I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Great Post! How about if the Dems would offer some vision for America that included the following three things:
1) Tax the rich and give health care to everyone
2) Security for our ports and points of entry
3) An energy policy dictated by democracy, not corporations

I agree - great post...and great comment too. I think the Republicans have proven the old adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity. When you can have one of your guys shoot a man in the face and then have the victim apologise, I think you are looking at an uphill struggle. But you are right - at least put up a fight! I would like to see the US governed by a group that had people not power top of their priorities. And that is coming from a Brit. When Bush won your last election, all I lost was £10...

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is
for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

This is the people's own version of "Shock and Awe." It is my hope that it will awaken a "sleeping giant," WE, the people, into taking action that is the responsibility of the citizens of this great nation.

Let the truth ring from every mouth, every Home, every Church, every School and University, every Town, every City, every State and in the Chambers of Congress. But, mostly, let it be heard in the White House!

The Declaration of Independence gives the citizens authority over the government. In fact it obligates each and every citizen, not only the right, but the duty to monitor and restrain our government.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — The Declaration of Independence


There is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war. Indeed, because most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make.

President McKinley told the American people that the USS Maine had been sunk in Havana Harbor by a Spanish mine. The American people, outraged by this apparent unprovoked attack, supported the Spanish American War.

Hitler used this principle of lying to his own people to initiate an invasion. He told the people of Germany that Poland had attacked first. The Germans, convinced they were being threatened, followed Hitler into Poland and into World War 2.

FDR claimed Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. It wasn't. The United States saw war with Japan as the means to get into war with Germany, which Americans opposed. So Roosevelt needed Japan to appear to strike first. Following an 8-step plan devised by the Office of Naval Intelligence, Roosevelt intentionally provoked Japan into the attack.

President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to send Americans off to fight in Vietnam. There were no torpedoes in the water in the Gulf. LBJ took advantage of an inexperienced sonar man's report to goad Congress into escalating the Vietnam compaign.

It is inescapable historical reality that leaders of nations will lie to their people to trick them into wars they otherwise would have refused.

Contrary to what some will say, it is not "conspiracy theory" to suggest that leaders of nations lie to trick their people into wars. It is undeniable fact!

This brings us to the present case. Did the government of the United States lie to the American people, more to the point, did President Bush, and his Neo-conservative associates that put him in power, conspire to lie to Congress, to initiate a war of conquest in Iraq?

This question has been given legitimacy by a memo leaked from inside the British Government which clearly indicates a decision to go to war followed by the "fixing" of information around that policy. This is, as they say, the smoking gun. But the fact is that long before this memo surfaced, it had become obvious that the US Government, aided by the government of Great Britain, was lying to create the public support for a war in Iraq.

First off, is Tony Blair's "Dodgy Dossier," a document released by the Prime Minister that made many of the claims used to support the push for war. The dossier soon collapsed when it was revealed that much of it had been plagiarized from a student thesis paper that was 12 years old! The contents of the dossier, however much they seemed to create a good case for invasion, were obsolete and outdated. This use of material that could not possibly be relevant at the time is clear proof of a deliberate attempt to deceive.!

Then there was the claim about the "Mobile biological weapons laboratories." Proffered in the absence of any real laboratories in the wake of the invasion, photos of these trailers were shown on all the US Mainstream Media, with the claim they, while seeming to lack anything suggesting biological processing, were part of a much larger assembly of multiple trailers that churned out biological weapons of mass destruction



The chief proponent of this hoax was Colin Powell, who presented illustrations such as this one to the United Nations on February 5th, 2003.

This claim fell apart when it was revealed that these trailers were nothing more than hydrogen gas generators used to inflate weather balloons. This fact was already known to both the US and UK, as a British company manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq

Colin Powell's speech to the UN was itself one misstatement after another. Powell claimed that Iraq had purchased special aluminum tubes whose only possible use was in uranium enrichment centrifuges. Both CIA and Powell's own State Department confirmed that the tubes were parts for missiles Saddam was legally allowed to have. Following the invasion, no centrifuges, aluminum or otherwise were found.

Powell also claimed to the United Nations that the photo at left showed "Decontamination Vehicles". But when United Nations inspectors visited the site after the invasion, they located the vehicles and discovered they were just firefighting equipment.

Powell claimed the Iraqis had illegal rockets and launchers hidden in the palm trees of Western Iraq. None were ever found.

Powell claimed that the Iraqis had 8,500 liters (2245 gallons) of Anthrax. None was ever found.

Powell claimed that Iraq had four tons of VX nerve gas. The UN had already confirmed that it was destroyed. The only VX ever found were samples the US had left as "standards" for testing. When the UN suspected that the US samples had been used to contaminate Iraqi warheads, they were quickly destroyed before comparison tests could be carried out.

Powell claimed that Iraq was building long-range remote drones specifically designed to carry biological weapons. The only drones found were short-range reconnaissance drones.

Powell claimed that Iraq had an aggregate of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical and biological warfare agents. Powell gave no basis for that claim at all, and a DIA report issued the same time directly contradicted the claim. No biological or chemical weapons were found in Iraq following the invasion.

Powell claimed that "unnamed sources" confirmed that Saddam had authorized his field commanders to use biological weapons. No such weapons were ever used by the Iraqis to defend against the invasion and, of course, none were ever found in Iraq.

Powell claimed that 122mm warheads found by the UN inspectors were chemical weapons. The warheads were empty, and showed no signs of ever having contained chemical weapons.

Powell claimed that Iraq had a secret force of illegal long-range Scud missiles. None were ever found.

Powell claimed to have an audio tape proving that Saddam was supporting Osama Bin Laden. But independent translation of the tape revealed Osama's wish for Saddam's death.

Colin Powell's UN debacle also included spy photos taken from high flying aircraft and spacecraft. On the photos were circles and arrows and labels pointing to various fuzzy white blobs and identifying them as laboratories and storage areas for Saddam's massive weapons of mass destruction program. Nothing in the photos actually suggested what the blobby shapes were and inspections which followed the invasion, all of them turned out to be rather benign. In at least one case, the satellite Powell claimed had taken one of the pictures had actually been out of operation at the time. And many questioned why Powell was showing black and white photos when the satellites in use at the time over Iraq took color images.

Another piece of evidence consists of documents which President Bush referenced as proof in his 2003 State of the Union Speech. According to Bush, these documents proved that Iraq was buying tons of uranium oxide, called "Yellow Cake" from Niger. Since Israel had bombed Iraq's nuclear power plant years before, it was claimed that the only reason Saddam would have for buying uranium oxide was to build bombs.

This hoax fell apart fast when it was pointed out that Iraq has a great deal of uranium ore inside their own borders and no need to import any from Niger or anywhere else. The I.A.E.A. then blew the cover off the fraud by announcing that the documents Bush had used were not only forgeries, but too obvious to believe that anyone in the Bush administration did not know they were forgeries!

In the end, the real proof that we were lied to about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That means that every single piece of paper that purported to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was by default a fraud, a hoax, and a lie. There could be no evidence that supported the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In a way, the existence of any faked documents about Iraq's WMDs is actually an admission of guilt. If one is taking the time to create fake documents, the implication is that the faker is already aware that there are no genuine documents.

What the US Government had, ALL that they had, were copied student papers, forged "Yellow Cake" documents, balloon inflaters posing as bio-weapons labs, and photos with misleading labels on them. And somewhere along the line, someone decided to put those misleading labels on those photos, to pretend that balloon inflaters are portable bio-weapons labs, and to pass off stolen student papers as contemporary analysis.

Lawyers call it "Mens Rea", which means "Guilty Mind". On TV you might hear it referred to as "Malice aforethought." In plain language, it simply means there is a clear and undeniable intent to deceive. Let me make it plain for those that want to resist the truth...in other words, not only did the Bush Administration lie to the people and to the U.S. Congress, but knew they were doing something illegal at the time that they did it.

All the talk about "Intelligence failure" is just another lie. There was no failure. Indeed the Army agents who erroneously claimed that missile tubes were parts for a uranium centrifuge received bonuses, while the Pentagon smeared Hans Blix, and John Bolton orchestrated the firing of Jose Bustani, the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, because Bustani was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad.

The President of the United States and his supporting cast did in fact lie to both the Congress and the citizens of these United States with the intent to take this country to war and cause the illegal invasion of a sovereign country. A personal dislike for another country's leadership or that country's political views or status is no justification to attack that country.

Defenders of the government will point to the cases previously listed as proof that lying to the people is a normal part of the leader's job and we should all get used to it. And because "Everybody does it" that we should not single out the present administration. And I say to those defenders, that assertion, is male cow excreta! We do not catch all the criminals, yet when we catch criminals, we deal with them in the judicial system in order to deter more criminals. In this case, murderers.

Right now, we have the criminals at hand. and, while other leaders in history have lied to start wars, for the first time in history, the lie stands exposed, while the war started with the lies, still rages on, to the death and detriment of our young men and women in uniform. We cannot in good moral conscience ignore this lie, this crime, lest we encourage future leaders to continue to lie as an excuse to send our men and women off to pointless wars. Lying to start a war is more than an impeachable offense; it the highest possible crime a government can commit against their own people. Lying to start a war is not only misappropriation of the nation's military and the nation's money under false pretenses, but it is outright murder committed on a massive scale. Lying to start a war is a betrayal of the trust each and every person both civilian and military places in their leadership. By lying to start a war, the Bush administration has told the military fatalities and their families that they have no right to know why they were sent to their deaths. It's none of their business. As citizens, IT IS OUR BUSINESS!

This time, the lies have been exposed and the guilty parties need to be removed from office, indicted, processed through the judicial system, and if found guilty, imprisoned for the maximum time the law will allow, without parole or any other lessening of time.

Our nation is founded on the principle of rule with the consent of the governed. Since We The People do not consent to be lied to, a government that lies rules without the consent of the governed, and ruling without the consent of the governed is slavery. Slavery was abolished in this country.

WE, as citizens, should be more than angry. WE should be in a rage. WE should be in a rage no less than that of the families of those 2,974 young men and women who have been killed and the more than 10,000 maimed in this war, which was started with a lie. WE need to be in a rage and WE need to act on that rage because even as these words are read, the same President and his administration that lied about Iraq's nuclear weapons is telling similar lies about Iran's nuclear capabilities. The line about the "Axis of Evil" was more than just the spin in a speech. The writing is on the wall; having gotten away with lying to start the war in Iraq, Bush and his neo-con war hawks will lie to start a war in Iran, and after that another, and after that another, and another and another and another because as long as WE remain silent, and as long as WE remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.

This is beyond the scope of mere impeachment. It is about criminal intent. It is about conspiracy and blatant contempt for the law.

Because our duly elected representatives have not acted as called for in their realm of responsibilities, I believe it is the duty of each citizen, who has knowledge of a crime, to make these offenses known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney General to pursue an investigation and present the facts to the Grand Jury in pursuit of an Indictment.

U.S.C. TITLE 18 PART I CHAPTER 47 § 1001.

(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, WHOEVER, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by ANY trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or USES any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
(b) Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party's counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding.
(c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to—

(1) administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or (2) any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate

Andrew R Jackson

Virginia Beach, VA