* lie about Iraq, lie about torture, lie about illegal surveillance, withhold plans which Congress is entitled to know … withhold the truth about the anthrax attacks? … it’s all in the same Bush-Cheney basket for which they must be held accountable

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why did the FBI fail to solve the 2001 anthrax case?

CASE CLOSED offers a “fictional” answer

* buy CASE CLOSED

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lie about Iraq, lie about torture, lie about illegal surveillance, withhold plans which Congress is entitled to know

… withhold the truth about the anthrax attacks?

… it’s all in the same Bush-Cheney basket for which they must be held accountable

***********

Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane write in the NYT (7-14-09) …

• Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.
• Mr. Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence.
• The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
• Congressional Democrats were furious that the program had not been shared with the committees.
• The Bush administration took the position that killing members of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group that has attacked the United States and stated that its goal is to attack again, is no different than shooting enemy soldiers on the battlefield.
• The Obama administration, which has continued to fire missiles from Predator drones on suspected Qaeda members in Pakistan, has taken the same view.

Read the entire article at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/us/14intel.html?_r=1&hp

LMW COMMENT …

The issue here is not that the U.S. had a plan to find and kill Al Qaeda leaders. Shame on us if we didn’t do everything possible to eliminate those who attacked us and will try to do so again.

The issue is that we are a nation of laws, and we must act in accordance with those laws.

If the laws are counter-productive or overly restrictive, then we should change the laws. But we should never permit an administration to simply act as if the laws did not exist. That is the path to dictatorship; that is the path of a Bush-Cheney administration that had no sense of the restraints which are central to our form of government and our Constitution.

Who can doubt that the Bush-Cheney administration …

• which lied about the reasons to go to its war of choice in Iraq,
• which lied about its illegal surveillance of American citizens
• which lied about torturing prisoners in violation of our own and international laws,
• and which willfully withheld information from Congress in contradiction to laws they chose to ignore,

… would not also restrain the FBI in its investigation of the anthrax case.

When the FBI presents a conclusion that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, a conclusion that cannot be supported on the facts of the case, even those limited facts which are so far known, then one must look to the reasons for such a blatant misrepresentation by the FBI, which had to know better.

I invented one such scenario in my novel CASE CLOSED, and I suspect that the truth, if ever known, will incorporate some of the concepts I developed in my novel, if not many of the details.