Necconservatives causing nothing less than an inversion of its traditional self-undertstanding and sense of priorities

Appetite for Destruction: "January 19, 2004 issue
Copyright � 2004 The American Conservative | By Claes G. Ryn"

Neoconservatives have more in common with French revolutionaries than American traditionalists.
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Virtually all Americans recognized the necessity of an emphatic response to 9/11. The reason this atrocity did not elicit focused action against the perpetrators but became instead the justification for war against Iraq and a worldwide battle against terrorism is that neo-Jacobin intellectuals and activists had long prepared to launch such a policy. After 9/11 they could push through policies whose full implications were not obvious to their less ideological bosses. President Bush had the excuses that he confronted wholly unanticipated and unsettling circumstances and was not an intellectual and historian able fully to understand the cause that he adopted.
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America is witnessing nothing less than an inversion of its traditional self-undertstanding and sense of priorities.

Claes G. Ryn is Professor of Politics at Catholic University and Chairman of the National Humanities Institute. He is the author of America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire.

O'Neill Says He Didn't Take U.S. Treasury Documents: all documents came from Treasury's chief legal officer

Excite - News: "O'Neill Says He Didn't Take U.S. Treasury Documents | Jan 13, 3:21 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, under fire for criticizing President Bush's leadership, denied on Tuesday he had taken secret documents from the Treasury.

On Monday, hours after O'Neill criticized the president on CBS television, the Treasury Department said its Inspector General was investigating how a document marked 'secret' was shown during the interview.

Speaking on NBC's 'Today' show, the ex-Treasury Secretary said the documents were given to him by the Treasury's chief legal officer after he requested them to help former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind write a book on O'Neill's time in the Cabinet.

'I said to him (the general counsel) I would like to have the documents that are OK for me to have. About three weeks later, the general counsel, the chief legal officer, sent me a couple of CDs, which I frankly never opened,' said O'Neill, who resigned under pressure a year ago in a shake-up of Bush's economy team." ...

Bush administration 'systematically misrepresenting' Iraq's WMD: repeated visits by VP Cheney pressed analysts to come to "more threatening" judgments

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Carnegie group says Bush made wrong claims on WMD: "Julian Borger in Washington | Thursday January 8, 2004 | The Guardian

The Bush administration will today be accused of 'systematically misrepresenting' the threat posed by 'Iraq's weapons of mass destruction' in a comprehensive report on post-war findings. "
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The authors say the intelligence reports of Iraq's capabilities grew more shrill in October 2002 with the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which included an unusual number of dissenting views by intelligence officials.

The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views "sometime in 2002". Repeated visits to the CIA by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and demands by top officials to see unsubstantiated reports, created an atmosphere in which intelligence analysts were pressed to come to "more threatening" judgments of Iraq.

The report concludes that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes". ...