The Whole Truth & Nothing But Truth

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Registered: 08-05-2004
The Whole Truth & Nothing But Truth
1
Sun, 09-26-2004 - 10:37pm
I got this in my inbox and the information about the article and links are at the very bottom. XOXO.

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The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth

By JOHN F. YOUMANS

Sept. 24



In one of the most heated presidential campaign battles in decades, Republicans and Democrats seem to be diametrically opposed on almost every issue important to the majority of citizens in this great United States of America. In addition to the increasing loss of lives in the Iraq War, more than 1,000 now, the terrible economy, the huge deficit, the loss of millions of jobs, and outsourcing of jobs, I think the greatest atrocity in this country is the way our president continually lies to us and how he distorts and misrepresents the truth. This is totally unacceptable. How does he keep getting away with it? OUT THE DOOR IN 2004.



As a child growing up in this great country many years ago, I believed our government and especially our president, told the truth. It was demanded. The president was believed to be honest, ethical and of high moral character. It was expected. I thought the President of the United States of America was put on a very high pedestal because if his honesty, ethics and high moral character; not only in the United States, but throughout the world.



How things have changed! America has lost its soul.



None of that is true now, and it is getting worse. It won't be long and we won't have any voice in our government. As everyone knows, Republicans are in the White House and have majority in the House and the Senate. Bush tells our legislators what he wants and the majority of Republican representatives and senators blindly do as he asks. This blind loyalty to the party has to stop. Their loyalty should be to us, we the people. As far as that goes, the president's loyalty should also be with we the people. He works for us, we don't work, literally, for him. Although, as it appears, we are working for him and the rest of the Military Industrial Complex.



This election is important to every citizen in this great country. Our history as a democracy depends on it.



Most of us immediately think Bush or Kerry when the word election is mentioned. But wake up folks! It is the Congress of this great country that is just as guilty as Mr. Bush. Much of what he does depends on how they vote. They are our representatives. They are elected to voice our beliefs, not blindly support the president.



To the Veterans reading this, just think about the battle we had getting a partial repeal of The Disabled Veterans Tax. The Bush administration, including the President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others, all opposed the repeal. Therefore, the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert wouldn't bring bill H.R. 303 to the floor for a vote so it could be passed. This was in spite of a majority of Republican and Democrat support.



Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia then initiated a discharge petition (H.Res. 251) to force the bill to the floor which was signed by 211 Democrats. Only two Republicans signed the petition. Others (including EVERY Congressman in OHIO, yes DAVE HOBSON too) following orders from Republican Speaker Hastert not to sign it or face strong repercussions from the party. Falling short of the required 218 signatures, the petition failed.



Then, because of all the grassroots pressure, congressional e-mails, telephone calls, office visits, etc, the majority devised, behind closed doors with Democrats prohibited from participating, a partial bill allowing less than half of disabled veterans to collect both their earned retirement pay and veterans disability pay was allowed.



The above is just one example of what happens every day in our House of Representatives and Senate. The Bush administration is controlling everything. And it is not going to get any better without a change. It will get worse.



I believe it is just as important to get rid of the puppets that are blindly following the Republican party line, regardless of the issue, as it is to send George Bush back to Crawford.



That is if we can get a fair vote this election with voting machines that accurately record our vote; an election where we accurately count the votes and every vote counts. If that happens, I think we have a brighter future ahead. But knowing this administration as I do, I think I can honestly predict it isn't going to happen that way. My outlook for Nov. 3 is not very good.



Perhaps more American citizens would agree on the issues if we were not constantly being lied to, if the facts were not misrepresented and if the facts were not being distorted. The media is also responsible for distorting the truth and it is not an accident. They are just accepting the rhetoric and not asking the important questions.



Facts and data to substantiate the theme of this article are so voluminous that only a portion can be included in this article. It would take a thick book to adequately present all the misrepresentation, fabrication, distortions and lies. Just do an Internet search for Bush lies and they will be available.



The most extreme distortion, misrepresentation or lie if you choose, of this administration was the reason they gave the world for going to war with Iraq.



On March 17, 2003, instead of concentrating on Al Queada, Usama Bin Laden and terrorism, George W. Bush addressed the entire country and the world. Instead of a message outlining the true war on terrorism in Afghanistan and around the world, he gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face a U.S. military invasion. To defend his goal since the beginning of his reign to invade Iraq, Bush declared, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."



There is no lack of evidence that this distortion, misrepresentation or lie was just not true. This decision has cost the death of more than 1,000 members of the U.S. Armed Forces placed in harm's way, more than 7,000 injured and the death of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Why?



President Bush claimed he was proceeding with total certainty based on intelligence that was 100 percent reliable and utterly conclusive. He did not say that due to the available intelligence he suspected Hussein possessed WMDs, that he worried Iraq was seeking weapons of mass destruction, that he believed he could not allow the possibility Hussein might develop and amass WMD stockpiles. He said that the basis for his choice of war was based on fact. In fact, the Neo-cons have had a plan ready to go for years. They were just waiting for a president gullible enough to believe it.



He now says the intelligence was wrong. When Diane Sawyer recently asked the president why, in the prewar stage, he portrayed Iraqi weapons as an imminent threat to U.S. security when intelligence reports, replete with cautionary tones and caveats, more often referred to potentialities. The president answered, "So what's the difference?"



What difference does it make? The horrifying reality points to a deficiency in character or deficiency of intellect that has produced a president willing to drag the nation to unparalleled heights of international loathing, to say nothing of all the wrongful deaths and injuries caused by the war because of the deceptions and dishonesty. Kirk Tofte wrote on Mar.21, People are much more tolerant of incompetence than they are mendacity. With Bush of course, we hit the exacta!



Where is the accounting for this terrible deception or incompetence?



CIA director George Tenet, in defense of the CIA and the poor intelligence, in public speeches and congressional testimony, provides indisputable evidence that Bush misled the public as to the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs. He stated he corrected his superiors, including Vice-President Dick Cheney, several times when they chose to misrepresent the facts. This was not an accident.



Many say President Bush was so intent on the Iraq War, based on false WMD allegations, he put the true war on terrorism on the back burner. Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his recent book, The Price of Loyalty, that, at the new administration's very first cabinet meeting, the decision to invade Iraq was presented as a given. This was eight months before the terrorist attack of 9/11. Bush and other zealous supporters (Neo-cons) for war with Iraq, especially in the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney and in the Defense Department of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, recruited long-time proponents of use of American military power in the Middle East like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Abraham Shulsky, and Michael Malouf, to bypass the CIA, DIA, and State Department's INR whose professional analysts were skeptical about Iraq's allegedly hostile capabilities and intentions. That is why DOD set up the Office of Special Plans (OSP) to second-guess and misrepresent the information from CIA and other intelligence agencies..



An editorial review of The Price of Loyalty, by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill states, The George W. Bush White House, as described by, is a world out of kilter. Policy decisions are determined not by careful weighing of an issue's complexities; rather, they're dictated by a cabal of ideologues and political advisors operating outside the view of top cabinet officials. The President is not a fully engaged administrator but an enigma who is, at best, guarded and poker-faced but at worst, uncurious, unintelligent, and a puppet of larger forces.



A much less publicized, but very explosive declaration of the intentional misrepresentation and bending of the truth concerning the reasons to invade Iraq, comes from a person, Karen Kwiatkowski, most of the world never heard of. But her now public personal account based on her work in the Pentagon is very enlightening. This information is exposed in an article by Marc Cooper of The LA Weekly, February 22-26, 2004, Soldiers For The Truth-Exposing Bush's talking-points war.

According to the article, Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP's task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.



She would soon conclude that the OSP a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.



Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.



It was told to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.



But developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that's more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.



Kwiatkowski was asked, were you told by your superiors what you could say and not say? What could and could not be discussed? Or were opinions they didn't like just ignored?



I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They'd make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, Just send me the file. And I don't know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made, Kwiatkowski said.



To the best of my knowledge, no president has been accused of lying as much as our present King George. Here are just a few books that address the subject: "The Lies of George W. Bush" (Corn), "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" (Scheer, Scheer, Chaudhry), "Weapons of Mass Deception" (Rampton, Stauber), "Big Lies" (Conason), "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" (Franken).



At the same time, we can't forget other huge mistakes of the Bush Administration; 9/11, Cheney's energy task force, WMDs and other pre-Iraq war claims, the environment, the cost of the Medicare Bill, the size of the deficit, the number of jobs lost, the role of the Saudis and Pakistan in terrorism, Halliburton contracts, Ken Lay, actions taken under the Patriot Act, the Florida 2000 recount, collusion between the executive and judicial branches, failure to support our Veterans and fully equip our military, the White House outing of a CIA agent, and, well, the list goes on. You can't get the truth out of the Bush administration about virtually anything.



This is an administration built upon secrecy lies, distortions, misrepresentations, and deceit. Instead of telling the truth and speaking of the issues, they prefer to pick some trivial issue about their opponents and blow it out of proportion to deflect their short-comings. Karl Rove is an expert at this; just ask Sen. John McCain or Sen. Max Cleland.



This is not just any normal election. The election will determine the future of our democracy. As Americans, we must demand the truth. We can no longer go on accepting lies from our elected officials. This includes both the president and congress.



http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Youmans_Index,00.html



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John F. Youmans is a retired USAF major and a decorated disabled Vietnam Veteran who served at Bien Hoa AB from 1966-1967. Mr. Youmans served 30 years in the USAF. Since his military retirement in 1993, Mr. Youmans has become a well published journalist and a reporter for the Daily Record in Dunn, N.C. for several years when forced to resign due to his health and disability stemming from Hodgkin’s Disease and Agent Orange. Mr. Youmans continues; however, to write articles for newspapers across the nation from home. In addition, he is a featured columnist for Military.Com and staff writer for several other Internet web sites including www.supportthevets.com, www.usdr.org and several others. Mr. Youmans has taken the task of advocating improvements for veterans’ benefits as a personal goal.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Sun, 09-26-2004 - 10:56pm
Sigh... what is the difference, indeed. :(

To be fair to Republicans, when Democrats controlled Congress they shut Republicans out of stuff as well. I wish both parties would remember that their ultimate duty is to run this country to the best of their ability on our behalf, and not to one up each other for political gain. Like this will happen any time soon... no matter who controls the House.

The way people get there needs to change, the money and power that incumbents have overwhelms challengers. And the whole seniority thing... should be tossed, because the first thing an incumbent does, particularly the ones who are there longest, is argue that their particular constituents will lose power with a junior member.

The presidency needs to be reigned in... no more wars without a declaration of war by Congress, and perhaps we need to specifically define where the president can act without ok, a certain blanket level of authority, and only temporary.

This war was a disaster from the moment the first rumours of plans started making their way around in 2002. That region of the world is incredibly fragile... yet we started swinging a hammer at it, and in the process have created more enemies, not less, more of a threat to this country, not less.

Is Kerry better? I have no illusions about him being a wondrous president. Yet what I do expect is a competent president, one who is careful and deliberate, who does not go off on half baked adventures and gambles, using Americans and whole countries as pawns. After the disaster that was Nixon (and he was a disaster not because of policy, but because of his own personal insecurities and failings, as a statemen one could say he was successful) we had the quiet stability of Ford, whom we looked to simply to *not* do anything, not stir anything up, be the football lineman of politics - if you aren't noticed, things must be going ok. This is so what we need now.


Edited 9/26/2004 10:57 pm ET ET by rayeellen