Reaching Critical Mass
By SEAN HANNON

June 17, 2004

For more than two years, the Bush administration has desparately sought the one smoking gun that would make its case for war. Now the grounds of the White House are lousy with smoking guns. The only problem for the president is that none of them make his case for war, and they’re all pointing in the wrong direction.

Here is my Top Ten List of Smoking Guns:

Smoking Gun #10: The State Dept’s recent publication of false numbers to make it appear that incidents of terrorism have sharply declined. Terrorism is, in fact, on a dramatic rise and Sect’y of State Colin Powell lamely promised a correction to what he called a very big mistake and the errors that “crept in”.

Smoking Gun #9: Vice President Cheney’s bald-faced lie that his office had absolutely nothing to do with the awarding of no-bid contracts worth $18 billion to his old company Halliburton.  According to Pentagon officials and recovered memos, the VP’s chief of staff Scooter Libby and others coordinated and facilitated it. To make things worse, Halliburton now faces charges of enormous waste and fraud, and of essentially running services in Iraq like Tony Soprano’s gang getting paid to sit around a construction site.

Smoking Gun #8: Despite the vain attempts by Bush to blame the entire torture scandal on seven MPs, there is now proof that General Ricardo Sanchez authorized the use of sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, and unmuzzled dogs to traumatize detainees. The Red Cross and Amnesty International had been notifying the Army of abuses since May 2003 and were largely ignored.

Smoking Gun # 7: Sect’y of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the request of ex-CIA chief George Tenet, ordered a high-level detainee’s existence be hidden from view of the Red Cross. The hiding of this prisoner and other so-called “ghost detainees” was cited by General Taguba as “deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and against international law”.

Smoking Gun #6: A Pentagon memo requested by Rumsfeld in March 2003 declared the president to be exempt from international law regarding torture, and that those who follow his orders to torture detainees were immune from prosecution. President Bush was asked directly by a British journalist if he had sanctioned torture. Bush responded “The instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law. That ought to comfort you”. After reading the memo, it doesn’t.

Smoking Gun #5: Attorney General John Ashcroft’s contempt of Congress by refusing to release an August 2002 memo on torture on the grounds that it was his private council to the president. The memo got out through the Washington Post anyway, and it lays out the legal framework for allowing the president to torture detainees with impunity. It also narrowly defines the infliction of severe pain and cruelty as “torture” only if you meant to cause pain (???) and only if you bring about “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death”.

Smoking Gun #4: A scathing 400-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee indicts the CIA’s bogus and hyped intelligence on Iraq. The White House and the CIA are sitting on its release, feverishly rewriting sections of it for “national security reasons”.

Smoking Gun #3: The 9/11 Commission reports that they found no “collaborative relationship” between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.  Evidence to the contrary showed that Hussein rebuffed or ignored Osama bin Laden’s requests for help in the 90’s. This further highlights that Bush misled us into a preemptive war, and let the real culprits escape and refortify. 

Smoking Gun #2: An unprecedented coalition of 26 senior military generals, heads of CIA and Joint Chiefs, and U.S. ambassadors stationed around the world have banded together for one purpose: to publicly call for the defeat of President Bush in the fall election. These professionals who served loyally under Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton felt compelled to speak out on the grounds that our national security and world reputation have been seriously damaged and brought to near ruin by the current president.

And the Top #1 Smoking Gun? Michael Moore’s new documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11”. In this exposé of Bush’s run-up to the war, Moore wisely steps back and let’s most of the candid footage speak for itself. I hear that it is a sobering experience for even the most die-hard Bush supporter, and deeply patriotic.

After all is said and done, it turns out that George W. Bush is himself the smoking gun.