Rewrite of part of what you said

Forgive me, I'm a compulsive rewrite man; it helps me better understand things.  Comments are welcome, both positive and negative.

 If you buy the official story, “Revelations about Governor (Spitzer) Began in Routine Tax Inquiry” (The New York Times, March 11, 2008), then of course the situation looks like Spitzer was just extremely unlucky to have been caught (because of the suspicious nature of financial transactions intended to conceal his expenditures for high-priced prostitutes). 

But if you think about it, that is a most _unlikely_ explanation of how the man happened to get caught.  Why?  Because the sums involved here – two or three thousand each, spent by a well known multimillionaire – are not sufficiently substantial to have drawn attention – except to someone who was looking for possible dirt on Spitzer.  And the great degree to which emphasis has been placed on this explanation suggests that someone’s plan was to discover dirt about Spitzer.  The only question is: who?  Who gave the order to keep an eye on Spitzer’s financial transactions?

Second likely motive:  For Spitzer to have been the object of a Bush vendetta, there would of course have had to have been some very good reason to give that order that would lead to the man’s removal from office -- just as in the case of Joseph Wilson or Admiral Fallon.  And indeed, all three men (Spitzer, Wilson and Fallon) directly challenged basic tenets of the Bush administration, and did so in a way that Bush and Cheney found threatening.  So it is quite significant that just one month before his outing, Spitzer published a column in The Washington Post called “Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime,” February 14, 2008, in which he explained that the administration’s own policies of (a) deliberate regulatory neglect and (b) favoring cronies, were major factors that contributed to the home mortgage crisis, perhaps the greatest economic catastrophe of our time.

It is no leap of logic to infer that Bush must have been infuriated and, as in the case of Wilson and Fallon, he probably wanted to strike out in retaliation.  That Spitzer’s fall should happen so soon thereafter, suggests that the decision to ‘get’ him was made partly out of a desire to punish another person for pointing to his administration’s dereliction of duty.  And why is he going to such lengths to protect the telecommunications industry?  He wants to be able to remain free to gather “intelligence” about those who might criticize or impeach him, his policies, and his administration.

by Richard Clark (16 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 63 comments) on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 9:53:45 PM
 

Further reflections . . .

In a recent article, “Why Bush Waterboarded Eliot Spitzer”, March 17, 2008), F. Willliam Engdahl reasons that Spitzer was targeted by a White House and Wall Street “dirty tricks” operation because he was undermining large-scale graft and corruption. Others have suggested that the Emperor’s Club was a Mossad front to gain valuable intelligence information and have it available for suitable political purposes. For the federal government to become so interested in a client of a prostitution ring appears to be so unusual that the situation calls for an alternative explanation. Another investigative journalist, Jerry Mazza, has uncovered multiple indications that Spitzer’s demise was contrived because he was a formidable force in moving against money-laundering, including by Russian-Israeli organized crime syndicates (“Spitzer taken down by Mossad?”, Online Journal, March 14, 2008; and “Postscript”, Online Journal, March 21, 2008).

The removal of Admiral Fallon, however, may indicate even more serious skullduggery afoot. In the tradition of the CIA, the administration advances “plausible explanations” in order to obscure what they have done. In the case of Admiral Fallon, for example, the Pentagon has denied that his resignation signals the prospect of an imminent attack on Iran. But Reuters has reported that he is not being allowed to retire from the service and is also not being allowed to testify before Congress (“Pentagon will not send Adm. Fallon to Congress on Iraq”, March 21, 2008). Here the name of the country of interest ought to be “Iran”, not “Iraq”. Iraq is old news. As recently as a year ago, Russian military sources were reporting that Bush was planning an aerial assault for April 6, 2007. Among the 20 targets were uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories (“Operation Bite: April 6 sneak attack by US forces against Iran planned," Online Journal, 26 March 2007).

Cheney's current visit to the Middle East raises concerns that this option may be back on the table. According to Webster Tarpley, the previously planned attack on Iran was to have been launched from several bases, including the island of Diego Garcia, where B-52s are based, and several aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Since Iran possesses the most sophisticated shore-to-ship missiles the world has ever seen, the probability of substantial losses of U.S. naval forces, potentially including thousands of lives, appeared to be considerable. Whether that consideration or the publication of information about it led to discarding the plan is not currently known. In the absence of novel electronic counter-measures that can address this problem – new defensive weapons of which the public is unaware – the risks involved in an attack of this kind (“a violent action against Iran”) are very serious. Indeed, the rationale for a new preventative attack in violation of international law, the UN Charter, and the U.S. Constitution appears to be extremely weak.

That rationale is to deny Iran access to the materials necessary to build nuclear weapons. The presumption that there is any kind of imminent threat here contradicts the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran publicly released in November 2007, which declared that Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003, which has been widely noted in the national press. What may be more surprising is that, even if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it could not use them in an offensive capacity without anticipating its own nuclear annihilation. It is distressing that after nearly a half-century of success with MAD (“mutually assured destruction”) as a policy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., so few seem to have learned so little. The only apparent purpose that weapons of this kind can serve is defensive in creating a counter-threat to an attack from other nations.

The first reports of Fallon’s removal from his role as the head of U.S. Central Command said that there were strong differences between the admiral and General David Petraeus, especially that “he (Fallon) believed Iraq was slumping toward civil war and that the Iraqi government would be unable to turn the tide, meaning the U.S. should find a way to quickly disengage militarily” (“U.S. commander in Mideast steps down”, Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2008). If the removal of Fallon and Cheney's trip to the region are ominous signs – and Bush believes that his successor might not be strong enough to cope with this problem, which he does not want to leave behind – then Bush and Cheney may be about to embark upon a new military venture that could make our incursion into Iraq look like a kindergarten party. It is tragic that – at this crucial stage in history – the U.S. should be led by ideologues and rogues.

by Jim Fetzer (15 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 18 comments) on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 at 12:59:55 AM