Just as we find among our own recent politicians in the U.S., Mexico's President Echevirria "would be able to throw the blame on others, as far away as he could from himself, for Tlateloco and the rest of the actions he supervised...." Krauze tells us that "Echeverria had snapped out an order by telephone to burn the bodies."
During the three years after the 9/11 attacks, a period when the American public gave all their trust to Bush-Cheney, the administration moved to intimidate the press by calling journalists unpatriotic if they voiced the slightest word of dissent. The most obvious example of this arose when Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an article in The New York Times revealing how Bush and Cheney were using trumped-up stories about WMDs in Iraq to justify their long-time neocon plan to invade. Bush-Cheney retaliated by destroying the career of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in the CIA. And they were able to throw the blame on others, such as Scooter Libby, who was convicted of felony federal charges of obstruction and perjury but never served a day in jail, because Bush pardoned him.
Yet this example pales in comparison to how Bush-Cheney secretly enabled torture to be used as a covert means to create a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, not to mention how they manipulated intelligence documents to justify bombing a country into rubble and killing a large part of its citizens, women and children included.
Unlike Mexico's President Echeverria, Cheney did not need to burn the bodies. The dead Iraqis, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, were killed in places where journalists were not allowed to go. Fortunately, Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, spoke the truth behind Cheney's lies, exposing how the former VP used torture to force prisoners to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein.
During the Bush administration, the government intimidated journalists' freedom of the press, which was, and still is, already weakened by the pressures of corporate sponsors. Almost every policy Bush-Cheney carried out, they did so as covert operations, from forbidding photographs of the soldiers returning from war in caskets to concealing how torture was authorized, how intelligence was manipulated, and how dissent was squelched, as in the case of Valerie Plame.
We think we are free. That's what we want to believe, and it seems we are because we can choose among 8 types of blue jeans and 21 flavors of ice cream. Now, though, our political leaders have shackled us in the chains of extremist ideology and religious superstitions. These same dismal shenanigans and outright crimes characterize the history of Third World countries as we see in places like Mexico.
Tragically for America, we have become extremely tolerant of political leaders who have taken ownership of our own government and our guiding principles, our only saving virtues. If the new administration under Obama, including Congress, do not willfully and aggressively undo the aberrations created by the Bush administration, then we will continue to roll down the rails, heading closer to a corrupt and failing government-one that no longer finds the courage to correct itself.
