The canaries are beginning to sing – must sound like a discordant cacophany to Bush – Cheney. Some with their backs to the wall, reputation in tatters and possible jail term in sight and some just angry erstwhile friends and officials of the Bush Administration are spilling their guts. Will Bush’s legendary luck run out at last? I am not sure. With all three branches of government in GOP hands, he and Cheney might go unscathed inspite of gross incompetence and obscene transgressions. The singers:
Scooter Libby who has been indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzerald for leaking classified information about Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA operative whose husband Joseph Wilson rubbed the administration the wrong way by questioning their case for the Iraq war. Libby’s defense apparently will be that he was following orders…. A former top aide (Libby) to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to reporters as part of the Bush administration’s defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.
Michael D. Brown (Brownie), the embattled former chief of FEMA has testified before congress that he was railroaded, scapegoated and abandoned by the Bush White House after Katrina. According to Brown, the newly formed Homeland Security Department to which FEMA was reassigned, was chaotic and its head Michael Chertoff was incompetent. One interesting fact to emerge from the hearings is a statement by Brown that directly contradicts the White House’s claim that the breach in the levees in New Orleans came as a surprise to them. Brown asserted that on the night of the breach, he had contacted the presidential ranch in Crawford where Bush was vacationing when Katrina struck. … Brown said not only did he inform the White House, but he also informed top Homeland Security officials about the situation on the same day. His comments contradicted previous statements by agency officials, who said they did not know the levees had been breached until the following day. "For them to claim that we didn’t have awareness of it is just baloney," Brown said.
Ex-CIA Official Paul R. Pillar, the former coordinator of US intelligence on the Middle East has written an article for the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign affairs in which he exposes the intelligence scam that was run out of Cheney’s office in preparation for the war in Iraq. Pillar’s criticism is the most withering since Richard Clarke blew the whistle on the White House’s singular obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussain. This is also the first time that an intelligence official of such seniority has criticized the Bush administration so publicly. …. "(The) administration "went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."… "It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.
Jack Abramoff, the uber lobbyist who stole shamelessly from the Indian tribes to give to GOP congressmen, is now the biggest pariah in Washington DC – especially for those who knew him well. George Bush and his spokesperson have denied that Abramoff was anything but one among the hundreds of visitors who have their photo taken with the president. Abramoff claims a little more intimacy than that… The guy saw me in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids," Abramoff wrote in an email to Kim Eisler, national editor for the Washingtonian magazine.
"Perhaps he has forgotten everything, who knows?" Abramoff added that Mr Bush also once invited him to his Texas ranch.
All this is music to my ears. I hope Colin Powel and officials at the Justice Department and the NSA are taking voice lessons.
Accidental Blogger 