[Mb-civic] In case you haven't seen this

[Ivan Menchell]

> Senate Hearings on Bush, Now
> By Carl Bernstein
> Vanity Fair
> Monday 17 April 2006
> In this VF.com exclusive, a Watergate veteran and Vanity Fair  
> contributor calls for bipartisan hearings investigating the Bush  
> presidency. Should Republicans on the Hill take the high road and  
> save themselves come November?
> Worse than Watergate? High crimes and misdemeanors justifying the  
> impeachment of George W. Bush, as increasing numbers of Democrats  
> in Washington hope, and, sotto voce, increasing numbers of  
> Republicans - including some of the president's top lieutenants -  
> now fear? Leaders of both parties are acutely aware of the  
> vehemence of anti-Bush sentiment in the country, expressed  
> especially in the increasing number of Americans - nearing fifty  
> percent in some polls - who say they would favor impeachment if the  
> president were proved to have deliberately lied to justify going to  
> war in Iraq.
> John Dean, the Watergate conspirator who ultimately shattered the  
> Watergate conspiracy, rendered his precipitous (or perhaps  
> prescient) impeachment verdict on Bush two years ago in the  
> affirmative, without so much as a question mark in choosing the  
> title of his book Worse than Watergate. On March 31, some three  
> decades after he testified at the seminal hearings of the Senate  
> Watergate Committee, Dean reiterated his dark view of Bush's  
> presidency in a congressional hearing that shed more noise than  
> light, and more partisan rancor than genuine inquiry. The  
> ostensible subject: whether Bush should be censured for  
> unconstitutional conduct in ordering electronic surveillance of  
> Americans without a warrant.
> Raising the worse-than-Watergate question and demanding  
> unequivocally that Congress seek to answer it is, in fact, overdue  
> and more than justified by ample evidence stacked up from Baghdad  
> back to New Orleans and, of increasing relevance, inside a special  
> prosecutor's office in downtown Washington.
> In terms of imminent, meaningful action by the Congress, however,  
> the question of whether the president should be impeached (or, less  
> severely, censured) remains premature. More important, it is  
> essential that the Senate vote - hopefully before the November  
> elections, and with overwhelming support from both parties - to  
> undertake a full investigation of the conduct of the presidency of  
> George W. Bush, along the lines of the Senate Watergate Committee's  
> investigation during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.
> How much evidence is there to justify such action?
> Certainly enough to form a consensus around a national imperative:  
> to learn what this president and his vice president knew and when  
> they knew it; to determine what the Bush administration has done  
> under the guise of national security; and to find out who did what,  
> whether legal or illegal, unconstitutional or merely under the  
> wire, in ignorance or incompetence or with good reason, while the  
> administration barricaded itself behind the most Draconian secrecy  
> and disingenuous information policies of the modern presidential era.
> "We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again,  
> by the American people," said Senator Arlen Specter of  
> Pennsylvania, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary  
> Committee, on April 9. "[T]he President of the United States owes a  
> specific explanation to the American people … about exactly what he  
> did." Specter was speaking specifically about a special  
> prosecutor's assertion that Bush selectively declassified  
> information (of dubious accuracy) and instructed the vice president  
> to leak it to reporters to undermine criticism of the decision to  
> go to war in Iraq. But the senator's comments would be even more  
> appropriately directed at far more pervasive and darker questions  
> that must be answered if the American political system is to acquit  
> itself in the Bush era, as it did in Nixon's.
> Perhaps there are facts or mitigating circumstances, given the  
> extraordinary nature of conceiving and fighting a war on terror,  
> that justify some of the more questionable policies and conduct of  
> this presidency, even those that turned a natural disaster in New  
> Orleans into a catastrophe of incompetence and neglect. But the  
> truth is we have no trustworthy official record of what has  
> occurred in almost any aspect of this administration, how decisions  
> were reached, and even what the actual policies promulgated and  
> approved by the president are. Nor will we, until the subpoena  
> powers of the Congress are used (as in Watergate) to find out the  
> facts - not just about the war in Iraq, almost every aspect of it,  
> beginning with the road to war, but other essential elements of  
> Bush's presidency, particularly the routine disregard for  
> truthfulness in the dissemination of information to the American  
> people and Congress.
> The first fundamental question that needs to be answered by and  
> about the president, the vice president, and their political and  
> national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice,  
> to Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George  
> Tenet, to Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is  
> whether lying, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of  
> information have been a basic matter of policy - used to overwhelm  
> dissent; to hide troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the  
> press, public, and Congress; and to defend the president and his  
> actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly failed.
> Most of what we have learned about the reality of this  
> administration - and the disconcerting mind-set and decision-making  
> process of President Bush himself - has come not from the White  
> House or the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security or the  
> Treasury Department, but from insider accounts by disaffected  
> members of the administration after their departure, and from  
> distinguished journalists, and, in the case of a skeletal but  
> hugely significant body of information, from a special prosecutor.  
> And also, of late, from an aide-de-camp to the British prime  
> minister. Almost invariably, their accounts have revealed what the  
> president and those serving him have deliberately concealed -  
> torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and its apparent  
> authorization by presidential fiat; wholesale N.S.A. domestic  
> wiretapping in contravention of specific prohibitive law; brutal  
> interrogations of prisoners shipped secretly by the C.I.A. and U.S.  
> military to Third World gulags; the nonexistence of W.M.D. in Iraq;  
> the role of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff in divulging  
> the name of an undercover C.I.A. employee; the non-role of Saddam  
> Hussein and Iraq in the events of 9/11; the death by friendly fire  
> of Pat Tillman (whose mother, Mary Tillman, told journalist Robert  
> Scheer, "The administration tried to attach themselves to his  
> virtue and then they wiped their feet with him"); the lack of a  
> coherent post-invasion strategy for Iraq, with all its consequent  
> tragedy and loss and destabilizing global implications; the failure  
> to coordinate economic policies for America's long-term financial  
> health (including the misguided tax cuts) with funding a war that  
> will drive the national debt above a trillion dollars; the  
> assurance of Wolfowitz (since rewarded by Bush with the presidency  
> of the World Bank) that Iraq's oil reserves would pay for the war  
> within two to three years after the invasion; and Bush's like- 
> minded confidence, expressed to Blair, that serious internecine  
> strife in Iraq would be unlikely after the invasion.
> But most grievous and momentous is the willingness - even  
> enthusiasm, confirmed by the so-called Downing Street Memo and the  
> contemporaneous notes of the chief foreign-policy adviser to  
> British prime minister Tony Blair - to invent almost any  
> justification for going to war in Iraq (including sending up an  
> American U-2 plane painted with U.N. markings to be deliberately  
> shot down by Saddam Hussein's air force, a plan hatched while the  
> president, the vice president, and Blair insisted to the world that  
> war would be initiated "only as a last resort"). Attending the  
> meeting between Bush and Blair where such duplicity was discussed  
> unabashedly ("intelligence and facts" would be jiggered as  
> necessary and "fixed around the policy," wrote the dutiful aide to  
> the prime minister) were Ms. Rice, then national-security adviser  
> to the president, and Andrew Card, the recently departed White  
> House chief of staff.
> As with Watergate, the investigation of George W. Bush and his  
> presidency needs to start from a shared premise and set of  
> principles that can be embraced by Democrats and Republicans, by  
> liberals and centrists and conservatives, and by opponents of the  
> war and its advocates: that the president of the United States and  
> members of his administration must defend the requirements of the  
> Constitution, obey the law, demonstrate common sense, and tell the  
> truth. Obviously there will be disagreements, even fierce ones,  
> along the way. Here again the Nixon example is useful: Republicans  
> on the Senate Watergate Committee, including its vice chairman,  
> Howard Baker of Tennessee ("What did the president know and when  
> did he know it?"), began the investigation as defenders of Nixon.  
> By its end, only one was willing to make any defense of Nixon's  
> actions.
> The Senate Watergate Committee was created (by a 77-0 vote of the  
> Senate) with the formal task of investigating illegal political- 
> campaign activities. Its seven members were chosen by the  
> leadership of each party, three from the minority, four from the  
> majority. (The Democratic majority leader of the Senate, Mike  
> Mansfield, insisted that none of the Democrats be high-profile  
> senators with presidential aspirations.) One of the crucial tasks  
> of any committee charged with investigating the Bush presidency  
> will be to delineate the scope of inquiry. It must not be a fishing  
> expedition - and not only because the pond is so loaded with fish.  
> The lines ought to be drawn so that the hearings themselves do not  
> become the occasion for the ultimate battle of the culture wars.  
> This investigation should be seen as an opportunity to at last rise  
> above the culture wars and, as in Watergate, learn whether the  
> actions of the president and his deputies have been consistent with  
> constitutional principles, the law, and the truth.
> Karl Rove and other White House strategists are betting (with odds  
> in their favor) that Republicans on Capitol Hill are extremely  
> unlikely to take the high road before November and endorse any kind  
> of serious investigation into Bush's presidency - a gamble that may  
> increase the risk of losing Republican majorities in either or both  
> houses of Congress, and even further undermine the future of the  
> Bush presidency. Already in the White House, there is talk of a  
> nightmare scenario in which the Democrats successfully make the  
> November congressional elections a referendum on impeachment - and  
> win back a majority in the House, and maybe the Senate too.
> But voting now to create a Senate investigation - chaired by a  
> Republican - could work to the advantage both of the truth and of  
> Republican candidates eager to put distance between themselves and  
> the White House.
> The calculations of politicians about their electoral futures  
> should pale in comparison to the urgency of examining perhaps the  
> most disastrous five years of decision-making of any modern  
> American presidency.
> There are huge differences between the Nixon presidency and this  
> one, of course, but surprisingly few would appear to redound to  
> this administration's benefit, including even the fundamental  
> question of the competence of the president.
> First and foremost among the differences may be the role of the  
> vice president. The excesses of Watergate - the crimes, the lies,  
> the trampling of the Constitution, the disregard for the  
> institutional integrity of the presidency, the dutiful and even  
> enthusiastic lawbreaking of Nixon's apparatchiks - stemmed from one  
> aberrant president's psyche and the paranoid assumptions that  
> issued from it, and from the notion shared by some of his White  
> House acolytes that, because U. S. troops were fighting a war -  
> especially a failing one against a determined, guerrilla enemy in  
> Vietnam - the commander in chief could assume extraordinary powers  
> nowhere assigned in the Constitution and govern above the rule of  
> law. "When the president does it that means that it is not  
> illegal," Nixon famously told David Frost.
> Bush and Cheney have been hardly less succinct about the  
> president's duty and right to assume unprecedented authority  
> nowhere specified in the Constitution. "[E]specially in the day and  
> age we live in … the president of the United States needs to have  
> his Constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the  
> conduct of national-security policy," Cheney said less than four  
> months ago.
> Bush's doctrine of "unimpairment" - at one with his tendency to  
> trim the truth - may be (with the question of his competence) the  
> nub of the national nightmare. "I have the authority, both from the  
> Constitution and the Congress, to undertake this vital program,"  
> Bush said after more than a few Republican and conservative  
> eminences said he did not and joined the chorus of outrage about  
> his N.S.A. domestic-surveillance program.
> "Terrorism is not the only new danger of this era," noted George F.  
> Will, the conservative columnist. "Another is the administration's  
> argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is  
> the 'sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs' … [which] is  
> refuted by the Constitution's plain language, which empowers  
> Congress to ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate  
> military forces, and make laws 'necessary and proper' for the  
> execution of all presidential powers."
> A voluminous accumulation of documentary and journalistic evidence  
> suggests that the policies and philosophy of this administration  
> that may be illegal and unconstitutional stem not just from Bush  
> but from Cheney as well - hence there's even greater necessity for  
> a careful, methodical investigation under Senate auspices before  
> any consideration of impeachment in the House and its mischievous  
> potential to create the mother of all partisan, ideological, take- 
> no-prisoners battles, which would even further divide the Congress  
> and the country.
> Cheney's recognition of the danger to him and his patron by a re- 
> assertion of the Watergate precedent of proper congressional  
> oversight is not hard to fathom. Illegal wiretapping - among other  
> related crimes - was the basis of one of the articles of  
> impeachment against Nixon passed by the House Judiciary Committee.  
> The other two were defiance of subpoenas and obstruction of justice  
> in the Watergate cover-up. "Watergate and a lot of the things  
> around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I  
> think, to erode the authority … [that] the president needs to be  
> effective, especially in the national-security area," Cheney has  
> observed. Nixon did not share his decision-making, much less  
> philosophizing, with his vice president, and never relegated his  
> own judgment to a number two. Former secretary of state Colin  
> Powell's ex-chief of staff, retired army colonel Larry Wilkerson,  
> has attested, "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of  
> the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense,  
> Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the  
> bureaucracy did not know were being made."
> Here it may be relevant that Powell has, in private, made  
> statements interpreted by many important figures in Washington as  
> seemingly questioning Cheney's emotional stability, and that Powell  
> no longer recognizes the steady, dependable "rock" with whom he  
> served in the administration of George W. Bush's father. Powell  
> needs to be asked under oath about his reported observations  
> regarding Cheney, not to mention his own appearance before the  
> United Nations in which he spoke with assurance about Saddam  
> Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and insisted  
> that the United States was seeking a way to avoid war, not start it.
> Because Powell was regarded by some as the administration "good  
> guy," who was prescient in his anxiety about Bush's determination  
> to go to war in Iraq ("You break it, you own it"), he should not be  
> handed a pass exempting him from tough questioning in a  
> congressional investigation. Indeed, Powell is probably more  
> capable than any other witness of providing both fact and context  
> to the whole story of the road to war and the actions of Bush,  
> Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the others.
> One of the similarities between Bush and Nixon is their contempt,  
> lip service aside, for the legitimate oversight of Congress. In  
> seeking to cover up his secret, illegal activities, Nixon made  
> broad claims of executive privilege, many on grounds of national  
> security, the most important of which were rejected by the courts.
> Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their colleagues have successfully  
> evaded accountability for the dire consequences of their policies  
> through a tried-and-true strategy that has exploited a situation in  
> which the press (understandably) has no subpoena power and is held  
> in ill repute (understandably) by so many Americans, and the  
> Republican-controlled Congress can be counted on to ignore its  
> responsibility to compel relevant, forthright testimony and  
> evidence - no matter how outrageous (failure to provide sufficient  
> body armor for American soldiers, for example), mendacious, or  
> inimical to the national interest the actions of the president and  
> his principal aides might be.
> As in Watergate, the Bush White House has, at almost every  
> opportunity when endangered by the prospect of accountability, made  
> the conduct of the press the issue instead of the misconduct of the  
> president and his aides, and, with help from its Republican and  
> conservative allies in and out of Congress, questioned the  
> patriotism of the other party. As during the Nixon epoch, the  
> strategy is finally wearing thin. "He's smoking Dutch Cleanser,"  
> said Specter when Bush's attorney general claimed legality for the  
> president's secret order authorizing the wiretapping of Americans  
> by the N.S.A. - first revealed in The New York Times in December.
> Before the Times story had broken, the president was ardent about  
> his civil-libertarian credentials in such matters: "Any time you  
> hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it  
> requires - a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed,  
> by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're  
> talking about getting a court order before we do so," Bush said in  
> a speech in Buffalo, New York, in April 2004.
> Obviously, Bush's statement was demonstrably untrue. Yet instead of  
> correcting himself, Bush attacked the Times for virtual treason,  
> and his aides initiated a full-court press to track down whoever  
> had provided information to the newspaper. "Our enemies have  
> learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized  
> disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts  
> our citizens at risk," he declared, as if America's terrorist  
> enemies hadn't assumed they were subject to all manner of  
> electronic eavesdropping by the world's most technologically  
> sophisticated nation.
> As in the Nixon White House, the search for leakers and others in  
> the executive branch who might be truthful with reporters has  
> become a paranoid preoccupation in the Bush White House. "Revealing  
> classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and  
> endangers our country," Bush added. (The special prosecutor's  
> revelation that Bush himself - through Cheney - was ultimately  
> behind Scooter Libby's leaking to undermine Joseph Wilson has  
> ironically caused Bush more damage among Republican members of  
> Congress than far more grievous acts by the president.)
> Literally dozens of investigations have been ordered at the C.I.A.,  
> the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, and elsewhere in the  
> executive branch to find out who is talking to the press about  
> secret activities undertaken in this presidency. These include  
> polygraph investigations and a warning to the press that reporters  
> may be prosecuted under espionage laws.
> Bush's self-claimed authority to wiretap without a court order -  
> like his self-claimed authority to hold prisoners of war  
> indefinitely without habeas corpus (on grounds those in custody are  
> suspected "terrorists") - stems from the same doctrine of  
> "unimpairment" and all its Nixonian overtones: "The American people  
> expect me to protect their lives and their civil liberties, and  
> that's exactly what we're doing with this [N.S.A. eavesdropping]  
> program," asserted Bush in January.
> When Nixon's former attorney general John N. Mitchell was compelled  
> to testify before the Watergate Committee, he laid out the sordid  
> "White House horrors," as he called them - activities undertaken in  
> the name of national security by the low-level thugs and high-level  
> presidential aides acting in the president's name. Mitchell, loyal  
> to the end, pictured the whole crowd, from Haldeman and Ehrlichman  
> and Colson down to Liddy and the Watergate burglars, as self- 
> starters, acting without authority from Nixon. The tapes, of  
> course, told the real story - wiretapping, break-ins, attempts to  
> illegally manipulate the outcome of the electoral process, routine  
> smearing of the president's opponents and intricate machinations to  
> render it untraceable, orders to firebomb a liberal think tank, the  
> Watergate cover-up, and their origin in the Oval Office.
> In the case of the Bush administration's two attorneys general,  
> John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, there are indications that - as  
> in the Nixon White House - they approved and/or promulgated  
> policies (horrors?) that would appear intended to enable the  
> president to circumvent the Constitution and the law.
> Ashcroft expressed reservations as early as 2004 about the legality  
> of the wiretapping authority claimed by Bush, according to recent  
> disclosures in the press, but Ashcroft's doubts - and the  
> unwillingness of his principal deputy attorney general to approve  
> central aspects of the N.S.A. domestic eavesdropping plan - were  
> not made known to the Congress. Gonzales, as White House counsel,  
> drew up the guidelines authorizing torture at American-run prisons  
> and U.S. exemption from the Geneva war-crimes conventions regarding  
> the treatment of prisoners. (His memo to the president described  
> provisions of the conventions as "quaint.")
> "Let me make very clear the position of my government and our  
> country," said Bush when confronted with the undeniable,  
> photographic evidence of torture. "We do not condone torture. I  
> have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values  
> of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and  
> our being." The available facts would indicate this was an  
> unusually evident example of presidential prevarication, but we  
> will never know exactly how untruthful, or perhaps just slippery,  
> until the president and the White House are compelled to cooperate  
> with a real congressional investigation.
> That statement by Bush, in June 2004, in response to worldwide  
> outrage at the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs, illustrates two  
> related, core methodologies employed by this president and his  
> cadre to escape responsibility for their actions: First, an  
> Orwellian reliance on the meaninglessness of words. (When is  
> "torture" torture? When is "ordered" "authorized"? When is "if  
> someone committed a crime they will no longer work in my  
> administration" a scheme to keep trusted aides on the payroll  
> through a legal process that could take years before adjudication  
> and hide the president's own role in helping start - perhaps  
> inadvertently - the Plame ball rolling?)
> "Listen, I know of nobody - I don't know of anybody in my  
> administration who leaked classified information," the president  
> was quoted saying in Time magazine's issue of October 13, 2003.  
> Time's report then noted with acuity, "Bush seemed to emphasize  
> those last two words ['classified information'] as if hanging onto  
> a legal life preserver in choppy seas."
> The second method of escape is the absence of formal orders issued  
> down the chain of command, leaving non-coms, enlisted men and  
> women, and a few unfortunate non-star officers to twist in the wind  
> for policies emanating from the president, vice president,  
> secretary of defense, attorney general, national-security adviser  
> to the president, and current secretary of state (formerly the  
> national-security adviser). With a determined effort, a committee  
> of distinguished senators should be able to establish if the  
> grotesque abuse of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo was really the work of  
> a "few bad apples" like Army Reserve Spc. Lynndie England wielding  
> the leash, or a natural consequence of actions flowing from the  
> Oval Office and Office of the Secretary of Defense.
> In a baker's dozen of hearings before pliant committees of  
> Congress, a parade of the top brass from Rice to Rumsfeld, to the  
> Joint Chiefs, to Paul Bremer has managed for almost three years to  
> evade responsibility for - or even acknowledgment of - the  
> disintegrating situation on the ground in Iraq, its costs in lives  
> and treasure, and its disastrous reverberations through the world,  
> and for an assault on constitutional principles at home. Similarly,  
> until the Senate Watergate hearings, Nixon and his men at the top  
> had evaded responsibility for Watergate and their cover-up of all  
> the "White House horrors."
> With the benefit of hindsight, it is now almost impossible to look  
> at the president's handling of the war in Iraq in isolation from  
> his handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Certainly any  
> investigation of the president and his administration should  
> include both disasters. Before 9/11, Bush and Condoleezza Rice had  
> been warned in the starkest of terms - by their own aides, by the  
> outgoing Clinton administration, and by experts on terrorism - of  
> the urgent danger of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack in the United  
> States. Yet the first top-level National Security Council meeting  
> to discuss the subject was not held until September 4, 2001 - just  
> as the F.B.I. hierarchy had been warned by field agents that there  
> were suspected Islamic radicals learning to fly 747s with no  
> legitimate reasons for doing so, but the bureau ultimately ignored  
> the urgency of problem, just as Bush had ample opportunity (despite  
> what he said later) to review and competently execute a disaster  
> plan for the hurricane heading toward New Orleans.
> There will forever be four indelible photographic images of the  
> George W. Bush epoch: an airplane crashing into World Trade Tower  
> number two; Bush in a Florida classroom reading from a book about a  
> goat while a group of second-graders continued to captivate him for  
> another seven minutes after Andrew Card had whispered to the  
> president, "America is under attack"; floodwaters inundating New  
> Orleans, and its residents clinging to rooftops for their lives;  
> and, two days after the hurricane struck, Bush peeking out the  
> window of Air Force One to inspect the devastation from a safe  
> altitude. The aftermath of the hurricane's direct hit, both in  
> terms of the devastation and the astonishing neglect and  
> incompetence from the top down, would appear to be unique in  
> American history. Except for the Civil War and the War of 1812  
> (when the British burned Washington), no president has ever lost an  
> American city; and if New Orleans is not lost, it will only be  
> because of the heroics of its people and their almost superhuman  
> efforts to overcome the initial lethargy and apparent non- 
> comprehension of the president. Bush's almost blank reaction was  
> foretold vividly in a video of him and his aides meeting on August  
> 28, 2005, the day before Katrina made landfall. The tape - withheld  
> by the administration from Congress but obtained by the Associated  
> Press along with seven days of transcripts of administration  
> briefings - shows Bush and his Homeland Security chief being warned  
> explicitly that the storm could cause levees to overflow, put large  
> number of lives at risk, and overwhelm rescuers.
> In the wake of the death and devastation in New Orleans, President  
> Bush refused to provide the most important documents sought by  
> Congress or allow his immediate aides in the White House to testify  
> before Congress about decision-making in the West wing or at his  
> Crawford ranch in the hours immediately before and after the  
> hurricane struck. His refusal was wrapped in a package of high  
> principle - the need for confidentiality of executive branch  
> communications - the same principle of preserving presidential  
> privacy that, presumably, prevented him from releasing official  
> White House photos of himself with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff  
> or allowing White House aides to testify about the N.S.A.  
> electronic-eavesdropping program on grounds of executive privilege.
> The unwillingness of this president - a former Texas governor  
> familiar with the destructive powers of weather - to deal  
> truthfully ("I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the  
> levees," he said in an interview with Good Morning America three  
> days after the hurricane hit) and meaningfully with the people of  
> the Gulf Coast or the country, or the Congress, about his  
> government's response ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job") to  
> Hurricane Katrina may be the Rosebud moment of his presidency. The  
> president's repeated attempts to keep secret his actions and those  
> of his principal aides by invoking often spurious claims of  
> executive privilege and national security in the run-up to the war  
> in Iraq - and its prosecution since - are rendered perfectly  
> comprehensible when seen in relation to the Katrina claim. It is an  
> effective way to hide the truth (as Nixon attempted so often), and  
> - when uncomfortable truths have nonetheless been revealed by  
> others - to justify extraordinary actions that would seem to be  
> illegal or even unconstitutional.
> Is incompetence an impeachable offense? The question is another  
> reason to defer the fraught matter of impeachment (if deserved) in  
> the Bush era until the ground is prepared by a proper fact-finding  
> investigation and public hearings conducted by a sober,  
> distinguished committee of Congress.
> We have never had a presidency in which the single unifying thread  
> that flows through its major decision-making was incompetence -  
> stitched together with hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale.  
> There will be no shortage of witnesses to question about the  
> subject, among them the retired three-star Marine Corps general who  
> served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff  
> during the war's planning, Gregory Newbold.
> Last week he wrote, "I now regret that I did not more openly  
> challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose  
> actions were peripheral to the real threat - Al Qaeda. I retired  
> from the military four months before the invasion, in part because  
> of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our  
> security policy." The decision to invade Iraq, he said, "was done  
> with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of  
> those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the  
> results." Despite the military's determination that, after Vietnam,  
> "[W]e must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and  
> casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the  
> conduct of it.… We have been fooled again."
> The unprecedented generals' revolt against the Secretary of  
> Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is - like the special prosecutor's Plame  
> investigation - a door that once cracked open, cannot be readily  
> shut by the president or even his most senior aides. What outsiders  
> long suspected regarding the conduct of the war has now been given  
> credence by those on the inside, near the top, just as in the  
> unraveling of Watergate.
> General Newbold and his fellow retired generals have (as observed  
> elsewhere in the press) declared Rumsfeld unfit to lead America's  
> military at almost exactly the moment when the United States must  
> deal with the most difficult legacy of the Bush presidency: how to  
> pry itself out of Iraq and deal with the real threat this  
> administration ignored next door, from Iran.
> Rumsfeld appeared Friday on an Al Arabiya television broadcast and  
> said, "Out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if  
> every time two or three people disagreed we changed the Secretary  
> of Defense of the United States, it would be like a merry-go- 
> round." This kind of denial of reality - and (again) Orwellian  
> abuse of facts and language - to describe six generals, each with  
> more than 30 years military experience, each of whom served at the  
> top of their commands (three in Iraq) and worked closely with  
> Rumsfeld, is indicative of the problem any investigation by the  
> Senate must face when dealing with this presidency.
> And if Rumsfeld is unfit, how is his commander-in-chief, who has  
> steadfastly refused to let him go (as Nixon did with Haldeman and  
> Ehrlichman, "two of the finest public servants I have ever known"),  
> to be judged?
> The roadblock to a serious inquiry to date has been a Republican  
> majority that fears the results, and a Democratic minority more  
> interested in retribution and grandstanding than the national weal.  
> There are indications, however, that by November voters may be far  
> more discerning than they were in the last round of congressional  
> elections, and that Republicans especially are getting the message.  
> Indeed many are talking privately about their lack of confidence in  
> Bush and what to do about him.
> It took the Senate Watergate Committee less than six months to do  
> its essential work. When Sam Ervin's gavel fell to close the first  
> phase of public televised hearings on August 7, 1973, the basic  
> facts of Nixon's conspiracy - and the White House horrors - were  
> engraved on the nation's consciousness. The testimony of the  
> president's men themselves - under oath and motivated perhaps in  
> part by a real threat of being charged with perjury - left little  
> doubt about what happened in a criminal and unconstitutional  
> presidency.
> On February 6, 1974, the House voted 410 to 4 to empower its  
> Judiciary Committee to begin an impeachment investigation of the  
> president. On July 27, 1974, the first of three articles of  
> impeachment was approved, with support from 6 of the 17 Republicans  
> (and 21 Democrats) on the committee. Two more articles were  
> approved on July 29 and 30. On August 8, facing certain conviction  
> in a Senate trial, Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford became president.
> In Watergate, Republicans were the ones who finally told Richard  
> Nixon, "Enough." They were the ones who cast the most critical  
> votes for articles of impeachment, ensuring that Nixon would be  
> judged with nonpartisan fairness. After the vote, the Republican  
> congressional leadership - led by the great conservative senator  
> Barry Goldwater - marched en masse to the White House to tell the  
> criminal president that he had to go. And if he didn't, the  
> leadership would recommend his conviction in the Senate and urge  
> all their Republican colleagues to do the same.
> In the case of George W. Bush, important conservative and  
> Republican voices have, finally, begun speaking out in the past few  
> weeks. William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the modern conservative  
> movement and, with Goldwater, perhaps its most revered figure, said  
> last month: "It's important that we acknowledge in the inner  
> counsels of state that [the war in Iraq] has failed so that we  
> should look for opportunities to cope with that failure." And "Mr.  
> Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the  
> point of Iraq.… If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get  
> him out of this jam." And "The neoconservative hubris, which sort  
> of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for  
> maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country."
> Even more scathing have been some officials who served in the White  
> House under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush's father. Bruce  
> Bartlett, a domestic policy aide in the Reagan administration, a  
> deputy assistant treasury secretary for the first President Bush,  
> and author of a new book, Impostor: How George Bush Bankrupted  
> America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, noted: "A lot of  
> conservatives have had reservations about him for a long time, but  
> have been afraid to speak out for fear it would help liberals and  
> the Democrats" - a situation that, until the Senate Watergate  
> Committee hearings, existed in regard to Nixon. "I think there are  
> growing misgivings about the conduct of the Iraq operation, and how  
> that relates to a general incompetence his administration seems to  
> have about doing basic things," said Bartlett.
> After Nixon's resignation, it was often said that the system had  
> worked. Confronted by an aberrant president, the checks and  
> balances on the executive by the legislative and judicial branches  
> of government, and by a free press, had functioned as the founders  
> had envisioned.
> The system has thus far failed during the presidency of George W.  
> Bush - at incalculable cost in human lives, to the American  
> political system, to undertaking an intelligent and effective war  
> against terror, and to the standing of the United States in parts  
> of the world where it previously had been held in the highest regard.
> There was understandable reluctance in the Congress to begin a  
> serious investigation of the Nixon presidency. Then there came a  
> time when it was unavoidable. That time in the Bush presidency has  
> arrived.
> ----------
> Carl Bernstein is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His biography  
> of Hillary Rodham Clinton will be published by Knopf next year.