On July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Richard Nixon. One of the grounds for indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the President. To Drinan, this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals that had already come to be known as "Watergate." The fourteen months of massive B-52 "carpet bombings," which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also kept completely secret from Congress, and the public, until the New York Times reporter William Beecher exposed them.

In recently released transcripts of telephone conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the President ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia using anything that flies on anything that moves." The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that sounds like (at that time General) Alexander Haig laughing.[1]

The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as we see today in Iraq from the present Bush administration. Few now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex that really set Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of Presidential conduct that seems eerily familiar today.

These two administrations, in two different periods of time in American history, seem to use the same tactics of isolation from reality, rage against political opposition, and consistently sacrificing the welfare of the nation at home to what they see as the demands of foreign affairs. All this comes from a narcissistic administration, willing to compromise civil rights, and the very foundation of which this great land was founded, just to achieve their personal agenda.

I take an excerpt from Federalist Paper No. 6; Alexander Hamilton:

‘The ambitious cardinal, who was prime minister to Henry VIII, permitting his vanity to aspire to the triple crown, entertained hopes of succeeding in the acquisition of that splendid prize by the influence of the Emperor Charles V. To secure the favor and interest of this enterprising and powerful monarch, he precipitated England into a war with France, contrary to the plainest dictates of policy, and at the hazard of the safety and independence, as well of the kingdom over which he presided by his counsels, as of Europe in general. For if there ever was a sovereign who bid fair to realize the project of universal monarchy, it was the Emperor Charles V., of whose intrigues Wolsey was at once the instrument and the dupe.’ [2]

Dean states, ‘No secretly developed policy has startled Americans, and the rest of the world, more than the Bush-Cheney decision to make the nation’s response to terrorism a policy of warmongering.’[3]

Dean goes on to say that The Congressional Research Service shows, the United States had never, before the Iraq invasion, attacked another nation militarily prior to its first having been attacked. This war with Iraq was unquestionably on the Bush-Cheney agenda long before 9-11. When the opportunity arose the subtle disassociation was made to lead the American public to believe that Iraq needed to pay for the actions taken on that horrible day. The scape-goat unprotected came out into the opening and the Bush-Cheney machine tackled it.

‘…they must lie to the American people and mislead Congress and continue their extraordinary abuse of power…they…have adopted a pure Nixonian end-justifies-the-means mentality…but Nixon was trying to end a war, not start one’.[4]

As much as I love this great nation of ours, our society has not grown forward from the days of Charles the V. The U. S. in all its great wealth and power, is not the sole benefactor for the betterment of mankind as the schoolteachers we had when we were children led us to believe. Our America is not above one man’s, or one Faction’s personal agenda. The Native Americans used to say ‘the white man speaks with forked tongue’. Yes he does! Truth is not part of the agenda in American politics. During the cold war our government told us about the evils of the Soviet Empire, and how they lied to their own people. They were said to have secret practices that none of their citizens knew about. They had a closed ruling of tyranny. They performed necessary evils in order to preserve what they believed to be the true way of life, Sound familiar? The Patriot Act, or how about an executive issue allowing torture as long as it’s for the right reasons.

George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime. Their secrecy is far worse than during Watergate, and it bodes even more serious consequences. Their secrecy is extreme—not merely unjustified and excessive but obsessive. It has created a White House that hides its president's weaknesses as well as its vice president's strengths.[5] Dean.

The most misleading part of their great secret administration is that they go out of their way to prove themselves not to be so secret. In fact as Dean states in his book George W. ‘comes off as an easygoing, back-slaping son of a former president. A hail-fellow-well-met politician whose family name and pleasing manner had landed him the Texas governor’s mansion, where he employed his considerable people skills as a onetime prep-school cheerleader and college fraternity president…a nice guy, not deep, not too bright, and not terribly serious…playing doofus…for the press.[6]

These my friend, are the skills of a true schemer. They first make their opponent feel as though they are too stupid to ever be able to conspire a plan of action without your knowledge, then they sit and wait for the correct moment to strike out with a blast of strategy that you were sure they were incapable of. The great boxer Mohammad Ali called this tactic the ‘rope-a-dope’. And this dope in the Whitehouse surely has us all on the ropes.

John Dean, is author of the book Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. He served as counsel to President Nixon. On June 17, 1972, five men employed by the Committee to Re-elect the President later known as CREEP were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. They went in and planted listening devices on the phones, and they stole campaign strategy documents.

The White House attempted to cover-up the burglary. Among those found guilty was Richard Nixon's chief counsel John W. Dean.

Amy Goodman from the radio talk show ‘Democracy Now’ interviewed John Dean after he wrote Worse Than Watergate, and asked him "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam.", do you agree?” John Dean replied “It certainly is a problem for him. It is certainly part of a pattern of secrecy. It's part of a pattern of misleading the American people. “

Dean continues, ”There are, as I outline in the book, something like 11 inchoate scandals that are available right now to really become a serious part of this administration. The worst problem, though, is nobody died during Watergate. None of the Watergate "abuses of power" resulted in the loss of a life. And we're in a situation now where the abuse of power has cost a lot of lives.

Dean talks about ‘lies of deception’, he goes on to say that to mislead the public about the direction of government policy, denies the electorate the ability to make an informed choice. Without the ability to make an informed choice, the democratic process is undermined and actually doesn’t exist at all. If we are only given some information, just enough to be persuaded to vote a certain way, then it is not a democracy with which we live in. Years back I worked in the insurance business and the legal term for this when it concerns insurance is called ‘errors of omission’, sought of lying by not telling all the possibilities. For example, if I were selling you my used car and I left out the fact that the front end was completely redone last year because it had been in an accident, that would be an error of omission. You would not have enough facts to make up your own mind as to whether you want to buy it. By leaving out that information I have persuaded you to make the purchase without you actually doing the choosing. This is the core of what the Bush-Cheney administration stands for. They are nothing more then used car salesmen that were born with a silver spoon in their mouths. If they had been born to poor parents they would be out on route 112 selling used Fords.

Now, once again, factions have taken America into another foreign war, this time it’s ideologues instead of anti-communists, but their pretext is the same. Last time it was a flimsy fabricated North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that led to Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. This latest war is being run by an administration at least as isolated, enraged, obsessed with secrecy, and abusive of power as Richard Nixon's. Americans are as obsessed by the relatively minuscule number of American casualties in Iraq as they were by the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam and just as blind to the suffering of Iraqis as they were to the millions of Indochinese who died.

Before agreeing to allow Bush to send troops to Iraq, “Congress asked Bush for two formal Presidential declarations, one was to prove, there is no diplomatic way to resolve the problems of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was the first condition. The second condition was that going to war in Iraq would be consistent with the war on terrorism, which was his second point, that there was an Al Qaeda connection with Saddam Hussein, and that was the implicit rationale for invasion. Bush, in a secret deal with the House of Representatives, agreed to that. The resolution was written, passed and signed by the President. No one really paid any attention to this resolution, and the President in March of 2003 goes to war.”[7]

One of the biggest problems here is that these men actually believe that what they are doing is for the best. They are a group of warped fundamentalist who in many ways resemble the character of the terrorists they are fighting. They base their actions on beliefs that are unproven and sometimes unclear. Dick Cheney himself has an agenda that includes wild suspicions of impending peril. Dean says, ‘the 9-11 attack was confirmation for Cheney of a long-held Hobbesain perception of the world’s likely state of perpetual war’… which comes from… ‘his beliefs acquired back in 1991 and 1992 when he served as secretary of defense.’[8]

This book has caused me to rethink my already dislike for the Bush administration. I have been for a long time now, aware that our system at the executive level requires much improvement, if not a complete overhaul. It is the Bush administration that has removed any doubt I previously had.

The Bush-Cheney obsession with secrecy, as Dean writes in his book, actually started during the campaign with a lot of stonewalling that morphed into more stonewalling once they got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Typical examples are, Cheney's health, his paranoia over security, his suspicious view of civil liberties, and his post-Cold War position that includes America “ruling the world”. Meanwhile, Bush's deeply flawed secret decision making is costing American blood and well-being abroad, we are loosing respect among other nations in addition to alienation from former friend nations. The loss of civil rights and liberties at home is a conflict to what this nation stands for and it is not accomplishing anything in the way of protecting citizens, in fact it’s only making Americans more vulnerable to terrorism. Although it has made lots of money for the executives at Fox news and other major news groups, and let us not forget Halliburton.

Since the late 1970’s and the Watergate scandal there has been a steady trend of open government. It really had changed significantly after Watergate. Bill Clinton, for example, declassified almost a billion documents. This administration has put as much of a halt as they possibly can on this area, and it started long before 9-11. It started long before there could be any national security justification. Rather, they used 9-11 and exploited it as an excuse for more secrecy. This in itself I feel is a dishonor to all who were lost on that sad day.

The secrecy has a purpose, that purpose is to secure any public opinion that may critique the Bush – Cheney machine and keep it from achieving its agenda. For Cheney 9-11 was a perfect storm a catalyst necessary to help him achieve broader goals.[9] As secretary of defense (1989-1993) Cheney accepted the decision not to march into Baghdad and remove Saddam, but he later was said to have regretted it.[10] This was his agenda from the get go. He was determined to use any means possible to get into Baghdad. And on September 11^th, 2001 the door had opened. Now it was just a simple task to convince the American people that all Arab people are the same, and that all Arab nations were involved in the attacks. When Bush stood on that aircraft carrier in 2003 and said, “mission accomplished” he was talking to Cheney, he was telling him we’re in!

Saddam had no reason to aide the terrorist. He was the ruler of a sovereign nation. One that was rich with oil. In fact as we see now with the civil war going on in Iraq these terrorists were more likely to be Saddam’s enemy then his comrades.

Unlike in the Watergate years, most of the legal action that might just dent the Bush administration's imperial armor is happening abroad. The most revelatory reports about American abuses of power and war-making come from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica's three-part series on the yellowcake forgery, in which the CIA forged documents in order to make it seem that Saddam purchased uranium from Niger. In addition there has been a recent Italian TV film on the American use of white phosphorus against civilians in Falluja. These issues have surfaced abroad, so the only real court actions against American abuses of power are taking place in Europe. There, an Italian court has indicted CIA agents for "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping operations on the streets of Milan. Spanish courts which sought to try Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for torture are now pursuing American violations of national sovereignty because CIA planes ferrying detainees to secret "black sites" used airports in the Azores and the Canary Islands. Both the United Nations and the European Union are investigating the CIA use of secret European prisons and airfields in their "rendition" operations. If Congress won't act to punish the Bush Administration officials who enacted a torture policy, perhaps the Europeans will.[11]

The United States is fighting in Iraq because of the egos of a few wealthy American politicians who somehow in their warped minds believe that in the end their names will be laced along with the names of Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and so on.

This great government of ours in the United States was founded on openness. The tyranny of the past where men were tortured was to be no longer, at least not here in this great new world. The fact is we have forgotten the days of being ruled by power hunger monarchs, and we have let our guard down. We don’t understand the threat of tyranny any longer. We have no examples in our lifetimes that we can reference to. Only one short generation back we saw tyranny in Europe but now in the year 2007 most of us have forgotten what our fathers understood all to well. And the worst part of that is the youth of 2007 only reads about tyranny in a textbook, and they see it like a fairytale or a myth. They don’t have the experience to see that the far-right-wing of our present government is only one or two steps away from having an uncompromising control over all who fall under their reach. That Hitler was first viewed as a leader who was securing the wellbeing of the German people and protecting them from outside intruders. Sound familiar?

Bibliography

1) http://www.democracynow.org/;Amy Goodman

2) Federalist Papers No. 6; Alexander Hamilton

3) http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/watergate.html

4) http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html

5) Worse than Watergate, the secret presidency of George W. Bush; author John W. Dean; publisher Little, Brown and Company, New York and Boston.