Presidents Will Break Laws To Achieve Goals

T he recent revelation that W. Mark Felt, the former number two person 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 the leader of the “free world” can be devious, corrupt, and dishonest. 

The parallels between the Bush and Nixon administrations are eerily familiar. Both bullied the press, were highly secretive, obsessed over leaks, engaged in massive cover-ups, and quickly brand- ed aides as disloyal if they dared to raise questions about the president’s policies. 

The Washington Post , the paper  credited with forcing Nixon’s resignation, summed it up in a November 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 Condo- leezza 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 likely ever be credited with exposing another Watergate. For one, mainstream reporters don’t want to put their careers on the line to sniff around, ask tough questions, and, perhaps, find sources like W. Mark Felt. 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.  

The sad reality these days 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 unearthed by the Times of London this May should have been the smoking gun that resulted in Bush being brought up on High Crimes and Misdemeanor charges under the United States Constitution’s impeachment clause. The memo— written eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq by Matthew Rycroft, a British national security official—was 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, 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 that President Bush made after the memo: 

• “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). 

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 unjust war rages on. How much more evidence do we need in order for Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the Senate to hold this president accountable for either war crimes or defrauding the people of 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.”