime measures, and Congress has refused to include us in a federal act.
Homosexuality is a punishable crime in a zillion countries, as is any activism on behalf of it. Punishable means prison. Punishable means death. The U.S. government refused our requests that it protest after gay teenagers were hanged in Iran, but it protests many other foreign cruelties. Who cares if a faggot dies? Parts of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. are joining with the Nigerian archbishop, who believes gays should be put in prison. Episcopalians! Whoever thought we'd have to worry about Episcopalians?
Well, whoever thought we'd have to worry about Florida? A young gay man was just killed in Florida because of his sexual orientation. I get reports of gays slain in our country every week. Few of them make news. Fewer are prosecuted. Do you consider it acceptable that 20,000 Christian youths make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls? This is not free speech. This is another version of hate. It is all one world of gay-hate. It always was.
Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated. Don't those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce the hate? Why is it socially acceptable to joke about "girlie men" or to discriminate against us legally with "constitutional" amendments banning gay marriage? Because we cannot marry, we can pass on only a fraction of our estates, we do not have equal parenting rights and we cannot live with a foreigner we love who does not have government permission to stay in this country. These are the equal protections that the Bill of Rights proclaims for all?
Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love? I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don't see much change coming.
I think your hate is evil.
What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim.
And even if your objections to gays are religious, why do you have to legislate them so hatefully? Make no mistake: Forbidding gay people to love or marry is based on hate, pure and simple.
You may say you don't hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what's the difference? Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you.
4. BUSH'S SHADOW ARMY (Part 1 of 2 parts)
BY
JEREMY SCAHILL
On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.
"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy."
Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."
The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America's global force posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare--the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors--constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors--conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission and they're falling all over each other." Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey, "Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company's success represents the realization of the life's work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law--entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military's court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince--the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince's private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training." In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the "war on terror" that the company's glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. "I've been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security," Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly shortly after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the hook now."
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world's largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day--at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division. Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.
Its largest obtainable government contract is with the State Department, for providing security to US diplomats and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as other diplomats and occupation offices. Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. According to the latest government contract records, since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there. In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan's regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training the south's security forces soon.
Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during much of the "war on terror"--something he stood accused of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure, powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had "quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.
Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja. A mob then burned the bodies and dragged them through the streets, stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates. In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned. US forces laid siege to Falluja days later, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands, inflaming the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day.
5. US EMISSIONS 'BREACH HUMAN RIGHTS'
BY
AUTHORS UNKNOWN
Continued melting of ice formations threatens local communities while raising global sea levels
Northern Canadians believe that carbon emissions from the US have contributed so much to climate change symptoms that their human rights have been violated.
The case was made Thursday by the Inuit community before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In their petition, the Inuit community asked the 34-nation body's assistance "in obtaining relief" from the impact of climate change.
The petition specifically refers to the United States as the country most responsible for climate change.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit activist, said climate change is "destroying the right [of the Inuit] to life, health property and means of subsistence".
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"States that do not recognise these impacts and take action violate our human rights," she said.
She said ice formations are much more likely to detach from land as temperatures rise, taking unsuspecting Inuit hunters out to sea.
The presentation of the Inuit petition comes as more than 60 nations launch the broadest scientific investigation yet of the Arctic and Antarctic to chart polar regions.
About 50,000 people will be involved in 228 monitoring projects, such as studying marine life in the Antarctic, mapping how winds carry pollutants to the Arctic or examining the health of people, polar bears and penguins.
Overlooked
Many scientists say that warming of the Arctic, where indigenous hunting cultures and animals are under threat from receding ice, may be a portent of damaging shifts elsewhere on the planet linked to climate change.
Continued melting of ice sheets on Greenland or Antarctica in the next few decades risks raising world sea levels, threatening cities from Tokyo to New York and low-lying coral atolls in the Pacific.
"These regions are highly vulnerable to rising temperatures," Michel Jarraud, head of the UN's World Meteorological Organisation, said in a statement.
He said more monitoring stations were needed in polar regions.
Rising temperatures
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Arctic temperatures are rising fast partly because water or ground, once exposed, soak up far more heat from the sun than ice or snow.
Antarctica is staying cooler, with its far bigger volume of ice acting as a deep freeze.
The world's top climate scientists said in a UN report last month that "average Arctic temperatures increased at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years".
They projected that sea levels could rise by 18 to 59cm by 2100, by when Arctic sea ice may disappear in summers.
Nordic nations with Arctic territories fear industries such as tourism are vulnerable to climate change.
BY
CYNTHIA TUCKER
It's too bad I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is likely to be the only Bush-Cheney confidant prosecuted for an aversion to the truth. There are plenty of unindicted liars walking the halls of the Bush White House.
Not a week goes by without a Bush administration spokesperson uttering a sentence or two that stretches credibility to the breaking point. Clearly, though, the most outrageous fabrications and most scurrilous falsehoods of the past six years were told in defense of the decision to invade Iraq.
Mr. Libby's defenders have pointed out, ad nauseam, that he was not charged with outing former CIA agent Valerie Plame - the incident that led to Mr. Libby's indictment. He was convicted on four counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice.
Still, his trial exposed the shameless scheming and skulduggery by which a debased administration sought one simple end: hiding the truth about the run-up to the war in Iraq. They were willing to do whatever it took to discredit Ms. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, because he called them on 16 words in a presidential speech. As Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Mr. Libby was a central player in the smear campaign.
You may recall those 16 words, uttered by President Bush during the State of the Union address Jan. 28, 2003: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In October 2002, the CIA had warned Stephen Hadley, then Condoleezza Rice's assistant at the National Security Council, against including those words in a presidential speech because the claim looked shaky.
Bush administration apologists have tried mightily to make the case that the White House made an honest mistake about Mr. Hussein's capabilities with weapons of mass destruction. They point out that most intelligence experts, here and abroad, believed that Iraq had amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. That may be true. But it's also beside the point.
The Bush team knew they never could have sold American voters on an invasion of Iraq just because Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons. So they decided to distort and dissemble. The fabrications used to justify the invasion were those linking Iraq to al-Qaida, those claiming Mr. Hussein had unmanned drones that could be used to attack American cities, and those declaring that Mr. Hussein was "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons," as Mr. Cheney put it.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accepted the assignment of giving an all-important speech at the United Nations in February 2003. Mr. Bush chose him because the president knew Mr. Powell had more credibility than the rest of them. Mr. Powell knew he was being used. He also knew better than to believe the text of his speech.
In February 2001, Mr. Powell told reporters at a press conference in Cairo that sanctions had worked to contain Mr. Hussein. Still, Mr. Powell dutifully followed orders and laid out a sham case against Mr. Hussein, replete with liters of anthrax, tons of chemical agents and the nonsense about unmanned drones being used against American cities. He also repeated the Bush administration's favorite tall tale: a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida.
By the time of the invasion, most Americans supported the war. Of course, most Americans believed Mr. Hussein had been actively involved in 9/11 - which is exactly what Mr. Bush had intended.
Among a dwindling group of voters, Mr. Bush is still revered as an upright and moral man, still credited with having the values and virtues that any decent person should respect. But morality encompasses more than sexual fidelity, more than sobriety after years of reckless drinking. It also encompasses honor, integrity and candor - especially in an enterprise such as war.
Mr. Bush took the nation to war on a web of lies, sacrificing the lives of men and women who took him at his word. There is precious little honor or integrity in that.
