WTF Is It Now?!?

Robert Fisk: Bunnypants' rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of Osama bin Laden. In the United States, the bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding belts – note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America's ever weirder "war on terror" – and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of "president" Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, you'll find they've issued more threats against Americans than Mr bin Laden.

John Dean blasts 'dick' Cheney: (snips...) Vice President Dick Cheney is at it again: More secrecy. Now he wants to bury the intelligence information given to President Bush on August 6, 2001 - over a month before the terrorist attacks. Indeed, Cheney wants Congress, far more generally, to keep its investigative nose out of issue of what intelligence the Bush Administration did, or did not, have about terrorism prior to September 11.

According to The Washington Post, White House political types have been putting the word out to their network of conservative radio talk show hosts throughout the country to rally the troops, set the dogs loose, and shout the Democrats down. Secrecy, however, is a tough sell, so they're going to have to attack some of their own as well.

Conservative columnist Phyllis Schlafly has been quite blunt about this secrecy business. In March, she blasted the White House for the Vice President's refusal to turn over the records of his energy task force. She finds Cheney's "pursuit of secrecy" comparable to "Clinton's refusal to disclose documents revealing who attended the meetings of Hillary's task force on health care."

Ms. Schlafly declared correctly that: "The American people do not and should not tolerate government by secrecy." And she told the Bush White House that no one's "going to buy the sanctimonious argument that the Bush Administration has some sort of duty to protect the power of the presidency."

To claim a need for secrecy to restore presidential power is disingenuous at best, and a deliberate falsehood at worst. Secrecy is the way of dictatorships, not democracies.