Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Top 10 Revelations from Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack"



Top 10 Revelations from Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack"
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/plan_attack.htm

"Plan of Attack, the new book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward, provides an inside view of the Bush administration's plans to invade Iraq, shattering the myths pushed by a White House obsessed with politics. Woodward interviewed 75 top administration officials and learned that the administration's public story about how and when the war was planned was full of holes."

Here are just a few of the top revelations about the Bush administration's rush to war from Woodward's book.

1. STEALING MONEY FROM AFGHAN WAR FOR IRAQ: Bush Took Money From Afghan War For Iraq -- Bush Hid Move From Congress
"Some of the funding would come from the supplemental appropriations bill being worked out in Congress for the Afghanistan war and the general war on terrorism. The rest would come from old appropriations. By the end of July, Bush had approved some 30 projects [for Iraq war plans] that would eventually cost $700 million. He discussed it with Nicholas E. Calio, the head of White House congressional relations. Congress, which is supposed to control the purse strings, had no real knowledge or involvement, had not even been notified that the Pentagon wanted to reprogram money." [p. 137]

2. EARLY OBSESSION: Bush Had Rumsfeld Draw Up War Plan In 2001
On November 21, Bush pulled Rumsfeld into one of the cubbyhole offices near the Situation Room and said "I want you...What kind of war plan do you have for Iraq.?" After a brief discussion, Bush told him "Let's get started on this. And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to." [p. 2]

3. EARLY ACTION: Bush Team Decided To Go To War In Jan 2003 -- Two Months Before Bush Claimed He Had Yet To Make Up His Mind
January 13, 2003, Bush to Powell: "The president said he had made up his mind on war. The United States should go to war." [p. 270]

March 6, 2003, Bush to Public: Bush: "I've not made up our mind about military action." [Bush News Conference, 3/6/03]

"... Monday, Jan. 13, Powell and Bush met in the Oval Office... 'I really think I'm going to have to do this.' The president said he had made up his mind on war. The United States should go to war. 'You're sure?' Powell asked. Yes, said Bush." [p. 270]
"...in Washington in early January 2003, Bush took Rumsfeld aside. 'Look, we're going to have to do this, I'm afraid,' he said... It was enough of a decision for Rumsfeld." [p.261]


4. SHARING SECRETS WITH THE SAUDIS: Cheney And Rumsfeld Showed Top Secret Map To Saudi Ambassador
"...on Saturday, Jan. 11, Cheney invited Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, to his West Wing office. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were also there... Sitting on the edge of the table in Cheney's office, Myers took out a large map labeled TOP SECRET NOFORN. The NOFORN meant NO FOREIGN -- classified material not to be seen by any foreign nation... Staring intently at the 2-by-3-foot Top Secret map, Bandar, a former fighter pilot, asked a few questions about air operations. Could he have a copy of the large map so he could brief Crown Prince Abdullah? he asked, referring to the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. 'Above my pay grade,' Myers said. 'We'll give you all the information you want,' Rumsfeld said. As for the map, he added, 'I would rather not give it to you, but you can take notes if you want.'" [p. 264]

5. ELECTION POLITICS: Bandar Says Saudis Will Fix Oil Prices For 2004
"According to Prince Bandar, the Saudis hoped to fine-tune oil prices over 10 months to prime the economy for 2004. What was key, Bandar knew, were the economic conditions before a presidential election, not at the moment of the election." [p. 324]

6. RUSH TO JUDGEMENT: Bush Team Quick To Link Saddam, 9/11
Wolfowitz "estimated there was a 10 to 50 percent chance Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- an odd conclusion that reflected deep suspicion, but no real evidence." [p. 26]

7. FAITH-BASED DIPLOMACY: Bush Sidestepped Important Diplomatic Questions
"'We will win," the Polish president said, but sounding like Colin Powell, he added plaintively, 'but what are the consequences?' After a pause, he continued, 'You need wide, broad international support. We are with you, don't worry about it. The risk is the U.N. will collapse. What will replace it?'" These were hard questions that Bush sidestepped, saying only, 'We believe that Islam like Christianity can grow in a free and democratic manner.'" [p.276]

8. VICE PRESIDENT FANATIC: Colin Powell Thought Dick Cheney Had "Fever" For Attack on Iraq
"Powell thought Cheney had the fever. The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Saddam and 9/11. It was a separate little government that was out there -- Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith and Feith's 'Gestapo office,' as Powell privately put it... Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice president. But there it was." [ p.292]

9. FATHERLY CRITIQUE? Scowcroft Received Bush Sr.'s Approval On Critical Op-Ed
"No one was as close to Bush senior as companion, loyalist and foreign policy soul mate. Scowcroft had coauthored the former president's memoirs. He sent him an advance copy of the article and received no reaction. That meant it was okay. The Wall Street Journal ran his article on August 15 [2002] under the provocative headline, 'Don't Attack Saddam.'" [p.160]

10. MORE WMD DECEPTIONS: Bush Told Elie Wiesel That Attack On Iraq Would Keep Saddam From Attacking Israel With WMD
On February 27, 2003, Bush told Elie Wiesel "If we don't disarm Saddam Hussein, he will put a weapon of mass destruction on Israel and they will do what they think they have to do, and we have to avoid that." [p. 320]
zzzzz

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Response to HumaneRightsAgenda Post:
Homework: Now and Then-- Parts I II and III

Interesting but not exactly correct. There really was no prosperity in the 3rd Reich. Most of Europe would really like to know where American scholars dig this up. During the 3rd Reich, on payday women waited outside the place where the husband worked so they could go to the grocery store before the prices went up. They had a tremendous inflation back then. You practically needed a wheelbarrow to cart the money to the store in order to get a loaf of bread.

That there was any sudden prosperity when Hitler came to power is a figment of the American imagination -- as any European can tell you. There were plenty of jobs because Hitler geared up the defense industry but that certainly didn't translate into prosperity because the Reichsmark war worthless. Having a job and being prosperous are not exactly the same thing

Also, Germany didn't really dig its way out of rubble after WW1. That was after WW2. The Treaty of Versailles was ridiculous and it's not quite clear why the US ran over there at the end of WW1 in order to push this treaty through. After all, why get vindictive against Germany? They didn't even start that war in the first place but rather had attempted to stop it.

Also, if President Hindenburg agreed with Hitler or not was irrelevant because the chancellor is the head of state in Germany. The president holds a more or less honorary position. He gets to swear in judges (but not select them), he gets to go on goodwill tours around the world, and he swears in the chancellor but that's about it. Chancellor really is the highest office in Germany and the second highest is the secretary of foreign affairs.

Hitler also didn't start his crap against the Jewish people right off the bat. He was too busy incarcerating the members of the socialist party (SPD) which had actually won that election to begin with. Good gravy, there were a gadzillion elections which Hitler tried to win, it was almost as if the Germans were expected to vote on a semi-annual basis until they get it right and vote Hitler's party into office. They really never did. Even in 1933, Hitler's party had less than 25% of the votes.

This NSDAP was really the DAP which was a defunct political party the Thule Gesellschaft had picked up and put Hitler in charge of. This Thule Gesellschaft (the only overt link between them and the NSDAP was BTW Rudolf Hess) existed since 1871 and was merely a spin-off of Skull and Bones at Yales. To be a member of the TG, you had to be either an aristocrat or a scholar or super-wealthy, since they were a fascist organization to begin with. Needless to say, Hitler was never a member of the TG.

Once Hitler was in power, the TG officially dissolved although..........
Also, Hitler's book Mein Kampf was merely a summary of a gadzillion books the TG had published between 1912 and 1919. That group was in close contact with the Bush family and numerous other wealthy families in the US hence Hitler's Putsch was largely funded from the US, mostly the Chase Manhattan Bank, Ford, General Motors, etc. etc.

It would really be beneficial for the American people if folks like W. David Jenkins and Sara DeHart would do their homework. Hitler had a personal grudge against Jewish people because he held them responsible for Germany losing WW1. Also, numerous prominent Jews, such as Berthold Brecht et al. leaned in the communist direction. The German people per se didn't have a peeve with the Jewish people period. Since the Jewish people tend to be a tad clannish and most of their sects don't allow mixed marriages (and won't even convert non-Jewish spouses), there wasn't a great deal of interaction between Jewish Germans and other Germans, albeit there were plenty of mixed marriages.

Since the NSDAP controlled the entire media, you simply can't just dig up old newspapers from back then and assume you're reading what the Germans were thinking at the time. The newspapers were only allowed to print what Hitler wanted the Germans to think, not what they actually thought. Members of the by then ostensibly dissolved Thule Gesellschaft had become quite busy in the German motion picture industry. After WW2, they resettled to Hollywood and the movies that got churned out since then clearly show it.

For a while there after WW2 it was fashionable among the scholarly crowd in Germany to succumb to a severe case of the mea culpa, so they came up with all kind of crapola that pleased the American occupation but none of it is really factual. The truth is that Germany used to be one of the very few countries in the world that did NOT discriminate against Jews which becomes quite obvious when you check how many doctors, lawyers, bankers, and professors were Jewish and got dismissed from their jobs by Hitler. You'd never get this impression by reading all the garbage those chest-beating bleeding heart scholars committed to paper during the American occupation of Germany after WW2.

Between the end of WW2 and somewhere in the 1970s, creative revisionist anti-German history was the order of the day over there and the US occupation of that country had a great deal to do with it. That's why the German people who had actually lived through the 3rd Reich and even prior to it were constantly amazed at the things they were told went on in their own country and they strongly felt they must have lived somewhere else during that time and didn't even know it. All this mea culpa-ing was laid on just a little too thick, in other words. Most of the stuff that was invented mostly by people who tried to please the UK and the US simply hadn't even happened period.

As for this garbage here:

1. Free _expression of opinion
2. Freedom of the press
3. Right of assembly and association
4. Right to privacy of postal and electronic communications
5. Protection against unlawful searches and seizures
6. Individual property rights
7. States' right of self-government

Nr. 1 can get you in trouble anywhere particularly in the US during the McCarthy era.
Nr. 2 The NSDAP more or less took over the press
Nr. 3 You can take with a pinch of salt
Nr. 4 What electronic communication?
Nr. 5 Leaves you wondering what exactly the term unlawful implies there; if Hitler made it legal, it was lawful. The proper term would be "unwarranted."
Nr. 6 WRONG, this is too simplistic to cover in a fascist regime. Actually, Hitler privatized everything like the good little capitalist fascist that he was. In fact, he only nationalized substantial Jewish property and immediately turned around and sold it to private bidders.
Nr. 7 What states? Germany only has three Freistaaten (Bavaria, Saxony, and Thueringen, the free states), all other parts of that republic are Bundeslaender (federal lands) and not states.

You can tell right away that this piece was written by a couple of clueless Americans who probably never even spent a day in Germany and obviously don't have an inkling of the German language either.

Of course, fascism is corporatism according to Mussolini but you can just translate it with capitalism and achieve the same result. None of this is really anything new here in the US. Sure, Bush tried to have the CIA overthrow the president of Venezuela. But you see, Bush wasn't even in office yet when the CIA did the same thing in Chile. The assassination of President Allende, after all, took place in 1973 and not in 2003.

As for assaults on the free _expression of one's opinion, well, the McCarthy era during the Eisenhower administration was good at that. The guy was in office in the 1950s.

As for liberty and equality in the US, well, the civil rights act didn't even get signed until Johnson, and that was in 1964. Does anybody really believe that non-Whites in the US had freedom to assemble or enjoyed any other rights prior to that? It's amazing that the American people only wake up now and notice that something's amiss in this land of the free. The US never was the land of the free for racial minorities and didn't need a Bush to come on the scene to strip us of our human or civil rights. Apparently only Whites didn't notice the problems prior to the Bush administration, the rest of us did.

While Jewish professors and teachers could always teach in Germany except during the duration of the 3rd Reich (about eleven or twelve years), they were never allowed allowed to teach white students in the US until 1964, that's nearly two decades after the end of WW2.

So to the question if history repeats itself, yes it does but you can't prove it by the US because this country had a fascist regime from the very start in 1776. It's not that Bush is imitating Hitler, actually Hitler imitated the United States. So W. David Jenkins and Sara DeHart really got that backward. Sure there were anti-Jewish thugs in the 3rd Reich but the KuKluxKlan is by far older than that and predates Hitler by leaps and bounds. And while the Jewish people and other minorities in Germany lived a peaceful life until Hitler and his thugs came along, minorities in the US never did and haven't even after the Jewish people could return to a normal life once Hitler and his thugs were gone.

The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler didn't desert the military during a war and could speak his language clearly. The difference between the 3rd Reich and the United States during its entire history is difficult to establish.