Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush

John Dean gets right to the point. He lists the facts and the law, and comes to a conclusion. This is not a lengthy volume full of political rhetoric, it's just facts, and how they apply to the law. This is an amazing book that should be read by every American.

Two chapters into John W. Dean's thrilling account of the factual indiscretions that our current administration has taken with the spirit of our Constitution, I started to think that the decline of America was indeed well underway. It's clear Dean has a tarnished past, but I agree with other reviews that it can offer an unequaled perspective on corruption, power, and revenge and how it can usurp the fragile balance of our sacred democracy.

"Worse Than Watergate" is a short but well-written book that focuses on the incredible, paranoid secrecy of the Bush Administration. The title has two meanings -- 1) the extent of secrecy is worse than the Nixon White House, and 2) the crime of the Bush Administration is worse than the crime of Watergate, which of course led to Nixon's resignation before his imminent impeachment. The punchline of Dean's book is that the Bush Administration systematically manufactured, manipulated and twisted intelligence, and lied to the American people to justify its war on Iraq. This is a high crime, an impeachable offense. It has all been well-documented (see in particular "The Lie Factory" on the Mother Jones website, about the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans staffed by neoconservatives and reporting directly to Cheney, getting most of their junk intel from Chalabi, the Iraqi con-man in exile), and Dean adds nothing new to the story other than pointing to the logical legal consequence of impeachment. Most of the book chronicles the amazing extent and nature of secrecy in the Administration's actions, including such things as Cheney's energy panel. Why is it that the Bush Administration was so reluctant for 9/11 to be investigated? What are they hiding? Why was a whole section on the Saudis blacked out of the Congressional investigation report? The most amazing revelation I found in Dean's book (though it had apparently been reported somewhere) is that the COG was activated after 9/11. COG (Continuity of Government) was a secret plan for reconstituting the U.S. government in event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Hundreds of federal employees were relocated to secret bunkers after 9/11, as part of the secret COG plan! What else is the Bush Administration doing that the public knows nothing about? Dean nails it right on the head when he points out a massive lie of the 2000 election campaign -- remember Bush saying that the U.S. should be humble, and not intervene militarily around the world? (This was a criticism of Clinton's interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti & Kosovo.) In reality, the foreign policy team he was assembling -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, & Co. -- had put together an aggressive doctrine under Bush Sr. back in 1992 in the form of the infamous Defense Guidance Doctrine, and was proceeding to implement it once again. The preventive war doctrine promulgated in Bush's National Defense Strategy is the revival of the 1992 strategy. It is a pervasive misunderstanding to refer to this doctrine as PREEMPTIVE -- preemption applies to a threat that already exists, attacking "them" before "they" can attack "us." But the Bush Doctrine is clearly PREVENTIVE in nature -- the whole point is to attack and destroy threats BEFORE THEY EXIST. How many WMDs have been found in Iraq? ZERO. How much solid evidence has been amassed of any Iraqi link to al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion? NONE. The Bush Administration

For a convicted felon, John Dean is an exceptional author. I remember reading his own recollections of the Watergate affair and his own association with the subsequent events that led both to his own denouement and the resignation of Richard Nixon in disgrace in "Blind Ambition" in the mid 1970s. Once again he weighs in impressively by building a very strong circumstantial case for the investigation and possible prosecution of President George W. Bush for criminal actions that Dean terms to be indeed, "worst than those of Watergate". Culling from public records and the recollections of other eye-witnesses, Dean shows how Mr. Bush has systematically exaggerated, embellished, and engineered a series of preverifications and outright lies to the American public in an effort to convince us of the need for military intervention in Iraq. Dean argues that in asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American force in Iraq, President Bush made a number of "unequivocal public statements" regarding the reasons this country needed to pursue military force in pursuit of national interests. Dean, now an academic and noted author, shows how through tradition, presidential statements regarding issues of national security are held to an expectation of "the highest standard of truthfulness". Therefore, according to Dean, no president can simply "stretch, twist or distort" the facts of a case and then expect to avoid resulting consequences. Citing historical precedents, Dean shows how Lyndon Johnson's distortions regarding the truth about the war in Vietnam led to his own subsequent withdrawal for candidacy for re-election in 1968, and how Richard Nixon's attempted cover-up of the truth about Watergate forced his own resignation. Dean contends that while President Bush should indeed receive the benefit of the doubt, he must also be held accountable for explaining how it is that he made such a string of unambiguous and confident pronouncements to the American people (and to the world as well) regarding the existence of WMD, none of which have been substantiated in the subsequent searches that have been conducted by either Untied Nations nor American Military investigators. Dean explains how the vetting process for any public staement is processed within the executive branch. [...] Moreover, Dean contends, others such as Donald Rumsfeld were even more emphatic in claiming Saddam Hussein had WMD, even claiming to know the locations as being in the Tikrit and Baghdad areas. Finally, he concludes, given the huge implicit political risk to Mr. Bush, it would inconceivable that Mr. Bush would be so brazen as to make such statements without some intelligence to back them up. Yet, according to Mr. Dean, we are left with a dilemma; either Mr. Bush's statements are grossly inaccurate, given the tons and tons of chemical agents he claimed Saddam possessed which can be neither located nor substantiated, or Mr. Bush has deliberately misled us. How do we