Author: James Bovard

Bill Moyers Journal  episode on “Buying the War” on PBS is a great expose on how media groveling to Bush administration falsehoods and absurdities helped lead to the Iraq war.

The program focuss on the villains and bootlickers in the press.  It also contained interviews with some of the courageous reporters – such as Warren Stroebel and Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder – who saw through & reported the Bush administration’s frauds months before the war began.   Charles Hanley, an Associated Press reporter who went with the UN inspection teams in Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, talked about how editors would delete his comments about how the Bush administration’s claims on WMDs were being proven wrong.   Norman Solomon, the author of War Made Easy,  made excellent comments on the institutional cowardice and groveling of the mainstream media.   Unfortunately, the program did not include any reference to Antiwar.com’s truth-telling long before “Shock and Awe” hit Baghdad.

Dan Rather told Moyers that in every newsroom in the country, there is fear of getting “the reputation of being a troublemaker” – thus making journalists and editors shy away from challenging the honesty of the White House.

Dan Rather at least had the gumption to be interviewed, despite some disgraceful things he said on the air after 9/11 about kowtowing to Bush.  Almost all  the chickenhawk columnists and pundits chickened out – didn’t even have the gumption to sit down in front of  Moyers and defend themselves.

If you get a chance to see the program (it airs at a different time in various PBS markets), it is definitely worth catching.   The transcript is already online here. 

Comments on this topic are welcome at my blog here.

Congress amended the Insurrection Act last September to make it far easier for the president to declare martial law. I go into the cheery details in a piece in the April 23 issue of the American Conservative:

How many pipe bombs might it take to end American democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago.

The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on Sept. 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order,” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

The full text of the piece is posted at my blog here, where comments & caterwaulings are welcome.

The District of Columbia is trying to fix its image, so it is spending $150,000 to choose a new motto for the city.  

A Washington Post article on the search for a catchy slogan made the mistake of permitting reader suggestions. Some of the initial proposals:

*Where Some Tourists Come to Die

*Zimbabwe Without the Passport

*Eat here and get shot

*The Most Self-Important City in the World

It would be great to come up with a motto for DC that captured Washington’s role as headquarters of the war machine & contemporary imperialism.   Suggestions are welcome at my blog here.

Former US United Nations Ambassador John Bolton told the BBC today that he was “damned proud” of how the U.S. intentionally blocked efforts to achieve a ceasefire last summer when Israel was bombing Beirut and many other locales in Lebanon.

The BBC summarized Bolton’s comments: “A former top American diplomat says the US deliberately resisted calls for a immediate ceasefire during the conflict in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Former ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the BBC that before any ceasefire Washington wanted Israel to eliminate Hezbollah’s military capability.”

Bolton said it was “perfectly legitimate and good politics” for Israel to seek to crush Hezbollah.   The fact that the Israelis used U.S. bombs to wreak death and destruction throughout Lebanon is apparently irrelevant.   More than a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed by the Israeli government, with the Bush team cheering on each detonation.

AIPAC, the most powerful lobby in DC, bragged of its role in blocking any ceasefire.  (A good critique of AIPAC’s role in the Lebanon carnage is here).  

Bolton captures the arrogance and total hypocrisy of the Bush war on terrorism.  In a meeting last August, Bolton  “implied that because Lebanon harbored Hezbollah, Lebanese lives were forfeit,” according to a UN official who heard Bolton commenting in meetings at the time.

Neither AIPAC nor the Bush team suffered any backlash from  Christian fundamentalists as a result of Israeli bombing of Christian villages.  Lebanese Christians despise and oppose Hezbollah – but they were Lebanese so they apparently deserved to die.

As I wrote in blogs last summer, both Hezbollah and the Israeli government were guilty of mass murder.  But the Bush administration’s absolute support (and re-arming) of a government that was intentionally slaughtering civilians is a crime that must not be forgot.  

Comments & contrary views welcome at my blog here.

Murray Waas, one of the best investigative journalists in DC, has a new piece on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s role in derailing a Justice Department investigation of his own possible criminality. Waas notes at the National Journal:

Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.

Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.

Waas’s superb work greatly advanced the exposure of the White House’s role in smearing an undercover CIA agent. And Waas may now have an even bigger fish – especially if Bush knew that Gonzo was a target of the investigation that Bush derailed.

Comments/condemnations welcome at my blog here.

Attorney General Gonzales is dead meat.  His exit is only a question of time.  (I been wrong before, but….)

I think the Senate Dems will not confirm some obvious hatchet man as the replacement for Gonzales.   Bush has “benefitted” from two Attorney Generals who were profoundly dishonest and demagogic.  No matter what the Bush administration did, they could be counted on to rubberstamp it as legal – or “close enough for government work” legal.

If the next Attorney General is halfway honest and opens the files of what has been done since 2001,  even damn moderates will be shocked.   There are bombshells waiting to detonate on the torture scandal, on Iraq, and on other dishonest and illegal gross abuses.

This year could be more entertaining politically than I expected.

Comments/corrections welcome at my blog here.