The Smoking Gun

For quite some time, many of us in the United States have proclaimed that George Bush lied through his teeth in justifying the war in Iraq. And now there’s proof. As BBC reporter Greg Palast noted in an op-ed yesterday, a top-level government memo has been leaked which shows that this administration fixed the evidence for war. Writes Palast of the memo: The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This is the smoking gun. George W. Bush is, under federal law, guilty of racketeering. He has committed both a felony and an impeachable offense. He deserves to both lose his presidency and to rot in a federal prison cell. But what will happen to our president? Not a damn thing. Nor will you see America’s so-called liberal media reporting about this. Oh, the New York Times reported on the evidence. But it was buried in a story about this week’s British elections. In the UK, this leaked memo was front page news. Writes Palast: Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print." My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a story for "over there." The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else. Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look. My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do. Indeed.