Bush's lies and people died for NO cause, NO reason!

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in Iraq compared to Vietnam? We have lost 1,700 soldiers in Iraq compared to what, nearly 100,000 or more in Vietnam. Give us a break. Nobody believed it before the 2004 election. Why do you all keep spouting the same unsubtantiated crap over and over? It really makes you all look stupid. I'm beginning to wonder if the left has any original thoughts. You all sound like clones of each other. EVERY milestone for Iraq has been met thus far. We turned sovereignty over to the Iraqi's and they've had elections. They are re-building infrastructure at an alarming rate....Iraq is a success. The loser John Kerry put out a letter today stating that we needed to have definite goals in Iraq. Everytime John Kerry said we couldn't accomplish something in Iraq we did!! John Kerry doesn't know when to shut up and realize "he lost", but obviously thinks he's a contender for 2008...I almost feel sorry for the guy...almost.

Sure there are insurgents, but the damage they ar inflicting is minimal....and yes, there are Iraqi's who LOVE Americans, believe it or not. I live near a military base, and several soliders have told me how the Iraqi people cry when they leave.

You can believe all the crap the media is telling you, but your precious Downing Street Memo is not evidence of anything. Bush has not been proven to lie, period. You can say it all you want, but it doesn't make it true. The little fairy tales the left make up about Bush and then get their buddies in the media to echo are just that "fairy tales."

What if the revoluntary soldiers had gotten *so tired* in the Revoluntionary war?

Even if you have family or friends in Iraq or Afghanistan right now your complaining and fussing about all the work they are doing is doing nothing to help them. Support them. Send them a letter or a care package. It would make a soldier's day, be it someone you know or someone you don't, and it would certainly brighten your mood in the process. You don't have to support the president or the war, but your frustrations can be turned around into producing something good for someone else.

Martin Garbus

Wed Dec 28, 1:41 PM ET

An hour after the New York Times described Bush�s illegal surveillance program, I wrote on the Huffington Post that Bush had committed a crime, a �High Crime,� and should be impeached.

Was there then enough evidence to justify the beginning of an attempt to impeach the President?

No.

Did the President have a good defense that he relied on Gonzalez, Ashcroft and the best lawyers in the country (in the Solicitor General�s and Department of Justice�s offices)?

Yes.

Would any significant number of Americans of Congressmen then support such a process?

No.

Given all that, would the turmoil and consequential turmoil have justified the start of that brutal process?

No.

But that has all changed.

Because we shall soon see the consequences of those warrantless searches, the consequences of the government�s five years of secrecy, and even the citizens of the �Red States� will be outraged. Firstly, the warrantless taps will infect hundreds of �terrorist� and criminal cases throughout the country. Not only future cases, but past and present cases, even if there were convictions or plea bargains after the survellance started.

The defendants in �terrorist� and other infected criminal cases, the Court must find, must get access to everything, or very close to everything to make sure they were never improperly surveilled.

The Bush Administration, in these cases will refuse, as did the Nixon administration, to divulge information on national security grounds. Many alleged critical cases must then be dismissed. It will include Organized Crime and drug cases.

The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill. Cases that should take six months to a year, will take three times as long, as motions go up and down the appellate ladder � as federal judges trial disagree with each other. Appellate Courts will disagree on issues so novel and so important that the Supreme Court will look at them.

Secondly, there will be an endless amounts of civil suits, that we can see will result in substantial damage awards. Commentators claimed there cannot be suits because no one has standing to challenge the surveillance. They are wrong. They do not remember the history of the Palmer Raids in the 1920�s, the surveillance in the Sixties and Seventies. The future will show both the enormous information the new technology has gathered but also the dishonest minimization of the extent of the surveillance.

That minimization is standard operating procedure for governments, whether they be run by Democrats or Republicans.

Thirdly, and most importantly, it is safe to preduct there will be coverups. This administration is not known for its candor.

The coverup starts by trying to get away with the vauge and meaningless defenses. Both Nixon and Clinton tried that.

When that doesn�t work, the coverup will be based on a foundation of small lies. Both Nixon and Clinton tried that.

We do not yet know what the FISA judges already fear � that they have been not just ignored by the executive but misused. The public shall also learn about the FISA judges� misuse of the FISA courts and their warrants. The courts were created to permit eavesdropping and electronic surveillance, not physical break-ins.

But the facts will show that the Bush administration, with the knowledge, and at times, the consent of, the FISA judges, conducted illegal physical break-ins - break-ins that to this day, the involved person, is unaware of.

Were the results of these �terrorist� break-ins then given to criminal authorities to start unrelated prosecutions? Of course.

The American public will also learn what this Administration has thus far successfully hidden. When Bush came into office, he signed an Exeutive Order making all of his, and his father�s, papers privileged. The order, extending 12 years out, also says if the President is incapacitated, then a third person can execute the privilege. This means anybody � a wife, a family lawyer, a child. The order also says the Vice President�s papers are privileged. It is an extraordinary Executive Order � this has never been anything like this. No one ever suggested a Vice President has executive privilege. If we do not find out what they are hiding, we will see witholding on a scale never before seen. He will no longer be able to use 9/11 and the war on terror as an excuse. It will confirm the fact that illegality and secrecy existed long before 9/11, that it started as soon as Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield got into office. It will show deliberate attempts to avoid any judicial or legislative oversight of the illegal use of executive privilege.

Impeachment procedures will come not because of wrongdoing but because of the discovery of lies.

Both Nixon and Cliton faced impeachments because they lied.

It was inconceivable before the Nixon and Clinton impeachment procedures began that there could be, or would be a country or Senate that would be responsive to it.

In the Nixon case, it spiraled from a petty break-in � in Clinton�s case from a petty sexual act.

But what Bush has done, and will do, to protect himself is not petty. It goes to the heart of the government. He already has a history of misleading the public on the searches conducted thus far. As he and his colleagues seek to minimize the vast amount of data collection, the lies will necessarily expand to cover the wrongdoing. Bush can be brought down.

The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.

Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Yet there's evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11�indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.

In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade�, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush's father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz's revelations illuminate Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Herskowitz�a longtime Houston newspaper columnist�has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush's 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers�expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript�pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz's house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as A Charge to Keep.

The revelations about Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist's continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior�who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published in 2003.

I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz's taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily because news organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an "October Surprise."

But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush�personally�in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming "a great president"�because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.

The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of this presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush's focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.

Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president's actions.

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

The issue of illegal immigration has been around way long than Bush's term in office. While I do agree it is an even bigger problem with terrorism looming, this was something that should have been addressed long long ago.

My grandmother said they did not agree on politics and she would never vote for the same person he did, so therefore her vote would cancel his out and she felt like that was wrong because he was the head of the household!!! Can you believe - as soon as he died, she never missed voting again for who she wanted.

keep us free from the nazi regime/communism? What about the Korean War? They died, too, to keep communism from spreading.

Viet Nam was another story. They died and people here were so outspoken about it (just like it is happening now), and that it brought the moral of the tropps down. When our president pulled them out so quick, all he-- broke out. The Viet Cong and Cambodia armies slaughtered thousands.

Those fighting now mostly support and believe in what they are doing. If the troops are pulled out as quick as O wants, the same thing may happen there. This is why they are trying to get Iraq's military and police set up so another Viet Nam will not happen. Support our troops.

When you described the various religious beliefs of your family members, you illustrated very well why government and religion don't mix.

Whether I (or you) agree with their views, they still have the right to have those views.