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Today's Stories

June 1, 2005

Jason Leopold
When President's Lie

May 31, 2005

Sen. Mike Gravel
Thank You, Mark Felt: We Need a New Deep Throat

David Krieger
US Nuclear Hypocrisy

Tad Daley
The Nuclear Me-Too Club

Joshua Frank
Pelosi at AIPAC: Israel Comes First

Richard Gott
Chavez Leads the Way

Norman Solomon
Time to Get Serious About Impeachment

Tom Segev
Our Man in the Territories

Walter Brasch
Killing Americans with Secrecy

Diana Johnstone
The French "Non"

 

May 28 / 30, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
There's Their Way or the Galloway

Richard Lichtman
We Wuz Framed! the Consolations of George Lakoff

Sharon Smith
The Road to Abu Ghraib

Paul Craig Roberts
Bush Opts for Civil War in Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Whigged Out: the Dems Have Become Merely a Vestigial Opposition Party

Ramzy Baroud
Muslims Were Desecrated, Not Just Their Holy Book

Brian Cloughley
Why Are Nukes OK for You, But Not for Us?

Fred Gardner
Advice from a Lawyer About Medical Pot

Lee Sustar
Chavez Gets Proactive

Joshua Frank
Isikoff Comes Clean: "Nobody in the US Said a Word, Until the Riots"

Justin E.H. Smith
What About the People? a Report from Romania

Jackie Corr
A Montana History Lesson on Assfulness

Michael Kimaid
Bush as Ahab

Toufic Haddad
Lessons from the Reversal of the AUC Boycott

Justin Taylor
The Fear of Paul Virilio

Amir Butler
Searching for a Saladin

Ben Tripp
Insomnia and Sarcasm

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel, Davies and Louise

May 27, 2005

Gary Leupp
It Really is a Crusade!

Daniel Estulin
Infiltrating Bilderberg 2005

Kevin Zeese
Iraq Withdrawal Vote: If Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones Can See the Light, Why Can't Nancy Pelosi?

Robert Fisk
Mubarak's Goon Squads

Dave Zirin
Why Pat Tillman's Parents Are No Longer Silent

Website of the Day
Stuckists

 

May 26, 2005

Yuki Tanaka
Firebombing and Atom Bombing

Ray McGovern
Bolton, the Monomaniac Who Would Be Ambassador

Arthur Mitzman
Agenda for a Sustainable Europe

Jack Random
Afghanistan: the Forgotten Occupation

Britt Bailey and Brian Tokar
Big Food Strikes Back

Rebecca Rush
The New Banana Wars: Chiquita's Threat to the Caribbean Islands

Jorge Mariscal
Santiago v. Rumsfeld

Paul Craig Roberts
Uncovering a DOJ Cover-up: The Murder of Kenneth Trentadue

Website of the Day
The F Word

 

 

May 25, 2005

Camilo Mejia
Prisoners of Conscience

Dave Lindorff
Brain Dead Democrats

William S. Lind
Of Cabbages, Cessnas and Kings

Chris Floyd
Tattoo Nation: Abu Ghraib as Normalcy

Brian Cloughley
The Stench of "Progress": the Torture and the Lies Continue

Lenni Brenner
The Plot to Stigmatize My Book on Nazi-Zionist Collaboration

Sean Cain
A Review of Naomi Klein's "The Take"

Karl Shepard
Extinction, Kansas and "Intelligent Design"

John Ross
Sweet Revenge at Terminal Island

Website of the Day
SWARM the Minutemen

 


May 24, 2005

Dave Zirin
Palestine's Big Visitor: Not Laura, but Ronaldo

Michele Bollinger
Criminalizing Abortion in S. Carolina: Why Did Gabriela Flores Go to Jail?

Winslow Wheeler
The Pork War

Uri Avnery
Wagner at the Holocaust Memorial

Michael Donnelly
Behind the Green(back) Curtain

Joshua Frank
Chavez's Economy: Is It Sustainable?

Stephen Dunifer
The Folly of Media Reform

Paul Craig Roberts
Is Bush a Sith Lord?

 

May 23, 2005

Esther Sassaman / Thomas Nagy
An Exclusive Interview with George Galloway

Mike Whitney
Free Jose Padilla: Three Years in Prison, Not a Shred of Evidence

Ramzy Baroud
Fallout from a Forged War: Battling Windmills While Iraq Burns

Michael Dickinson
Pictures at an Exhibition: Censoring the "Carnival of Chaos"

Walter Brasch
In Praise of Bob Barr

Dick J. Reavis
The Newsweek Scandal: an Unmentioned Detail

Maria Tomchick
Galloway and the US Press

Norman Solomon
Let's Play "Media Jeopardy"

Kevin Zeese
Inventing a Pretext for War: an Inte4rview with James Bamford

Website of the Day
Drawings of Darfur: Genocide Through Children's Eyes

 

 

May 21 / 22, 2005

David H. Price
CIA Skullduggery in Academia

Gabriel García Márquez
My Visit to the Clinton White House, Bearing a Message from Fidel on Terrorism

Oren Ben-Dor
To Create Academic Freedom in Israel, a Boycott is Needed

Gary Leupp
Nights in White House Satin with Jeff Gannon

Laith al-Saud
An Anatomy of the Iraqi Resistance

Elaine Cassel
Bush and the Angry God: Twilight of Secular Democracy in America?

Greg Moses
The Saints of Mischief and Halliburton

Fred Gardner
Martyring Dr. Carol Wolman

Dave Lindorff
The GOP's Police State

Alan Maass
Uzbekistan's Karimov: Bush's Favorite Terrorist?

William Blum
The American Myth Industry

Tom Crumpacker
Send Posada Carriles to Venezuela

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Newsweek: a Contest of Hypocrisies

Doug Giebel
The Grand Illusion

Evelyn J. Pringle
No Child Left Unmedicated: TeenScreen, State-drugging and Suicide

Carolyn Baker
Spiritual Abuse by the Religious Right

Chris Floyd
Justice in JebWorld

Frederick B. Hudson
Black and Gay?: a Review of "Brother to Brother"

Ben Tripp
Him Talk Plenty Long Time: Busting the Filibuster

Poets' Basement
Davies, Engel and Louise

 

 

May 20, 2005

Dave Lindorff
Newsweek and White House Hypocrisy

Kevin Zeese
As Insurgency Increases, New US Military Recruits Fall

Paul de Rooij
"Private": a Film in Search of a Cliché

Christopher Brauchli
How Insurance Companies Exploited 9/11

Mark Engler
Triumph Over Debt?

Joshua Frank
Bush to Dine with Porn Star

Robert Jensen
TV Talk, No Evidence Required

Jeffery R. Webber
Bolivia Erupts

 

 

May 19, 2005

Bill Forman
An Interview with Alexander Cockburn

Stan Goff
Hey, Democrats, Listen to Galloway and Learn Something

Neve Gordon
From Ghettos to Frontiers: What Will Happen After Israel Withdraws from Gaza

Michael Dickinson
The Trouble with Menwith: Tagging British Peace Activists

Karyn Strickler
The Texas Nexus: How Racial and Political Gerrymandering United

Andrew Freedman
Nazi Science at NIH

Paul Craig Roberts
The Politics and Economics of Outsourcing

 

 

May 18, 2005

Jean Bricmont
Vive La France?

Laura Carlsen
Bush's Posada Carriles Quandry: an Anti-Cuba Terrorist is Still a Terrorist

Mike Whitney
The Secret Raids of Alberto Gonzales: 10,000 Swept Up

Joshua Frank
Flushing the Koran: Why Newsweek Got It Right

George Galloway
Thusly, I Humiliated Norm Coleman (and Christopher Hitchens)

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Writing Tickets for American War Crimes

Dwight D. Eisenhower
How the GOP will Destroy Itself

Dave Lindorff
The Plot to Make the PATRIOT Act Even Worse


May 17, 2005

Mickey Z.
GIs Behaving Badly

Petuuche Gilbert
The People of Acoma Still Fight to be Free

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies That Kill: Why Isn't Bush in the Dock?

Ramzy Baroud
The New Palestinian Uprising

Robert Jensen / Pat Youngblood
Pinning the Blame on Newsweek

Stan Cox
Poisoning Patancheru: the Severe Side Effects of India's Drug Industry

Dave Zirin
American Anthem: Ozzie Guillen and Fining for Freedom

Diana Barahona
Reporters Without Borders Unmasked

Website of the Day
Revolutionary Flower Pot Society

May 16, 2005

Michael Gillespie
The Family Released a Statement: Death Notices for the Warrior Theocracy

Jason Leopold
BP Stains the Arctic

Jesse Muldoon
How Many Schools Left Behind?

Norman Solomon
Media and the War: "The Bombs in Iraq Explode at Home"

Robert Cray
Twenty

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq is a Bloody No Man's Land

Website of the Day
Bolton's Divorce Papers: She Took It All Away, Including Most of the Furniture

 

May 14 / 15, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Join the 14 Per Cent Club!

Saul Landau
Lessons from Vietnam: Wars Kill Empires as Well as People

Gary Leupp
Whither Yale? Towards the Imperial University

JoAnn Wypijewski
The Glory that is Lockhart, Texas

Ben Tripp
The Wayward Airplane: a Cautionary Tale

Brian J. Foley
Was Jesus Gay?

Tom Barry
Bolton the Eavesdropper

Mitchell Verter
Barbarous Oaxaca: Indigenous Rights Groups Meet the "Law of the Club"

Mike Ferner
War on COs: Army Files Additional Charges Against Kevin Benderman

Dan Smith
Perceiving Darfur

Mark Scaramella
Death with Pitfalls

Don Fitz
Mommy, Is This a Finger in My Rice Puffs?: Splicing Human DNA into the Food Chain

Diane Farsetta
PR Industry Imitates Big Tobacco: the Senate's "Fake News" Hearings

Michael Dickinson
Soldier Crawling: Military Conscription in Turkey

Ron Jacobs
The Jackson State Murders

Fred Gardner
"Hydroponics? Ridiculous!": A Real Farmer Looks at Medical Marijuana

Farrah Hassen
Far From Heaven: a Review of Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven"

Douglas Valentine
50 Cent's Plea

Poets' Basement
Louise, Ford, Engel, & Albert

Website of the Weekend
Military Base Closings and the South

May 13, 2005

Tom Stephens
A Chronology of US War Crimes and Torture, 1975-2005

Patrick Cockburn
"They Destroyed Everything"

Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman, Imperial Chronicler

Chris Floyd
Miami Vice: the Sleazy World of Jeb Bush

Jenna Orkin
Ground Zero's Toxic Dust

Dave Lindorff
Googling for Fun

Joshua Frank
Yale Fires an Acclaimed Anarchist Scholar: an Interview with David Graeber

Website of the Day
Botero: Pinta El Horror de Abu Ghraib

 

May 12, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
America is Losing: More Phony Jobs Hype

Uri Avnery
Death of a Myth

Greg Moses
Neo-Con Logic at the Border

Carolyn Baker
The Politics of Dominionism: the New Religious Right in America

Pat Williams
Amateurish High Jinks on Roadless Areas

William S. Lind
Reality Gap: the Myth of US Invincibilty

Jack Random
The Dubious Wisdom of George W. Bush

Gary Leupp
Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey Goldberg

 

 

May 11, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
The Rise, Fall and Rise of Ahmed Chalabi: King of Jordan to Pardon His $300 Million Bank Swindle

Kevin Zeese
The Occupation Gets More Saddam-like Every Day

Christopher Brauchli
Coffee, Tea or Torture?: A One Way Ticket to Uzbekistan

Zalman Amit
The Collapse of Academic Freedom in Israel: Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University

Robert Shull
Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops: Senate Gives DHS Power to Waive All Laws

Mike Whitney
God, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Anti-Arabic Week at a Southern High School

Norman Solomon
Political Bluster and the Filibuster

 

May 10, 2005

Richard Drayton
The Imperial Mythology of WW II: an Ethical Blank Check

Dave Zirin
Steve Nash's Brilliant Year: Anti-War Hoopster Wins NBA's MVP

Jackie Corr
The Medicare Catch: Mrs. O'Hara's Windfall

Dave Lindorff
Silence of the Scams: Economists on China

Michael Donnelly
From Roadless to Clueless: the Great Stillborn Eco Victory

Reza Fiyouzat
Nomadic Abstracts

Scott Parkin
Taking Direct Action Against Halliburton

Stephen Babcock
The Burden of Knowing Better

Alan Farago
Florida, Water and Lobbyists

Michael Neumann
Naomi's Courage

Website of the Day
One Nation Under Plagiarism

 

May 9, 2005

Louis Proyect
Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond, Greenwasher

Robert Fisk
"Mission Accomplished": the Occupation, Year Two

Kevin Zeese
Concientious Objection on Trial: the Court Martial of Keith Benderman

Joshua Frank
Kerry Bashes Gay Marriage

Sasha Kramer
A Mother's Day Call for Justice in Haiti's Prisons

Andrew Wimmer
Create and Resist

Jeffrey Webber
Back to the Streets in Bolivia?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Straight to Bechtel

 

May 7 / 8, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Who Beat Hitler?

Gary Leupp
Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism

Saul Landau
Pope Torquemada: Purges, Pedophiles and Cover-Ups

Joe DeRaymond
Autumn of the Revolutionary: Another Look at Daniel Ortega

Daniela Ponce
Seeing Chile in Nepal

Heather Williams
Hollywood Does Enron

Gregory Elich
Zimbabwe's Fight for Justice

Anis Memon
To Cuba and Back

John Chuckman
The Peculiar State: "Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism"

Mike Whitney
Hard Right Rage Against the Truth

Ron Jacobs
Re-Reading "Born on the Fourth of July" as the Iraq War Grinds On

Colin Kalmbacher
Whither Disorder? Ann Coulter and the Texas Police State, Cont.

Lance Selfa
Uprising in Mexico City

Fred Gardner
"Getting High is a Little Like Cuba"

Ben Tripp
Letters on Wittgenstein

Mickey Z.
The Mother of All Days

Richard Joseph
Those Patriotic Magnets

Dr. Susan Block
Come As You Are: Masturbation 101

Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Louise, Nettnin, Engel and Albert

 

 

May 6, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood

Erin Yoshioka
Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison?

Sam Husseini
Talking with Syrians

Dave Lindorff
Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters

Kevin Zeese
Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty

Joshua Frank
An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War

Dan Bacher
Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid

P. Sainath
India's Bloody Water Wars

 

 

May 5, 2005

Carles Mutaner
Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?"

Carl G. Estabrook
Is There Any Hope for the Pope?

Farrah Hassen
The US's Syrian Obsession

Kevin Zeese
"Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta

Michael Leonardi
May Day with an American Soldier in Rome

Bennett Ramberg
The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You

Ray McGovern
The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit

Norman Solomon
Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran

Nicole Colson
The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights

Brian Concannon, Jr.
Clearing the Fences in Haiti

 

 

May 4, 2005

Colin Kalmbacher
Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested

John Walsh
Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War

Greg Moses
Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation"

Ali Khan
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart

Chris Floyd
Ring Them Bells

Linda S. Heard
D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics

Dave Zirin
The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle

William S. Lind
Fool's Paradise

Gary Leupp
Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution

Website of the Day
Kent State, May 4, 1970

 

May 3, 2005

Dave Lindorff
Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice

Brian Cloughley
Halliburton's War Loot

Ira Kurzban
Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers

Seth Sandronsky
Towards Debtors' Prisons?

Gilad Atzmon
The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More

Michael Donnelly
Branding Eco Collapse

Alex Sanchez
Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush?

Peter Linebaugh
Magna Carta and May Day

 

May 2, 2005

Ron Jacobs
Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement

Stan Goff
The Case of Hasan Akbar

Karyn Strickler
Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics

Joshua Frank
Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly

Kevin Zeese
Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam

Vicente Navarro
Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician

 

 

 

April 30 / May 1, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility"

Gabriel Kolko
Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later

Jennifer Loewenstein
The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood

Lee Sustar
City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago

Saul Landau
The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power

T.W. Croft
The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy

Nikolas Kozloff
Fox News v. Hugo Chavez

William Blum
Never-Ending Double Standards

Dave Lindorff
Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly

Joshua Frank
The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls

Doug Giebel
Saving Jane Fonda

Steven Erlanger
A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief

Fred Gardner
Washington State Doctor Harassed

Mike Whitney
Another Mad Bush Press Conference

Kurt Nimmo
Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine

Joe DeRaymond
A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania

Michael Dickinson
Flags

Mickey Z.
May Day at Yankee Stadium

Justin Taylor
The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy

Poets Basement
Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
Save Barbados's Cowpastor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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June 1, 2005

From Watergate to the Downing Street Memo

When Presidents Lie

By JASON LEOPOLD

Tuesday's revelation that W. Mark Felt, the former number two man at the FBI, was the anonymous source known as Deep Throat, who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unravel the Watergate scandal in the pages of the Washington Post 30 years ago should be seen as an important reminder that even the leader of the free world can be devious, corrupt and dishonest.

Some things never change.

The parallels between the Bush and Nixon administrations are eerily familiar. Both bullied the press, were/are highly secretive, obsessed over leaks, engage(d) in massive cover-ups and quickly branded aides as disloyal if they dared to raise questions about the President's policies.

The Washington Post, the very paper that is credited with forcing Nixon's resignation, summed it up perfectly in a Nov. 25, 2003 story on the similarities between the two administrations.

"Bush structures his White House much as Nixon did. Nixon governed largely with four other men: Henry A. Kissinger, H.R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and Charles Colson. This is not unlike the "iron triangle" of aides who led Bush's campaign and the handful of underlings now -- Cheney, chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and communications director Dan Bartlett -- who are in on most top decisions. Nixon essentially ended the tradition of powerful Cabinets in favor of a few powerful White House aides -- a model Bush has followed."

"The most striking similarity is in the area of secrecy and what Nixon staffers called "managing the news." Nixon created the White House Office of Communications, the office that has become the center of Bush's vaunted "message discipline."

Unfortunately, neither the Washington Post nor any other mainstream newspaper or magazine in this country will ever be credited with exposing another Watergate. For one, mainstream reporters just don't have the balls to put their careers on the line to sniff around, ask tough questions, and, perhaps, find sources like W. Mark Felt. Not even Woodward has the muckraking qualities of what Woodward used to have. Worse, editors' at large papers don't encourage reporters to practice that kind of reporting anymore because they don't want to rock the boat or risk losing their jobs or be seen as liberal and therefore become the ire of the blogoshpere.

The sad reality these days, however, is that it takes a scandal such as a president receiving oral sex in the Oval Office by an intern to qualify for above the fold headlines and impeachment. Leading the country into a war under false pretenses? Sorry, not juicy enough.

The Downing Street memo that was unearthed by the Times of London last month should have been the smoking gun that finally resulted in Bush being brought up on High Crimes and Misdemeanor charges under the United States Constitution's impeachment clause. The memo was written a full eight months before the U.S. led invasion in Iraq by Matthew Rycroft, a British national security official, based on notes he took during a July 2002 meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisers, including Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service who had recently visited the White House to meet with Bush administration officials.

Among other things, the memo said:

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route.... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. ...

It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

These are some of the public statements about Iraq that President Bush made after Rycroft revealed in the July 2002 memo that Bush wanted to use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein and that he would say that Iraq had a massive weapons arsenal, was a threat to the U.S. and its neighbors in the Middle East in order to build public support for a case for war:

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
(Radio Address, October 5, 2002)

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." (Cincinnati, Ohio Speech, October 7, 2002).

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." (State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003).

Despite the fact that the memo was splashed across the front pages of dozens of international newspapers, it was relegated to the back pages-or not covered at all-in U.S. papers.

The memo's authenticity has never been called into question by either the Bush administration or Tony Blair's office.

"But the potentially explosive revelation has proven to be something of a dud in the United States," the Chicago Tribune said in a May 17 story.

"The White House has denied the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly to it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war," the Tribune said. "All of this has contributed to something less than a robust discussion of a memo that would seem to bolster the strongest assertions of the war's critics."

How sad for the more than 1,400 soldiers and the tens of thousands of innocent civilians who died in the Iraq war and the thousands more who will no doubt perish as this bogus and unjust war rages on. How much more evidence do we need to pile on in order for those gutless Democrats and those fanatical Republicans in Congress and the Senate to hold this president accountable for either war crimes or defrauding the United States?

One of the key figures during Watergate made a compelling case a couple of years ago for impeachment if President Bush intentionally misled Congress and the public into backing a war against Iraq.

"To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," wrote John Dean, President Richard Nixon's former counsel, in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be 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."

Dean said that statements made by presidents that pertain to national security issues are supposed to be held to a higher standard of truthfulness.

"A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation."

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in early 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.