From: Jei (jei@cc.hut.fi)
Date: Thu Feb 12 2004 - 05:12:51 MST
I thought this would nicely fit the topic of accountability.
..Meaning if the government representatives can't be held accountable,
is it really a representative government anymore, but a dictatorship?
Nice to see Internet is also useful for something like this.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121204I.shtml
Cyber-Campaign Demands Congress Censure Bush
By Jim Lobe
Inter-press Services
Wednesday 11 February 2004
WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (IPS) - Grassroots cyber-movement
MoveOn.org, which claims more than two million U.S. members, has
launched a major campaign demanding Congress formally censure
President George W. Bush for lying to it about the threat posed by
ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Joined by another group, Win Without War (WWW), MoveOn said it
had already collected more than 450,000 signatures on an
email-based petition drive in just the past week, and will now take
out print and television advertising to bring more people into the
movement.
The two groups ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post on
Tuesday that accused Bush of running "a campaign of misinformation,
of cherry-picking and distorting intelligence, of hype and hysteria
that led America into an unnecessary war".
"There must be consequences when a president misleads the
American people, and the Congress, with such disastrous results",
said the ad, which featured a photograph of a pensive Bush with the
caption, "He knew".
"An independent commission can deal with failures at the
intelligence agencies. Congress should deal with the failures at
the White House," it added.
"Congress devoted considerable attention and, eventually, voted
to impeach President (Bill) Clinton for misleading the public about
a sexual affair", said Adam Ruben, national field director of
MoveOn.
"It isn't unreasonable to think that misleading the nation
about the necessity of going to war constitutes an abuse of power
of much greater significance."
The campaign by MoveOn and WWW, which is expected to be joined
by other national anti-war groups in coming days, begins as the
administration, including Bush himself, has become increasingly
defensive about both the war and the justifications it gave for
attacking Iraq in March.
It also comes amid a flurry of new public-opinion polls
indicating the president's public approval rating has fallen
sharply over the last several weeks, particularly following the
admission by Washington's former chief weapons inspector, David
Kay, that the administration's pre-war statements about Iraq's
alleged weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) programmes were
unfounded.
Polls over the past two weeks have shown Democratic Party
front-runner John Kerry either ahead of or in a dead heat with the
Republican Party's Bush if the November election were held now.
In the latest poll, taken just after an unprecedented,
hour-long interview with Bush on NBC-TV's 'Meet the Press' on
Sunday, the Gallup organisation found the two candidates in a
virtual tie. Just one month ago, Gallup had Bush leading Kerry by
12 percentage points.
But in a second survey taken before the interview, Gallup said
the percentage of voters who identified themselves as Democrats had
jumped from 30 to 34 percent in just two weeks, while those
identifying themselves as Republicans dropped by one percentage
point.
As a result, Democrats now lead Republicans by three percentage
points in party identification.
That finding is likely to make a major impression in the
Republican-controlled Congress, where all 435 seats of the House of
Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for election in
November.
Committees in both houses have been investigating pre-war
intelligence for months, but they have split along partisan lines
over how to do so.
Republicans have insisted that investigations should be
confined to mistakes made by the official intelligence community in
assessing the threats posed by Iraq before the war, while Democrats
have called for the probes to be expanded to include the ways in
which senior administration political appointees -- notably in Vice
President Dick Cheney's office and the Pentagon -- interfered with
that process.
But the Democrats' appeals have been resisted by the Republican
chairs of the two committees.
Similarly, Bush tried to co-opt calls for a wider investigation
last week by creating a commission to study why the intelligence
proved wrong in Iraq, but it will not report until 2005 and its
mandate has also been limited to the intelligence itself, rather
than any possible manipulation by political appointees.
The MoveOn campaign is designed to bolster demands that the
scope of the congressional investigations be expanded as part of a
process to formally censure Bush for distorting the intelligence.
"This is not about a failure of intelligence", said Tom
Andrews, a former Democratic congressman who heads WWW, which is
itself a coalition of some 42 national groups. "It's a failure of
integrity".
"Bush knew that the intelligence community's assessment of
Iraq's arms programmes did not support the administration's
pre-conceived notion that Iraq had chemical and nuclear weapons",
said Andrews. "He knew better -- but he chose to mislead us".
"If Congress refuses to hold this administration accountable,
we will hold its members accountable in every (congressional)
district in the country", he said.
Andrews was joined by two retired senior intelligence officials
who charged that, while the official intelligence community made
mistakes in their analyses, the much greater fault -- and
distortions of intelligence -- lay with the administration's
political figures.
"This country is now going through the worst intelligence
scandal in its history", said Melvin Goodman, a former top CIA
analyst who teaches at the National Defence University here.
Calling the administration's allegations about Hussein's
alleged WMD programmes and ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist group a
"campaign of deceit", he charged that the Office of Special Plans
(OSP) established by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, "was engaged
in falsifying intelligence information" that was then leaked to the
press and sent via Cheney's office to the White House.
"The reasons we were given for going to war were false", added
Larry Johnson, a career CIA officer who served as deputy director
of the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism in the 1990s.
"The Bush administration engaged in a deliberate campaign of
information warfare, which employed erroneous and misleading
information as part of a broader strategy to build public opinion
for an invasion", he said.
Johnson noted that both Cheney and Rumsfeld consistently
asserted the existence of operational ties between Iraq and
al-Qaeda. "But the CIA found no evidence that Iraq was engaged in
supporting Islamic terrorism", he said.
Also on hand Tuesday was Fernando Suarez del Solar from San
Diego, California, whose son, a Marine, was killed last March in
Iraq. "He died in Iraq, and for what"? asked Suarez. "For President
Bush's lies".
MoveOn, which was founded by Internet entrepreneurs, has come
to be seen as a model for political organising and fund-raising
through the Internet. In the 2000 elections it raised more than two
million dollars for congressional candidates and almost doubled
that total in 2002.
Consultations with its fast-growing membership earlier this
year resulted in raising millions of dollars for Democratic
candidate Howard Dean's now-faltering primary campaign, while its
television and newspaper ads are widely considered among the most
effective in the country.
--- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Feb 12 2004 - 05:15:12 MST