Alleged crimes and transgressions by recent U.S. Presidents
 

I want to see more comparison, or just plain lists, of crimes and transgressions committed or reasonably alleged to have been committed by the 42nd and 43rd U.S. Presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

I'm interested not in stuff that's only political, but in stuff that goes beyond politics. I realize that's a fuzzy border -- I'm just trying to set some kind of boundary. Anyone with a way of clarifying that boundary -- please speak up!

For perspective, remind us of similar misdeeds, if any, by earlier U.S. Presidents -- since, say, World War 2 (i.e., Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush the Elder).

I want, if possible, to take this out of other threads where the allegations get off-topic.

Please limit the allegations to those for which there is (a) at least some evidence that has been published in the responsible major news media (e.g., not just sensationalist tabloids) and (b) plausible logic for commission of the crime or transgression.

Please include links to detailed responsible (non-wacky) explanations elsewhere (so that the rest of us may be educated) if possible. Please limit your text in this thread to basic summaries if there's such a link or links.

Is this limited to [U]during[/U] their administration, or is it to include political career in general, campaigns, etc.?

Norm

I'll start off with two examples for each.

Clinton administration:

[U]Suspicions about death of Ron Brown[/U]

[URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Brown_(U.S._politician[/URL]),

[URL]http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/BROWN/brown.html[/URL] (I don't really know if this site is a responsible one. I just Googled, and this one seemed non-wacky upon brief skim.)

- -

[U]Sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and subsequent perjury about it[/U]

[URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Lewinsky[/URL]

[URL]http://icreport.access.gpo.gov/report/6narrit.htm#L1[/URL]

------------------------------------------------------------

Bush ("W", "the Younger", "43") administration:

[U]"The Republican War on Science"[/U] (title of the Chris Mooney 2005 book)

[URL]http://oversight.house.gov/features/politics_and_science/index.htm[/URL]

[URL]http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0106/p11s02-coop.html[/URL]

- -

[U]Deception about justification for Invasion of Iraq[/U]

[URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War[/URL]

and I intended to add another link here, but I have to go to an appointment before finding a suitable link.

[quote=Spherical Cow;96334]Is this limited to [U]during[/U] their administration, or is it to include political career in general, campaigns, etc.?[/quote]Let's limit to [u]during their administrations[/u].

I redacted the thread title to "Alleged crimes and transgressions...," since in nearly all instances that's what is being discussed. Any cases where there was an actual conviction or enough evidence to go to some kind of formal legal proceeding or hearings can be noted as such.

By way of pointing out the slippery legal and moral ground involved in many such cases:

- The encouragement of the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to rise up and depose Saddam Hussein by the Bush-Sr. administration and the resulting slowness to intervene in the subsequent brutal reprisals against them by the Baathist regime, leading (according to consensus best-estimates) to hundreds of thousands killed in the near-term, a colossal humanitarian crisis, the environmental crime of Hussein et al's draining of the southern marshes, and over a decade of no-fly zones and punitive sanctions which ended up (due to criminal but entirely predictable diversion of aid by the Hussein regime) resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Iraqis could, according to a not-unreasonable point of view, be viewed as a crime against humanity.

- The Clinton Administration Bombing raids in Iraq in 1999, after Hussein kicked the UN nuclear inspectors out, are described by the kind folks on the (obviously agenda-free) [url=http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar1999/iraq-m04.shtml]World Socialist Web Site[/url] thusly:

[i]"The US air attacks amount to an illegal and undeclared war against the people of Iraq. While the White House and the American media refer to "no-fly zones" in northern and southern Iraq as though they had some sort of official status, the ban on Iraqi air operations in these zones was unilaterally imposed by the US, Britain and France in the wake of the gulf war, and has never been authorized by the UN Security Council."[/i]

Today's [i]New York Times[/i] has an op-ed piece about the Bush Administration's post-9/11 [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/opinion/18thu1.html]warrantless wiretapping program[/url]:

[quote][b]A Spy Program in From the Cold[/b]

[i]Published: January 18, 2007[/i]

Of the many ways that President Bush has trampled civil liberties and the balance of powers since the 9/11 attacks, one of the most egregious was his decision to order wiretaps of Americans’ international calls and e-mail without court approval. It was good news, then, when the administration announced yesterday that it would now seek a warrant from the proper court for that sort of eavesdropping.

The president’s decision hardly ends this constitutional crisis. Among other things, the public needs to know why Mr. Bush broke the law for more than five years and what should be done to ensure there will be no more abuses of the wiretap statute.

But we’re pleased that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Bush had decided to end the warrantless program. He said the administration had worked out a way to speed the process of getting a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to intercept communications to and from the United States “where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of Al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.”

He said the court — created by the 1978 law on domestic wiretapping — issued an order on Jan. 10 governing this new process and that eavesdropping under “the terrorist surveillance program” would be subject to the court’s approval. There are still some big unanswered questions. For one thing, because the new warrant process is secret, we don’t know whether the court has issued a blanket approval for wiretapping, which would undermine the intent of the law, or whether the administration agreed to seek individual warrants.

It was also troubling that Mr. Gonzales repeated his insistence that the warrantless spying was legal. That suggests that the administration — which has never explained why it could not have sought warrants from the start and turned down offers to amend the law — will continue to resist legislative oversight of the wiretapping. It’s also likely to argue that the lawsuits challenging the eavesdropping should be dismissed. The damage has already been done by the president’s decision to ignore the law, and the lawsuits should proceed.

Mr. Gonzales’s announcement clearly was politically timed: he will appear today before the Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats who have vowed to investigate the eavesdropping.

We hope they will do that. Congress has a legitimate interest in the creation of this program, which has always seemed motivated more by the president’s relentless campaign to expand his powers than by a real need to speed intelligence gathering.

We strongly agree with John Rockefeller IV, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that “the administration’s go-it-alone approach, effectively excluding Congress and the courts and operating outside the law, was unnecessary” and that the White House should turn over documents on the creation of the wiretapping program. If the 1978 law needs to be updated, that should happen in public, not in a secret court.

This administration long ago forfeited the public trust on these issues.[/quote]

So you can add that one to your list, Richard. I suggest merging your first two posts into a single thread-starting post, in which we can maintain a regularly updated list (assuming we keep the entries brief enough that it doesn't proliferate out of control). Cheesehead, do you think this makes sense, or would you rather do things on a post-by-post basis?

Ernst: post-by-post, for now, until we've accumulated more.

Garo,

In the "Thoughts on ..." thread, you mentioned, at [URL]http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=96379&postcount=66[/URL]:

"3) Clinton's lies during the Kosovo war did lead to deaths of many innocents. None were American. Perhaps this is why this is not cited. But then what about his lying over Somalia?"

Will you please list details of those Clinton lies, or post links to descriptions elsewhere?

Well I do not have links for Clinton's lies but there are links for major obfuscation and lying by people who worked under him in circumstances that mean it could only have been done with Clinton's knowledge.

[url]http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0910-07.htm[/url]

[url]http://www.suc.org/kosovo_crisis/documents/ger_gov.html[/url]

[url]http://www.zmag.org/ZSustainers/ZDaily/2001-06/19herman.htm[/url]

[url]http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/a_just_war.htm[/url]

[url]http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/JOH406A.html[/url]

Garo,

Will you at least give us a 1- or 2-sentence explanation of what you meant by your two phrases "Clinton's lies during the Kosovo war" and "his lying over Somalia"?

Or do you need to amend those phrases to "major obfuscation and lying during the Kosovo war by people who worked under Clinton in circumstances that mean it could only have been done with Clinton's knowledge" and "major obfuscation and lying over Somalia by people who worked under Clinton in circumstances that mean it could only have been done with Clinton's knowledge"?

Sure

1) Kosovo - The western powers, and this includes Clinton, consistently lied to their own people about the scale of the ethnic cleansing being committed by the Serbs in Kosovo. Also, when evidence emerged post facto that the cleansing was accelerated as a result of the NATO bombing campaign this was denied and facts were twisted to support the "good war" interpretation that the cleansing was proceeding at that rate before the bombing started. During the Rambouillet negotiations, Serb concern about the KLA arming itself and attacking Serbs were not given adequate weight. The settlement offered to the Serbs was so outrageous that no independent country would have accepted it and then the Serbs were portrayed as being obstructionist.

Note that I am not denying that Serbs were killing Kosovars. They were! But the scale of the killing and the role of the KLA was obfuscated.

2) Somalia - The US public was lied to about the events that led to the the mission fictionalized in Black Hawk Down. A US-led mission led to the death of many non-combatants when they bombed a supposed safe house. Not very dissimilar to what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan more times than one can count.
[URL]http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs999[/URL]

3) Iraq - "half a million children dead is a price worth paying". Sanctions on food and medicine. Need I say more?