So Many Secrets, So Few Shredders

As a parent, nothing makes me more nervous and suspicious than absolute silence. If kids aren’t making noise, it’s a pretty safe bet there is trouble afoot. Likewise, a quiet Bush White House has me on edge. This is already the most secretive administration in American History and now they have clammed up like never before. With so many secrets to hide and so many fronts to defend, chances are, they are up to no good at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

With Bush’s poll numbers in the toilet, the word Impeachment is being bandied about. Even Zogby got off his ass and finally posed the question to the American people (after being paid by AfterDowningStreet.org) and surprise, surprise, 53% support an impeachment inquiry if Bush lied us into war. We all know that the intelligence was cherry picked, massaged and in some cases manufactured so the inquiry should be a slam-dunk, right? Wrong. This administration has classified more documents than any in our history, making the truth almost impossible to decipher. Anyone (Patrick Fitzgerald, the GAO, Senators and House members) trying to piece together a cohesive case against any member of this White House will hit this “classified documents” wall. Many decades from now a full accounting of the crimes perpetrated by this administration may come to light, but even that depends on a press that is willing to “catapult the propaganda” to get at the truth.

In the short term, the most we can hope for is that the public will infer from the administrations lack of candor that they have something to hide. This still leaves those of us trying to expose the fraud within our government open to the charge of being nothing more than “conspiracy theorists”. Without the facts all we have is theory, which in reality is the best possible conclusion based on incomplete data, usually assumed to be true until disproved when new facts come to light. But we no longer live in a country where facts and the scientific process hold the same power they once did. Just look at the recent CBS poll showing that 51% of Americans believe that God created humans in their current form. That is a frightening number, but it explains a lot. If the majority of Americans believe an unseen man in the sky created the earth and its inhabitants in 6 days a mere 10,000 years ago contrary to all scientific findings, why wouldn’t they believe that Saddam Hussein perpetrated 9/11 and was on the brink of launching nuclear weapons at the Continental U.S.? Why would they question the official story of 9/11? Would scientific data in the form of exit polls convince them of the impossibility of official vote tallies that defy explanation in the 2004 election? These are the most significant stories of our time and they are met with media silence and a citizenry incapable of deciphering fact from fiction.

There are serious questions regarding the official story of 9/11 and although more and more people are waking up to the inconsistencies, there is a significant segment of the population who will never question our government’s part in the disaster. For them, it is easier to believe that Islamic Fundamentalists who hate our freedom struck a mighty blow in the name of Allah, than it is to consider who benefited most from 9/11 and why it was an ex-CIA asset that was the mastermind. There are a few brave Senators and Congressmen using official channels to get more information from the White House and even speaking out in public about their concerns. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have been fighting it out with the FBI and the Office of the Inspector General, to release their findings to the public regarding investigations into what our government knew prior to 9/11 (here to view the letter). Both investigations stem from allegations made by Sibel Edmonds an FBI whistleblower and Indira Singh a Wall Street whistleblower (for an amazingly candid presentation by Indira Singh at the Citizen’s Commission on 9/11 go here for downloadable segments). New on the scene but just as vocal recently is Rep. Curt Weldon, R-PA, who has been trying to get traction on the Pentagon’s secret group “Able Danger” who apparently knew all about Mohammad Atta (and others) before the 9/11 tragedy but was conspicuously left out of the 9/11 Commission Report (here for an interview with Rep. Weldon on CNN). Even the Congress with its constitutional authority to check the power of the White House is not allowed to know what they are up to.

In addition to the unanswered questions surrounding 9/11, there are ongoing investigations into the 2004 Presidential election. Much of the work of uncovering the truth is being done in Ohio, as it was ground zero for the 2004 shenanigans. Rep. John Conyers has been tireless in his efforts to expose the inconsistencies in the official vote counts in his state, all done without the benefit of media attention. Although the most significant findings of election fraud will most likely come out of the local criminal investigations into the Coingate scandal and Tom Noe’s illegal contributions to the Bush/Cheney campaign from funds stolen from Ohio’s Worker’s Compensation Fund. For those who want to believe that Ohio in 2004 was a fluke and explained away by the ridiculous assertion that Bush voters were shy on election day and avoided being exit polled, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Ohio Free Press have blown that myth out of the water with their most recent article detailing the miraculous wins for the Conservative Right in their state on election day 2005. Sticking our heads in the sand a la John Kerry will not get us out of the mess we are in. Kerry may believe the Presidency was stolen from him in 2004, but unless he is willing to talk openly about it, he is merely dead weight dragging the party and our democracy down.

On the bright side, there are some government leaders fulfilling their responsibility to the people and attempting to get at the truth of what the Bush administration is trying so desperately to hide. With so many investigations into so many different aspects of this criminal regime, it is only a matter of time before we the people will know what has really happened in this country and how close we came to losing it all (assuming we haven’t already). No doubt the details will come to light when it no longer matters and when those who perpetrated the crimes are long gone, but whether they come out at all depends on what becomes of reporting in this country. Corporate controlled media will not expose the lies because they were complicit in them. Without the help of the evening news and the 24-hour cable news networks, none of what has happened could have occurred. They pounded the drumbeat to war and beamed it into every home in America, they legitimized the 2004 election and they sold the 9/11 Commission Report as the definitive truth. The MSM has become nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Bush administration, but that does not mean that reporting is dead, not by a long shot.

On-line independent media outlets have provided information to the public that was essentially banned from our newspapers and television news shows. Not banned as in they were told by the government not to report on certain stories, but it was simply not in their best interest to do so. What we have seen, or haven’t seen, from the MSM is self-censorship driven by greed. The pittance they receive from advertisers based on how many of our eyes are glued to the screen, pales in comparison to the cash giveaways provided by the Bush administration. In that light, who could blame them for dumping us overboard in favor of the bigger cash cow. Corporate ownership of the fourth estate is the death knell of democracy, but the estate isn’t gone, it’s just been broken up and sold. How about that, the market took care of that monopoly all on it’s own, economic theory at work. With television news turned infotainment and our nations newspapers turned stenography readouts, more and more people are getting their news on-line and although the big boys are there as well, the genesis of information is increasingly coming from the smaller, independent outlets. This can only be good for the country and it provides hope for a rebuilding of the estate we have lost.

So regardless of the news that 53% of Americans believe Bush should be impeached if he lied about pre-war intelligence, an impeachment hearing is unlikely, there are simply too many secrets to protect and too many roadblocks already set up to make sure it never gets that far. If by some miracle, the impeachment process does get started, we should all buy stock in manufacturers of shredding machines as they will likely be working overtime in the White House, the Capitol Building and the Corporate headquarters of every major news outlet in the country (well, maybe not Fox, because really, what’s the point). We may also want to consider that some of the 53% who favor impeachment, overlap with the 51% who seem willing to believe anything however far fetched, in fact the more unbelievable the better and preferably without concrete facts to back it up. An Impeachment trial filled with facts and figures but without salacious details of sexual misconduct simply wouldn’t hold their interest.