The noose tightens....

When the history of the fall of the George W. Bush administration (because this time it's not going to be enough to remove just the president from office; the entire bunch is going to have to go down) is written, it won't be any mainstream media outlets that will be portrayed in the movie, it will be the intrepid folks at Raw Story. Today they have a ton of new information that's gradually coming out regarding the lies and deceit about Iraq that characterize the Bush Administration.

First, there's this informative timetable showing that Bush had hoped to invade Iraq before even being elected, all the way back to 1999.

Then, there's more documents backing up the Downing Street Minutes:

• A March 25, 2002 memo by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw expressing concern that the case for war against Iraq is weak:
  

  
  The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few. The risks are high, both for you and for the Government. I judge that there is at present no majority inside the PLP for any military action against Iraq, (alongside a greater readiness in the PLP to surface their concerns).
  
  [snip]
  
  If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the US would now be considering military action against Iraq. In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL and Al Qaida. Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of 11 September.
  
  [snip]
  
  regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal. Of course, we may want credibly to assert that regime change is an essential part of the strategy by which we have to achieve our ends - that of the elimination of Iraq’s WMD capacity: but the latter has to be the goal...
  
  [snip]
  
  A legal justification is a necessary but far from sufficient precondition for military action. We have also to answer the big question - what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than in anything. Most of the assessments from the US have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq’s WMD threat. But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better.
  



• A memo from British foreign policy advisor David Manning indicating that Condoleeza Rice, now Secretary of Bush Administration Lies and Spin, was committed to "regime change" in early 2002.
  

  
  Condi’s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed.
  
  [snip]
  
  From what she said, Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions:
  
  - w to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified;
  
  - at value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition;
  
  - how to coordinate a US/allied military campaign with internal opposition (assuming there is any);
  
  - what happens on the morning after?
  
  No doubt we need to keep a sense of perspective. ut my talks with Condi convinced me that Bush wants to hear you [sic] views on Iraq before taking decisions. [sic] He also wants your support. He is still smarting from the comments by other European leaders on his Iraq policy.
  
  [snip]
  
  I think there is a real risk that the Administration underestimates the difficulties. They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this really does not mean that they will avoid it.
  
  Will the Sunni majority really respond to an uprising led by Kurds and Shias? Will Americans really put in enough ground troops to do the job if the Kurdish/Shi’ite stratagem fails? Even if they do will they be willing to take the sort of casualties that the Republican Guard may inflict on them if it turns out to be an urban war, and Iraqi troops don’t conveniently collapse in a heap as Richard Perle and others confidently predict? They need to answer these and other tough questions, in a more convincing way than they have so far before concluding that they can do the business.



• A March 22, 2002 memo by Tony Blair's political director Peter Ricketts:
  

  
  The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. This is not something we need to be defensive about, but attempts to claim otherwise publicly will increase scepticism [sic] about our case. I am relieved that you decided to postpone publication of the unclassified document. My meeting yesterday showed that there is more work to do to ensuer [sic] that the figures are accurate and consistent with those of the US. But event he best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years ont he [sic] nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.
  
  US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Aaida [sic] is so far frankly unconvincing. To get public and Parliamentary support for military operations, we have to be convincing that:
  
  the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for;
  
  it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran).

And there's more...

These documents are worth reading, for they provide a glimpse of the kind of advice Tony Blair received from his advisors before capitulating to the war dreams of George W. Bush. They make his acquiescence, and continued support for, this war, even more heinous, because HE WAS GIVEN THE INFORMATION TO KNOW BETTER. It makes one wonder just what the benefit to Blair was.

Presumably these are the documents that Rep. John Conyers will present during his hearings on Thursday (assuming that James Sensenbrenner doesn't barge in and shut them down.

The Downing Street Minutes may not be in and of themselves culpatory, but taken in context with the rest of these documents and the Raw Story timeline, they provide a picture of a cynical, manipulative administration, committed to a particular policy (i.e. war) even before taking the reins of power, and then cynically using the events of 9/11 and the fears of the American citizenry to justify this predetermined policy.

Now, I may have believed in Bush Administration complicity or deliberate negligence in preventing the 9/11 attacks right from the first day, but many Americans felt that even the possibility was too heinous to even contemplate. However, given the long track record of Bush Administration commitment to attacking Iraq, it is no longer the exclusive province of tinfoil hatters to believe that this Administration, having been briefed in August that attacks engineered by Osama Bin Laden were in the offing, decided to let the scenario play out because they knew it would provide the justification for war that they needed. I do believe that greedy Bush Administration officials are behind the put options on American and United Airlines that have STILL not been identified; after all, why pass up an opportunity to make a few bucks while you're at it? Now, all this said, I don't believe they anticipated the collapse of the World Trade Center; this falls into the realm of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I think they figured on losing a couple hundred people in a few airplanes, and maybe a few casualties in the buildings -- and their cost/benefit analysis -- the same coldhearted calculations they use in figuring out how many corpses of American kids will be tolerated -- led them to allow the attacks to occur.

The remaining question, however, is whether the Bush Defense Forces of the mainstream media are going to be powerful enough to squelch the growing rumbles of the blogosphere and progressive radio -- and the ever-increasing pile of evidence demonstrating that the Bush Administration is guilty of the most heinous crimes against the Constitution, against the American people who placed their trust in them, and against humanity, ever committed by an American presidential administration.