{"id":612,"date":"2005-10-29T18:00:45","date_gmt":"2005-10-29T22:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2005\/10\/29\/after-the-fall\/"},"modified":"2005-10-29T18:00:45","modified_gmt":"2005-10-29T22:00:45","slug":"after-the-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2005\/10\/29\/after-the-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"After the Fall"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a7281'><\/a><\/p>\n<table width=\"537\" border=\"0\">\n<tr>\n<td height=\"286\">\n<p align=\"justify\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/busshteam.jpg\" width=\"350\" height=\"241\" align=\"left\">The<br \/>\n        sharks are circling. They smell blood in the hurricane-roiled political<br \/>\n        waters of the pool of public opinion. Scooter<br \/>\n        has been thrown under the bus, and Kapitain Karl is hanging by a thread.<br \/>\n        The mainstream media is awash in stories counting the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/10\/30\/politics\/30leak.html?ex=1288324800&amp;en=726319500dfc4360&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss\">leaks<br \/>\n        in the storm tossed Bush ship of state<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">However,  as usual, nobody is talking<br \/>\n          about the real issue, which goes to the core of the course on which<br \/>\n        the country<br \/>\n          has been set by the current administration.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">The bottom line is that the evidence that led the United<br \/>\n        States into the war in Iraq was trumped up. Some of it was disproven<br \/>\n        but not discarded, some was intentionally misinterpreted, some contrary<br \/>\n        reports were ignored or discounted and some was manufactured whole.&nbsp; And<br \/>\n        evidence of this exists.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">There were witnesses. The Republicans in Congress, who<br \/>\n        promised an investigation into the &quot;intelligence failures&quot; leading up<br \/>\n        to the war, are dragging their feet, because they know, or suspect, where<br \/>\n        the trail leads. Cheney, Rove, Rice, Tenet and Wolfowitz, clearly. We<br \/>\n        are even afraid that before this is over we will have to revise our prediction<br \/>\n        of a <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2005\/05\/13#a5084\">New<br \/>\n        Republicant ticket<\/a> of John McCain and Colin Powell in 2006.<br \/>\n        We now believe the ex-Sec of State is doomed to be sucked into the vortex<br \/>\n        of blame for this tragic and historic misdirection of American foreign<br \/>\n        policy.<br \/>\n        When<br \/>\n        he realized the enormity of what was going down, he bailed, but it was<br \/>\n        too late, we fear. Another good man taken down by a nasty scandal not<br \/>\n        of his making. There will be many good men falling on their swords before<br \/>\n        this is over.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Because we are talking high crimes here and not misdemeanors.&nbsp; The<br \/>\n        pugnacious self-righteousness of special prosecutors has been historically<br \/>\n        established and the present iteration is no exception. If there is a<br \/>\n        single memo, notebook, email, or recording, kept by some paranoid official<br \/>\n        trying to cover his (or her) ass, which proves that any of the aforementioned<br \/>\n        officials knew or had reason to believe that a single piece of the evidence<br \/>\n        presented to the US Congress, the United Nations and the American people<br \/>\n        was untrue, unreliable, unrealistic in light of other known facts or in<br \/>\n        any way less than what they presented it to be, they are screwed.&nbsp;Considering<br \/>\n        what that evidence was used for, it may constitute treason. And we believe<br \/>\n        that there are many, many such instances that will come out<br \/>\n        now that the investigation is being broadened.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Make no mistake, it is broadening. This is why the Grand<br \/>\n        Jury was extended.&nbsp; The African Uranium report, and the efforts<br \/>\n        to discredit its debunkers, were one instance in an extensive and coordinated<br \/>\n        strategy to hoodwink the public, the Congress and the UN. As we all know,<br \/>\n        one lie leads to another, in commission, and any experienced investigator<br \/>\n        knows that it works that way in reverse as well.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">The only reason Dubya didn&#8217;t make the list of fabricators<br \/>\n        and prevaricators is our gut instinct that the rest of the guys don&#8217;t<br \/>\n        don&#8217;t let him in on the heavier stuff, both for purposes of plausible<br \/>\n        and convincing denial, and because they don&#8217;t trust him to keep his<br \/>\n        mouth shut. George gets wacky once in a while, and is liable to say<br \/>\n        just about anything.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">But even if Dubya can convincingly plead ignorance and<br \/>\n        isn&#8217;t impeached, imagining him in charge without the grownups around<br \/>\n        borders on the macabre.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Will he panic and try to dismiss the investigators,<br \/>\n        a la Nixon, as a seemingly minor infraction (the break-in or teh leak) starts unraveling<br \/>\n        a web of deceit and malfeasance? Will a secondary figure trying to save<br \/>\n        his career (or his life) reveal a smoking gun, a la John Dean? If this<br \/>\n        case did not involve the gravest betrayal of public trust, the deaths<br \/>\n        of thousands of precious young people and innocent civilians, and a mortal threat to the country<br \/>\n        we all love (as opposed to the country we currently live in), it would<br \/>\n        be an entertaining unraveling.&nbsp; As it is, we can only pray that<br \/>\n        the country can somehow avoid the abyss that yawns ahead.&nbsp; Stay<br \/>\n        tuned&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The sharks are circling. They smell blood in the hurricane-roiled political waters of the pool of public opinion. Scooter has been thrown under the bus, and Kapitain Karl is hanging by a thread. The mainstream media is awash in stories &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2005\/10\/29\/after-the-fall\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}