There is just such a dearth of unspeakably horrible acts of business and politics going on when discussing Iraq that it becomes easy to forget about some of them. The White House has done a good job of stonewalling any and all investigations into wrongdoing. And now, when posed with the very real information that Iraq never had any WMDs to begin with, they are now shrugging their collective shoulders and blaming the intelligence.
Call me crazy, but W's dad was head of the CIA, I just don't buy that George '43 was so clueless as to not have any insight into the intelligence community and that all these things just happened to go wrong...
But now in the interest of not letting these things be forgotten- let's all take a moment, shall we, and talk about Halliburton. (cont'd)
There have been some investigations into Cheney's connections with Halliburton by those plucky reporters at local papers who haven't been cowtowed yet by the White House, but by and large this story is ignored by the news media. When
questions are raised regarding Cheney's involvement it is played off as a "political cheap shot". How dare they insinuate those things, it is unbecoming of rational political discourse! So, where are the followups and demands for investigations?
Nowhere.
The Administration (and believe me, especially after reading Paul O'Neill's story, I heartily blame Cheney for a large chunk of the chickenhawking going on) drums up a war, skewers intelligence and makes it more difficult for the intelligence community to function (then blames them for the lack of cohesion when it blows up in their faces), and is responsible for thousands of deaths of innocent people. While all of this is going on, Halliburton makes out life a bandit through profiteering, and only a minor fringe of all these ill-gotten spoils will even be taxed because of their creative use of the Cayman Islands (and the bustling metropolis of Vila, Vanuatu apparently.
Clinton got a some sexual favors from an intern, and conflated questions with the "depends on what your definition if is, is" defense and all hell broke loose.
We are dealing with systematic deception of society from the highest levels of government, and people look the other way.
But W and Cheney seem too keep it in their pants, so I assume everything is right with the world.
Where is the accountability here?