Thursday, July 17, 2003

Is President George W. Bush Cracking Up?   Comments by The Parodist   It’s a sad day for America when the President of the United States must resort to either a blatant lie or has succumbed to mental lapses that could be revealing mental disorientation or worse, mental sickness. Another sad possibility is that George W. Bush is a dupe of others who are telling him what to say, what to do, and what to think—that someone else, like Karl Rove or Dick Cheney are telling him what reality is.   Take a look at the July 15th Washington Post article by Dana Priest and Dana Milbank: after a meeting in the Oval Office with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Bush fielded questions from the press. First Mr. Bush defended the intelligence he receives, categorizing it as “darn good.” Then he said the CIA doubts about the uranium-buy scam in Niger came only after the January 28th State of the Union speech in which Bush endorsed the statement that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium in Africa.   If that weren't enough to raise doubts about the state of the President’s mind, Bush then said the decision to go to war with Iraq was made after he gave Saddam Hussein “a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.”   The Washington Post gently wrote the truth: the events leading up to war were: “Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective.”   America is in trouble. Clearly both republicans and democrats must work together and empower congressional investigations into the workings of this White House. The questions are “Who is making the decisions in the White House?”  Is it Karl Rove? Dick Cheney? Or a corporate group? 12:40:20 AM    comment []

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

How Cheney Squeezed the CIA   Comments by the Parodist     Dick Cheney appears to be in real trouble. He’s been caught finagling again. This time it’s not California’s energy scam—but there is a similar pattern—once again he displays a propensity to create sleight of hand illusions in order to convince others of the merits of his point of view. (You can read about his part in creating both the illusion of an energy shortage as well as the actual California energy crisis at the Yurica Report.com “Fraud Traced to the White House.”) This time the veep used his skills to create the illusion that the U.S. was in imminent danger of a nuclear attack from Saddam Hussein.   It’s fascinating to realize that the whole California crisis was conceived as the first in a series of dominoes. Dick Cheney would use California to push through his vision of a new national energy policy, which would include war against Iraq for oil. Saddam Hussein and Iraq were described in reports as the all-star villains who threatened America’s oil security. The idea was to claim that Saddam Hussein was causing the California energy crisis. Unfortunately Enron began to collapse and Governor Gray Davis was sending hounds out who smelled the fraud and began to pursue it. The governor was beginning to catch on. But what he couldn’t have known was that Dick Cheney was grinning behind the scenes at California’s discomfiture. When it looked like the media might trace the fraud to the White House, the Bush administration had to switch gears to Plan B: the invasion of Iraq.   Cheney has had a lot of practice in the psychology of manipulation. He had to have concrete reports that appeared to back his claims about Iraq’s threat to the safety of the U.S. Similar reports were produced in conjunction with the California Energy scam, but now he needed reports to convince congress and the nation to go to war.   In the legal profession it’s called autoptic evidence. It’s really no evidence at all. But Dick Cheney (perhaps with Karl Rove’s encouragement) is a master at it. It’s also called “real evidence.” In the courtroom it goes like this: a farmer accuses a neighbor of stealing his horse, then his lawyer brings the horse into the court room just as the farmer says, “If you don’t believe me, there’s the very horse.”  There’s something about the human mind that when we see a concrete object (or report) we believe everything else that’s being said about it. So in law, the rules of evidence prohibit the introduction of autoptic evidence. In short, you can’t wave the report or the horse around!   But the veep needed a horse. He had to wave something around. So in an astonishing break with tradition, Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, began making “multiple” visits to the CIA, this on top of Cheney’s regular briefings by the CIA. Dick Cheney had to manipulate, pressure, and push folks, in this instance, CIA specialists into writing the kind of intelligence reports he wanted to see.   He’s got his comeuppance now. It seems veteran CIA agents are demanding Cheney’s resignation. They’ve gone as far as writing an open memo to the president, stating their reasons and recommendations. We know that some analysts told the Washington Post (June 4, 2003) that Cheney and Libby pressured them to make assessments that fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives. We know for a fact that the CIA reports “underwent a dramatic transformation from 2001 to 2002 after reporting essentially the same data for many years,” according to an article by Joseph Cirincione and Dipali Mukhopadhyay of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  There was virtually nothing in the data itself to account for the change that was so dramatic the authors called the new tone “alarmist.” In other words, the information was being stroked and coaxed and emphasized—manipulated.   Subtle changes were made, like bringing Iraq’s nuclear history and inspections from the bottom of the list to number one. According to the authors, the first half of 2001 came the first mention that “Baghdad may be attempting to acquiring materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”  After September 11, the sentence changed to “is attempting to acquire materials.”   By 2002 the intelligence report said: “Iraq is working to reconstitute its nuclear program.”   Pressuring an agency of the federal government is not a good thing to be doing. Richard Nixon misused the CIA and was about to be impeached for it. As John Dean wrote recently, “To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be ‘a high crime’ under the Constitution’s impeachment clause.” Dean said it is also a violation of federal criminal law, “including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony to defraud the United States or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”     1:13:26 PM    comment []

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Liar, Liar. Your Pants Are on Fire! Comments by the Parodist   I have heard from a source that we should expect some explosive news in a few days. A congressional committee is about to release a report on what the president knew about 9/11 prior to the events. The news will be shocking. According to my source, the CIA gave a very detailed, specific report to the president. It was impossible for the president not to have known the events were coming. But speaking of the CIA and its reports, don't think for a minute that the president is off the hook because of George Tenet's statements that he alone is responsible for false information in the President's State of the Union address. First, there's so much falsity in the speech, the prez could start a cottage industry with it.  But if you want to put on your Sherlock's hat, take a look at what the CIA director said the CIA did--and look at the words the president spoke. Do that and you'll know we're looking at fraud. But first, if you'd like to know what the argument is and will be in the future, go to www.yuricareport.com and read the text of Tenet's statement and then read the text of the president's State of the Union speech. Just click on them. Here's the deal: If you believe the CIA was coerced by the president into "cooperation" then the president is guilty of high crimes and can be impeached. If you believe the president was an innocent dupe of unscrupulous CIA officials, then he gets away scot free, but George Tenet goes to jail. The president said in his State of the Union address, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Tenet said those 16 words should not have been in the speech. Then Tenet explained the CIA agreed the text in the speech was "factually correct, i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa." But that is not what the President said. He said the government of Britain had "learned" certain scary facts. When governments "learn" something and announce it, citizens pay attention. By citing the British government, the president placed the Niger uranium scam under the official imprimatur of the British government. He legitimized his assertions. Nevertheless the CIA signed off on the president's speech by creating an artifice that misdirected attention to a totally different subject. And because the president's remarks were couched in a ringing endorsement of the British findings as facts, there is no way the English language can be tortured into an interpretation that makes the president's speech true, factual and accurate.  The president was making false statements to the members of Congress and the American people. How could the honorable specialists in the CIA allow it? Mr. Tenet explained it, "agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct." Poor Mr. Tenet. He tried to rise to the occasion. He couldn't help it. He forgot "concur" means "acting together with someone to produce a single effect." Who did the CIA officials act together with?  What pressures were placed on them to agree? If you believe the president was ignorant of the falsity of his speech, you have to say the CIA committed an intentional fraudulent act by concealing, suppressing and withholding vital information affecting the national security of the U.S.  On the other hand, if you believe the president knew the statement he made was false, then he was guilty of fraud. Either way, fraud was committed. Richard Nixon was about to be impeached for abusing his power by manipulating, controlling and interfering with the work of a federal agency. To do so is a criminal offense. George Tenet is acting more like a man who has been coerced to bend the rules--than one who was free to allow his agency to do its job. 10:26:31 AM    comment []

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

The New York Times and FERC Got It Wrong       Comments by The Parodist         The New York Times published an editorial on July 1, 2003, praising the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for its rulings against the energy companies that manipulated the California market. The N.Y. Times made one exception, couching its animadversion in questionable language, the Times mildly reproached the commission for its failure to “take Gov. Gray Davis off the hook for billions in long-term electricity contracts."  The Times went on to explain, "The commission ruled, 2 to 1, that to give him the relief he wanted on the contracts for the other $12 billion would violate the sanctity of the contractual process necessary for free markets—even though these contracts were based on prices inflated, in part, by market manipulation.”    The New York Times missed the point: there is convincing evidence that the original FERC ruling, which stated the California energy crisis was caused equally by an energy shortage as well as market manipulation, is false. El Paso Natural Gas, Reliant, and Duke Power were all manipulating energy supplies by turning their energy off at peak times, which caused shortages!    Salon.com's Scott Rosenberg is right, the press either won’t or can’t think that stories on different topics can be related, but there is also a failure to do investigative research. If some enterprising news organization had researched the FERC’s ruling, they would have found that after two years of investigating the causes of the energy crisis in California, the FERC’s conclusion incredibly mirrored Mr. Cheney’s and Mr. Bush’s conclusions in the National Energy Policy report--which is frozen for all time and which was astonishingly written while California was being fleeced.    How could the FERC have reached a conclusion that is almost identical to the conclusion that was inserted into the National Energy Policy report by an individual who had to have known what caused the crisis?    If someone had researched the matter, they would have found that the California energy crisis was relied upon heavily by the Bush administration. The crisis was so important to the White House that it was referred to 110 times in the National Energy Policy report! Of the 110 references, at least 105 essentially said, “The California crisis can happen again throughout the U.S.—it can happen in any state-- unless we change our energy policy.”  After 105 repetitions, the mind begins to believe.   But in the middle of the National Energy Policy report, an astonishing admission lies unnoticed by the world: an insertion was made that completely contradicts the 105 California references. The Bush administration suddenly admitted that the California crisis could not happen in any other state because all other states have structural rules that prevent manipulation. The report then goes on to blame California for its faulty rules, and that blame was mimicked two years later by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s rulings.    How could the White House have had such foreknowledge? Officials actually anticipated what it took two years of investigation for FERC to conclude. How did the White House know the causes before Californians had a clue?    Keep in mind that Richard Nixon was about to be impeached because he manipulated a federal agency and attempted to control its conclusions.   In trying to determine what has happened, to account for the Bush White House foreknowledge, we either have to believe that a supernatural prophetic spectre passed over the White House, or, it was just a lucky guess that made officials insert a passage into the National Energy Policy report that contradicted everything previously stated by the report, or we have to conclude that White House officials knew about the fraud at the time the fraud was being committed.   This raises questions of collusion, accessories during the fact, and conspiracy allegations. We’re not going to know the answers unless investigations or lawsuits are filed. And we're not going to get officials to act if the people of California don't care that they were robbed and raped.   Scott Rosenberg is right, California should be pursuing impeachment proceedings against FERC, and I would add: against Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.    Is that the only thing that can be done?  No. I think California has to become very creative and to think outside the usual avenues and methods. Law suits have been filed by the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch against Mr. Cheney for refusing to turn over documents showing who advised him in the writing of the National Energy Policy report.   Since actual crimes were committed: why shouldn’t California file a class action RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization) case against the White House and FERC?  It can be filed as a civil action where the penalty is treble damages. Although no one has ever filed a RICO action against a president, the rewards to Californians and to the governor would be worth the effort—not to mention the impact upon this country and the world.       Editor's note:  For a detailed report with links to documents see the article “Fraud Traced to the White House” at http://www.yuricareport.com.     2:57:29 PM    comment []

Sunday, June 29, 2003

The Feds Claim Poor  Miss California Seduced Her Rapists     The Parodist         Editor's Note:  This story was written in response to Scott Rosenberg's blog suggesting that Californian's should be impeaching FERC rather than the governor. http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2003/06/27.html#a388         The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is usually called “FERC” and it has lost its marbles. The poor thing has become unhinged. Its logical thinking resembles Rush Limbaugh’s argument that in order to be fair and principled, congress must give child tax credits to the childless.   Just think how salacious the two republican commissioners (Pat Wood III, the Chairman and Nora Brownell, both appointees of President Bush) have become. According to them, Miss California is the biggest hussy in the union:   “Why she flaunted herself in front of the world, inviting her own rape. She made holes in her apparel, which were definitely provocative openings that allowed glimpses of her nudity and private parts. She tossed her body around seductively, lifted up her skirts and with such behavior aroused the helpless energy companies into an uncontrollable desire to gang rape her. So naturally they abused her and had their way with her.  But they couldn’t help it. It was all her fault so she has to pay all those contracts she signed.”   Oh, poor unhinged FERC, can’t you see those contracts she signed as she struggled to free herself from the rapists were made under duress?  Nope. Old Pat Wood categorized those contracts as “fair, negotiated, hard-fought deals.” I think he got the “hard fought” part kind of twisted, don’t you?   FERC has unwittingly copied an oft-repeated defense of convicted rapists. (Even some murderers and con men have used it.) It’s “The victim made me do it,” defense. The only problem is the law consistently rejects it. But as I said, FERC can’t help it. Its sunk to absurdity. Its regulatory job forgotten and overridden by the rules in the loony bin where the inmates are in charge.     Take a look at poor Pat Wood III, the Chairman of FERC. He can’t help it. Ken Lay (the former head of Enron) recommended him for his first job with Governor Bush way back in Texas. It wasn’t his fault he was appointed to head the energy commission in Texas. (Wood denies that Lay had anything to do with his appointment. He wrote a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman stating that he knew Bush had not relied on Ken Lay’s endorsement since during his job interview with Bush, he was able to read, upside-down and across the Governor’s desk, the actual letter Bush relied on in appointing him—and it wasn’t Lay’s!)   Well then, there he was minding his own business in Texas and up comes that upstart Ken Lay again. This time Lay was appointed to the presidential transition team under Dick Cheney. His job was to interview applicants to the FERC. It wasn’t Pat Wood’s fault Ken Lay recommended him again, this time George W. was going to be president. It wasn’t Pat Wood’s fault that he got the job again. And lo and behold, it happened so fast, poor Pat Wood was stuck in the middle of a crisis in California, a state he didn’t even know was in the U.S. Well naturally, he didn’t order any investigation. He let his staff plug along on eliminating all the various possibilities for the cause of the California energy crisis, and that let him count the ways for two years.   And of course poor Pat Wood never did read the National Energy Policy Report published on May 16, 2001. The one, you know, put out by Dick Cheney and his task force. So poor Pat Wood didn’t know that the prez and the vice prez left their fingerprints in the energy report, revealing they had to have known and had to have remained silent while the rapists were in the act of raping poor Miss California. They never blew a whistle. They just sat back and watched. Oh dear. Scott Rosenberg was right when he said that the unfolding story in California is “a big story.”  But the story is the fodder that could bring down the presidency—not just the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.     For a detailed report with links to documents see the article “Fraud Traced to the White House” at http://www.yuricareport.com.             11:39:05 PM    comment []