A Candle to the Wind?

Amy Goodman recently wrote of how The USA could have benefitted from an eventual conviction of Richard Nixon. Unfortunately, view points like hers are being stifled more and more in the nation's mainstream media. Here are some excerpts and a link to her article, published at the Seattle PI:

Impeaching, prosecuting Nixon could have elevated the nation

AMY GOODMAN
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

One of the high points of the U.S. media was the investigation into the Watergate scandal. Now, 30 years later, with President Ford's death, the media are contributing to the cover-up they once exposed.
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Let's review the history: Nixon was running for re-election in 1972 against anti-war Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota. Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP -- their acronym, not mine) had been conducting a campaign of dirty tricks against potential Democratic presidential candidates. In May and June 1972, Nixon operatives, called "The Plumbers" (so-called as they both plugged up and generated information leaks), broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, based at The Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The burglars, including an ex-CIA man and several Cuban American veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, were planting bugs and photographing documents. An address book on one of the burglars linked them to the White House.
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John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, became the star witness of the Senate investigation. He linked Nixon not only to the cover-up, but also to the criminal break-in of the psychiatrist's office of Pentagon whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg. In an exclusive "Democracy Now!" broadcast with Ellsberg and Dean, the two former antagonists spoke together on national television for the first time. They described other dirty schemes planned but not acted on, such as "incapacitating" Ellsberg, and firebombing The Brookings Institution.
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For Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon's resignation was an opportunity: Ford made Rumsfeld his chief of staff, with Cheney as his assistant. When Rumsfeld moved over to secretary of defense, Cheney became chief of staff. George H.W. Bush was named director of Central Intelligence. Journalist Robert Parry describes the Ford administration as the "incubator" of the current Bush administration.

If those emerging power brokers had witnessed a vigorous prosecution of Nixon and his co-conspirators, it could have elevated the country ... and changed history. Perhaps a decade later, the Reagan-Bush administration would have thought twice about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which an unaccountable administration would defy Congress and illegally support the Contras in Nicaragua, who killed thousands of civilians. Perhaps the current Bush administration would not have dared to manipulate intelligence to invade Iraq, leading to the deaths of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

As the nation buries President Ford, let's not let the U.S. media bury the story.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/298235_amy04.html

Dick Cheney's Song of America

Drafting a plan for global dominance

Posted on Wednesday, October 26, 2005. An essay exploring the real origins of the Iraq War, written before the war started. Originally from October 2002. By David Armstrong.

Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney's masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan.

The Plan was published in unclassified form most recently under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term as secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993, but it is, like Leaves of Grass, a perpetually evolving work. It was the controversial Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992—from which Cheney, unconvincingly, tried to distance himself—and it was the somewhat less aggressive revised draft of that same year. This June it was a presidential lecture in the form of a commencement address at West Point, and in July it was leaked to the press as yet another Defense Planning Guidance (this time under the pen name of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld). It will take its ultimate form, though, as America's new national security strategy—and Cheney et al. will experience what few writers have even dared dream: their words will become our reality.

The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.

The rest of the article can be found here.

[in case the previous link no longer works, here is an updated link: http://harpers.org/archive/2002/10/0079354]