(AFT wire/11.31.2010/0954) In the rush to sort through 250,000 US government documents recently disbursed through the Internet by the website WikiLeaks, security analysts are paying closest attention to the oldest document in the package which some pundits and American political leaders claim opens a former US President to charges of treason.
“It is a grave disappointment to see an American Head of State stoop to this level, clearly intending to strengthen America’s enemies around the world and give terrorists the upper hand over our brave troops,” writes columnist David Frum for the right-of-centre U. S. magazine National Review.
Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives, has called for a Congressional investigation leading to formal charges. Fox TV managing editor, Brit Hume, referred to the former leader as “treasonous scum.”
The contentious document, a highly-classified State Department cable, was apparently written shortly after the former top official addressed close colleagues in a private meeting in Upstate New York, speaking shortly before the end of his second presidential term.
The unsigned cable reports that: “POTUS (acronym: the President Of The United States) stated that ‘The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and comfort’ attempting to establish principles of equivalency and interdependency between USG and oil-producing enemy states.”
“The speaker then called for severe limits to US military might in order to: ‘avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty,” the document continued.
The comments, delivered by then-US President George Washington to a largely military or ex-military audience in 1796, “referred dismissively to the American Government as merely ‘an experiment,’” the document reported, “and he repudiates domestic American, democratic, political partisanship as leading ‘at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.’ So-called exaggerated security fears may lead to dictatorship, POTUS added.”
“If he was not dead already, this George Washington guy should be impeached, waterboarded and put on trial in secret military courts because that’s the American way,” said TSA director John Pistole, speaking to The Wall Street Journal.
The official cable charged the US leader with intentionally undermining American economic growth and government policies of Quantitative Easing by stating: “As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible.”
In response, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke called the speaker, Mr. Washington, “bad, dangerous and unpatriotic.”
The cable concluded, “POTUS warns against diplomatic and military ‘foreign entanglements’ quoting. ‘the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible,’” which the cable claimed “has severe, negative implications for expanding the State Department budget in Fiscal Year 1797.”
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Nicely done.
Stephen,
As my daughters would say, you are being naughty again! But I agree that we ought to reexamine this Washington guy in light of these important documents. After all, didn't they name the city that disgorges all these documents after him? You know, the city that Stan Evans used to call "Rodham and Gomorrah."