If you read any long OP today, read this Judith Coburn on Busco's crimes

from TomDispatch, November 22 - http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=38684 - reprinted in Asia Times, November 24 - http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK24Aa01.html

(I searched for this in DU without success: Apologies if a dupe).

Apart from what's quoted below, it's a pretty good overall summary of the position, as viewed from the US by those with eyes to see, the Project for the New American Century finds itself in today.

BTW, in the section where Judith refers to the fact that "most of the legal action that might just dent the Bush administration's imperial armor is happening abroad," the reference to "Spanish courts ... 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" should read the Balearic and the Canary Islands. (Although Portugal may well like to check out the possibility of similar such flights using airstrips in the Azores...)

<snip>

To most Americans, the slaughter of millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Lao, as well as the destruction of their countries, seem unrelated to "Watergate." Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the secret bombing of Cambodia, who had ordered his own dissenting staffers and several journalists illegally wiretapped to stop leaks, escaped indictment and would soon be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

...

We now have something close to one-party government in this country, an idea still so fantastic to Americans and their media that the most serious, in depth, and credible exploration of the 2000 and 2004 election fraud by any journalist -- the book Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America -- has been done by an Englishman, Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. He's now been joined by American professor Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and Why They May Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) digs into the subject as well.

And instead of the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller (and the reborn Bob Woodward). Only a tiny handful of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking circulations), 60 Minutes and almost uniquely the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the kind of serious, in-depth investigative journalism that was done by many in the Watergate era. On-line reporters, able to circulate a single story at lightening speed around the world, are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as their age of Watergate print compatriots but have radically less money to support investigations of any sort. As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in Vanity Fair, the Bush administration, like Nixon's, has succeeded only too well "in making the conduct of the press the issue -- again in wartime with false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national security." If only the media of our era had actually justified such attacks.

John Dean was indeed right. The Bush Administration's excesses are "worse than Watergate," in part because the power that has congealed in presidential hands is much greater than Nixon's imperial presidency held in the early 1970s. As a result, its zealotry, secrecy, deceit, and abuses of power are more akin to the secret bombing of Cambodia or the Iran-Contra affair -- scandals which did not unseat presidents -- than Watergate itself. In both the bombing of Cambodia and Iran-Contragate, a power-hungry White House kept secret foreign policies that it knew neither Congress, the courts, nor the public would be likely to approve -- even though Americans have traditionally been only too eager to give the White House a blank check on national security. No one was indicted for the secret bombing of Cambodia. In Iran-Contragate, eleven top administration officials, including two national security advisers and an undersecretary of state were finally convicted, but the first President George Bush rushed to pardon four of them as well as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (even before he could be indicted). The specter of this resolution of the Libby case recently prompted Democrats and then a group of CIA officials -- to little media attention -- to write the President demanding that he go on record indicating there will be no pardons in the Plame affair. They received no reply.

Journalist Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East for the Village Voice, Pacifica Radio, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She co-anchored (with David Gelber) Pacifica Radio's live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings.

It's going to be a Happy New Year, a year of great changes for the better. Villains will be outed, tried, jailed and cursed forever. Laws will be made whole and strong, while anti-laws are repealed and the system redesigned to prevent any such abuse in the future.

And then the Millenium will finally be upon us.

Consider how early in the process a summary and analysis of our Constitutional Crisis like this one has been written. It isn't complete, of course. It doesn't touch upon Abramoff and the stolen elections. But it does put current events outside the country into historical perspective.

Let the Process move on!

Thanks for posting! :thumbsup:

thanks for posting.....this gets my vote.