Rewriting history while disrespecting the dead

By Libby

Brent Budowsky gets his rant on in this piece and touches on something that I've been meaning to address; the scheduling of Petraeus's report to Congress.

Let this be said up front: While the president and Petraeus maneuver for him to testify on the anniversary of Sept. 11, the Speaker and majority leader should hold firm and say that this matter is not subject to discussion and the general will not testify on this date.

The fact that Petraeus would allow himself to be used in this attempt at shameful exploitation of the one day on our calendar that should be above exploitation, speaks for itself.

Really. I can't think of anything more disrespectful to the 9/11 dead than to take the focus off the memorials by scheduling what is sure to be a controversial report on that day. It could easily be scheduled for the 12th instead. It couldn't be clearer that this is an attempt to reinforce the false notion the White House has been pimping for five years, that Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11. It didn't. We know it didn't. So where's the outrage? I'm appalled myself.

Budowsky goes on to pretty much shred Petraeus's credibility as both an impartial voice and as a tactician.

Fact: Shortly before the 2004 presidential election Petraeus did something that active-duty commanders should not do. In late September he wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post obviously as a favor to the Bush campaign, in which he applauded what he called major progress by the Iraqi military, Iraqi police and Iraqi leadership.

Beyond taking a political position in a way that an active-duty general should never do, which demonstrates political tendencies that in truth trouble many of the highest ranking military officers today, his forecast and analysis turned out to be almost completely, catastrophically wrong on every level.

The post is worth reading in full as there are many other examples, including the 04 op-ed, but this point struck me as particularly notable.

Even worse, we now learn that there will be no written report from Petraeus or the White House that was to have received his original paper. The whole exercise was a political sham, designed to buy time, and now that the time has been bought, the truth comes out: The Petraeus Report will not exist, anywhere, in written form.

Somehow I missed this news. How canny of the White House to eliminate a written record of a report that is certain to be comprised of mainly half-truths and outright lies. Perhaps Bush is hoping that history will judge him more kindly if he withholds the evidence for future historians.