Let's Compare Clinton's Phony Email "Scandal" and Dick Cheney's Fetish for Secrecy

by Nomad

After searching in vain since in March of last year, wasting time and spending millions, the Republican Party still expects to find something on about Hillary Clinton's emails. They've already admitted the investigation were politically-motivated.
Too bad these tireless and principled investigators were not around when Vice President Dick Cheney was fighting to keep his secrets classified.

Things have a dreadful habit of backfiring for the Republicans. The more they blustered about President Bill Clinton's adultery the higher his approval rating climbed. By and large, the public thought it was a case of too much about too too little. 

It seems like the party has learned absolutely nothing. Take the fruitless email investigation and the search for.. what are they searching for?. Does anybody remember?

We do know how it began.

Investigation Ad Nauseum

The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee Investigation started out, as we all know, as a search for culpability in the deaths of State Department officials in the Benghazi attacks, which left four dead. 

After two agonizing years (filled with unsupported but damaging leaks to the press) the committee found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.  (Presumably, that would include the appointed Secretary of State.)

On the Benghazi investigation, more than $3,500,000 was thrown away. That figure exceeds the budget of the entire House Intelligence Committee. and does not include "significant expenditures made by the State Department and Defense Department to find and declassify material requested by the committee or the expense of witness travel for those who work for the government."

A miserable flop of a smear. So, what to do now, they asked? Why not a start a new investigation into Democratic candidate's use of a private email server? With the help of the media, the new so-called scandal investigation dragged on and on.

It didn't go smoothly. 

In October, false accusations by Chairman Trey Gowdy forced the CIA to step in with a rebuttal. 

Gowdy’s accusation was that Secretary Clinton had sent an email containing "some of the most protected information in our intelligence community, the release of which could jeopardize not only national security but human lives.”

Totally untrue. No apology or clarification. The investigation pressed on as it does today. 

How much will be spent on this investigation is anybody's guess. It won't be cheap. As one source noted:

Rep. Gowdy now states the committee will continue its work into 2016 raising its cost to taxpayers to more than $6,000,000, casting his inaction as the result of the Obama administration’s slow pace at producing requested documents, a questionable premise.

Critics of the committee (and the numbers are growing) have called the investigation as nothing short of a taxpayer funded witch hunt of a leading presidential candidate. 

Supporters of the Republican-led investigations say Hillary must be guilty of something. However, many in the GOP seem to forget when it came to keeping secrets. nothing could surpass the overt duplicity of former vice-president Dick Cheney. 

Bush's Unending Lies: Why Deceptions about Iraq May Be His Only Legacy

by Nomad

Former president George W. Bush's recent comments about Iraq demonstrated that his skill at deception and self-deception is undiminished by time. 
It will probably be the only thing he will be remembered for.

The other day former president George W. Bush was on NPR plugging his book on his father, 41: A Portrait of My Father. While presumably whitewashing his father's career, Bush took a moment to whitewash his own. 

In that interview Bush was asked whether he thought Iraq was safer now compared with when Saddam Hussein was in power. What would Iraq be like today if we hadn't invaded?  

"One could envision a nuclear arms race between Iran and Iraq. The man, Saddam Hussein, would have a lot of revenue as a result of high prices of oil."

Actually this is an outright lie. 

Since 1991, sanctions on exports and imports administrated by the UN had made all exports of oil tightly controlled. Admittedly it wasn't perfect and Saddam was able to find some loopholes. (This is the Middle-East where no rule is entirely fixed and black markets can be found everywhere.)

However, to claim that Iraq could have found the financing for a atomic weapons program is absolute nonsense. In fact, The government of Iraq declined UN offers to ease sanctions which would have enabled Iraq to sell limited quantities of oil to meet its people's needs. Saddam refused in order to effectively hold his own people hostages and to have all sanctions removed. 

The UN did not let up the pressure on the Iraqi government and set up the much-criticized Oil for Food Program in 1995.  Corruption might have been rife in that program but there was never any evidence that money was diverted for any atomic weapons project. 

In fact, 25% Iraqi oil export proceeds allowed under the sanctions were used to the Compensation Fund for war reparation payments, 2.2% went to United Nations administrative and operational costs and 0.8% for the weapons inspection program. The rest (72%) went to humanitarian purposes.
That doesn't leave very much to spend on a clandestine nuclear weapons research program.

Breaking it Down

Immediately after this statement, to preempt reality from wrecking his myth- he added

"And even though there wasn't, you know, a -- we found a dirty bomb, for example -- he had the capacity to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And so there's -- you know, it's all very hypothetical."

The statement is typical of his fumbling oratorical style but there's more to it than mere incoherence. Bush tries to cram so much misrepresentation in one remark, it's hard to know how to break it down.
Let's give it a shot.

The Iraqi Invasion, The French Warning and Fox News

by Nomad

As the Republic of Iraq faces its first existential crisis since the evacuation of American troops, it is important to take a look back to the time before the invasion, to the days before the crossing of the Iraqi Rubicon.
The events of this week shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who has a memory. After all, the French warned us that this would probably happen.  

With Iraq is such a mess, and Republican conservatives attempting to blame the Obama administration, it is a good time to review things. Let's go back to the months before the invasion of Iraq. The US worked hard to get the UN on board to approve of military action, to sanction the use of force. US troops had already been deployed and were waiting in the Saudi Arabian desert for the "thumbs up" sign. 

But that is when France and, to a lesser extent, Germany, threw a monkey wrench into what had seemed to be a solid coalition of the West. Colin Powell had pulled out all stops to convince the members, with diagrams of mobile chemical weapons factories and even holding up a fake bottle of anthrax.
This form of persuasion, (scare tactics, some said at the time), did not have the desired effects. 

The French ambassador to the UN at the time, Dominique de Villepin, gave his famous speech, in which he told the UN that while nobody was ruling out the use of military action, the inspections and the use of crippling sanctions on Saddam's government should be allowed to continue. Hans Blix, the UN chief inspector, had so far found no chemical weapons and should be allowed to continue the systematic search.

In a calm and cool delivery, he proposed regular meetings of the security council to review the progress. Here is an excerpt of that speech.

In that 14 February 2003 speech, he warns what that any direct military intervention would naturally also involve a difficult peace. It could, he pointed, out also lead to greater instability and provide a suitable environment for the spread of terrorist groups in that region.

Naturally the Bush administration was shaken by this formidable challenge to the Anglo-American war plan for Iraq. Without UN approval, the invasion of Iraq- even with a coalition, could be considered an aggressive and illegal action.