Juan Cole makes a compelling case for the further misdeeds of this White House. Despite being convicted of lying to Congress and being blacklisted against ever having another high-level government position, Elliot Abrams now sits as a member of the National Security Council. George Bush and Dick Cheney make more clear their criminal intent with each passing day. Impeach them both !!! Or at least, write to them and ask them why they’ve done this. Here’s the quick way to do that:
Bush White House Censors Op-Ed on Iran
Elliot Abrams Must Go
Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation carries the story of how Elliot Abrams and others at the National Security Council in Bush’s White House have intervened to stop the publication of an op-ed in the New York Times by Flynt Leverett. Leverett himself served in the National Security Council until not so long ago.
For Leverett’s criticism of Bush administration Middle East policy and its mishandling of Iran since January of 2002, see this interview at Eurasia.net. He advocates US talks with Iran.
Ironically, the White House attempt to stop high-level discussion of talking to Iran comes just as the Iranian public dealt a slap in the face to extremist President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who stole the presidential elections in summer of 2005. Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani appears to have trounced Ahmadinejad’s own favorite cleric, Mohammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, an authoritarian anti-democrat.
Back to Washington. The remaining Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like David Wurmser in Cheney’s office and Abrams at the NSC have been agitating behind the scenes for war on Syria and Iran. These people hate peace the way the devil hates holy water. They confess themselves actively disappointed when a war doesn’t happen. They helped send US troops into Iraq where 24,000 have been wounded or killed, and they’d just love to expend some more lives on other pet projects.
That does it. Elliot Abrams must go. Elliot Abrams is a felon. He was involved in stealing Pentagon weapons from US stockpiles, selling them to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then stealing the Iranian funds so garnered to give to far-right Central American death squads, and then lying about all this to Congress. The Congress in the Constitution controls the budget. The Congress had cut off money to the rightwing death squads supported by Reagan and henchmen like Abrams. This elaborate criminal conspiracy inside the White House was the Right’s response. They shredded the Constitution (and ever since have been calling their critics “unpatriotic.”)
In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.
Congress pledged that Abrams would never work at a high level in government again. But by the time the Neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration got Bush to appoint him to the National Security Council, there had been so much turn-over in Congress that, one member told me, “no one remembered who Abrams was.”
Read it here.
