It appears that the stream of "sternly worded letters" directed at Executive from Legislature is no longer enough for some people.


Is the Independent Counsel going to return? Democrats, played for fools in the aftermath of the Clinton impeachment, seem to be waking up to a dazed recognition that the sternly worded letter is not going to force an Executive Branch official  answer to a Congressional subpoena; and that a more potent instrument may be needed, the very one Democrats imprudently allowed to lapse a decade ago, as Rep. Jerrold Nadler confided to Glenn Greenwald on Wednesday:

GG: A hearing today. Okay, last question, because I know you're very pressed for time, which is this: when I talked to Congressman Holt a few weeks ago, he said that he would favor the creation of an independent commission, like the 9/11 Commission endowed with real subpoena power to investigate the anthrax case, and subject all of the FBI's investigation--

JN: I would favor that too, but their subpoena power would be no more enforceable than our subpoena power. I mean, if the administration chooses to procrastinate. I think there ought to be an independent commission. I think to explore the issue, we're going to have to re-establish some form of the old special prosecutor statute, that went out after Ken Starr, because you can't let an administration control the prosecutions.

I replied to a poster who had written about Obama's possible support for preemptive strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, and the author of the post criticized my use of the word "obsession" to describe our own, and Israel's, fear of Iranian nukes.
Well, let's consider some items from reputable sources I have stumbled across today:

<snip>

In May 2003, with pressure for regime change intensifying within the US, Iran made efforts to negotiate a peaceful resolution with the United States. According to Lawrence Wilkerson, then-Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, these efforts were sabotaged by Vice President Cheney.

"The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran," Wilkerson said.

The US was already looking increasingly to rogue methodology, including support for the Iranian terrorist group MEK. Before the US invasion, MEK forces within Iraq had supported Saddam Hussein in exchange for safe harbor. Despite this, when they were captured by the US military, they were disarmed of only their major weapons and are allowed to keep their smaller arms. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld hoped to use them as a special ops team in Iran, while then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and State Department officials argued against it. By 2005, the MEK would begin training with US forces in Iraq and carrying out bombings and assassinations in Iran, although it is unclear if the bombings were in any way approved by the US military.

<snip>
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Iran_The_Road_to_Confrontation_0123.html

MEK is a terrorist organization (it is on the State Dept. list). I find that quite damning for us, since it reveals that the Bush Doctrine, which gave Sarah Palin such trouble,  would in fact justify an attack on ourselves, by ourselves. Better to scrap it, I think. And with it, the policy that would justify preemptive attacks. (And we would have to be complicit in any Israeli preemptive attack.)

More:

<snip>

 Nazila Fathi at the NYT again today attributed to Ahmadinejad the phrase "wipe Israel off the face of the map." He didn't say it, and spoke of the regime. He quoted Khomeini saying, "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." (Een rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az safhih-i ruzgar mahv shavad; the verb construction mahv shodan is intransitive). (Khomeini had said 'vanish from the arena of time.') He has explained that he meant that the Zionist regime would collapse just as the Soviet one did. He didn't threaten to wipe anything off anything.

Fathi and her editors know all this.

Fathi is either a liar or was forced into this falsification by an editor who is a liar. [This issue of liars constantly arises when examining any subject matter that Dick Cheney has gotten his paws on, and the charges have proved to be all too credible.]


<snip>
http://juancole.com/

I am not multilinguial, so I have to defer to experts here. I find Cole a reputable source, but I would love to hear alternate takes on this by those with the requisite knowledge.

And my final thought:

Has Cheney trained his daughter's, or any other, black ops program on Israel itself, to feed its fears and make it more amenable to his purposes?

Earlier this week I wrote:

"I wonder what it says of what our Government has come to, that I find that it is easier to believe that it is led by those not mentally competent, than by criminals of this scale."

It was in response to the Washington Post's running an excerpt from "Angler," by Barton Gellman, chronicling perhaps the most egregious lie in the history of the Republic- and the sad thing is that I do not believe that I am abusing the language when I describe it that way. The only abuse might be my half-ironic 'perhaps.'

But really, words mean so little. Mine, without doubt, are just expressions of that emotion which makes one prone to hyperbole, to the point of exhausting even one's own patience.

And these words ,too, seem the product of mere exhausted anger:

"If Armey is right, Dick Cheney has not only behaved improperly, but also criminally: In addition, when lying to Armey, Cheney clearly committed a "high crime or misdemeanor" in his blocking the Constitution's checks and balances from stopping our march into Iraq. During the debates that took place during the Constitution's ratification conventions, it was specifically stated that lying to Congress about matters of war would be an impeachable offense [I have to interject here that impeachment needs to be interred as one of Madison's follies. The very word reeks of naivete, and brings derision on anyone who invokes it. ].Congress has also made it a crime.

Nonetheless, nothing is likely to happen to Cheney, for Congress is too busy dealing with the disastrous economy that he and Bush are leaving behind as they head for the door. No one seems inclined to hold Cheney responsible, and he appears totally unconcerned about the wrath of history. Yet in lying even to those in his own party, about reasons to go to war, he has sunk to a low level few have reached, and it is no hyperbole to call his actions treasonous to the structure and spirit of the Republic."

An article in WaPo describes Cheney's private discussions with Dick Armey, who had opposed the Iraq war, but who was convinced to reverse his stand when hearing what sound like Cheney's wish-fulfillment delusions:

Armey reversed his position after Cheney told him, he said, that the threat from Iraq was actually " more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large."

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Cheney said, according to Armey, that Iraq's "ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been "substantially refined since the first Gulf War," and would soon result in "packages that could be moved even by ground personnel." Cheney linked that threat to Hussein's alleged ties to al-Qaeda, Armey said, explaining that "we now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as al-Qaeda."

These comments sound so evidently crazed that, when reading this, I actually questioned Cheney's sanity; then  reluctantly told myself that instead we have here conscious duplicity of  historic proportions. Armey might be excused for having believed  Cheney- given the presupposition that Cheney was sane,which I never have seen questioned by anyone,  and that it is truly difficult to believe that a Vice-President can be capable of dishonesty on this scale, when speaking privately to a leader of his own party, on a matter of such importance.

Even in the midst of this campaign of lies, that last belief still comes with some difficulty to me. I wonder what it says of what our Government has come to, that I find that it is easier to believe that it is led by those not mentally competent, than by criminals of this scale.