In The Name Of God, Go!

In the Asia Times:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK10Ak01.html
we read  
Spooks refuse to toe Cheney's line on Iran  
By Gareth Porter WASHINGTON - 

The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program. The aim is to make the document more supportive of Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts provided by participants in the NIE process to two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers... ...But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the "unsatisfactory" draft NIE, but without making its key findings public. ...Cheney's desire for a "clean" NIE that could be used to support his aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor in the replacement of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence in early 2007. 

And so it goes.
Cheney wants to cook the books to agree with his office, The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense want something more representative of the range of opinion of the intelligence community. Of course, what this makes immediately obvious is the fact that Mr. Cheney and crew obviously use this method to get their way and it is clear that they did so in 2002 and 2003 in beating the drums for war in Iraq. In essence, the tiger does not change his spots.
This is not news.
Mr. Cheney knows he perverted the truth and is quite proud of the fact, secure in his opinion that it was all for a higher goal, a goal of such prisitine morality that its achievement would absolve all sins and crimes implicate in the pursuance of that supreme goal. There is still talk about intelligence being wrong, not perverted, merely because so much of the population is rather dim and witless and still thinks the intelligence community as a whole played dumb.

What is to become of the American Empire? This empire has existed in various stages of growth and development since the USA became a colonial power. What distinguished the American Empire from the other empires of its times: the Russian, the British, the German, etc., is the thread of democracy and law, extensively written, spoken, debated, by the Founding Fathers who were products of a time when public life and private were consonant with the spiritual lives and produced a moral sense of remarkable acuity.
The American Empire is now beginning to fall apart. Iraq is not the beginning; it is the end, or the presager of the end. The American Empire will be destroyed by its own enormous creations: the financial system which becomes perverted by greed, the ecological system which is perverted by lies and chemistry, the political system which is perverted by greed and lies, and so on. Under the Empire, Genetically Modified food will eventually be force fed us, as if we were geese for foie gras, in order to increase profit for global corporations.

The American Empire will strangle on its own excesses: an excess of greed, an excess of pride, an excess of ego pure and simple coupled with its own bizarre taste for gigantism and monsters which it quaintly refers to as "economies of scale" or whatever the buzzword is. Nothing is inevitable. I would feel a chance to escape some impending doom by having the present administration resign.

In 1653, Oliver Cromwell addresses the Rump Parliament, "Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! "
 

In the spring of 1940, as German Panzers raced across Europe and the British reeled back from their failed Norwegian campaign, the peace policy of Neville Chamberlain was revealed at last to be a disaster, Leopold Amery, MP, ( who had been two years senior to Churchill at the Harrow School) rose in Parliament to condemn this policy and quoted Cromwell, “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Now as Mr. Cheney attempts to cook the intell books again, we raise our voices to proclaim that enough is enough. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, we cannot take another year of your administration: IN THE NAME OF GOD, GO!