Chapter 306: Ambushing Bush

Sunday, May 7 to Wednesday, May 31, 2006 (Continued)

Dodge-Gate merits having more of its details mentioned.

President Bush's promised appearance on Monday afternoon boiled down to his saying, "The CIA has exceeded its authority by using their secret funding to get into areas of research that were prohibited by my administration. As God is my witness, I'm determined to stop the diversion of funds into areas of research that this administration unhesitatingly rejects blah, blah..."

I'd read some of the memos he'd sent Ernesto Elliott, so I knew he was talking a big, smelly, crock of shit. On the other hand, what else could he have said? By Monday afternoon hundreds of the facts mentioned in my emails had been confirmed and none had been found to be false. The purpose of the recently destroyed Fort Dodge lab was now inarguable, so the entire issue came down to who was to blame for its existence. Bush could've put up his hand and said he knew about the lab, had approved its research, and thereby have taken responsibility for its illegal actions. Or he could've lied. There was no way he was ever going to admit he'd known - and therefore allowed - an illegal lab, especially not when its own documents talked about the risk of its killing tens of millions of registered voters and their children. Bush chose to make America look like an asshole of a nation to avoid his taking any responsibility at all for something that he was totally responsible for, and could've shut down at any time during his presidency.

I knew Bush's denial meant he was an asshole. He was producing so much shit that he couldn't be anything else. Judging from my school-life, the world is full of assholes and I'd ordinarily do what I always did: avoid them. But this case was very different. Bush headed the Government that had kidnapped me and would've experimented me to death, and I'd heard over a dozen legal experts on various channels saying, "The DHS's and CIA's treatment of Mark Anderson was illegal." I couldn't pin my mistreatment on Bush, but I could prove he was lying about the illegal biochem lab, so I'd make sure some of that shit stuck to the asshole. It came down to a very simple issue to me: if the Government had their mistakes publicized, they'd be less likely to abuse their power in the future. If that'd happened more in the last few years, I might not have grieving families in three-quarters of my recent dimensions and be stuck doing gardening all day long instead of developing what could have turned out to be a fascinating scientific career.

[[For years I'd tried to run away from assholes and bullies; sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. About a year ago I finally started standing up for myself when assholes and bullies came to me; always succeeding. This was the first time in my life I was proactively 'taking it to them', starting with the most powerful President in the world. It was an important decision for me.]]

I asked Vanessa, "Can I borrow some blank paper from your office please?"

"Help yourself, Ron."

I reproduced by hand the three presidential memos that I'd read in EE's (Ernesto Elliott's) office, labeling them "Presidential Memo", giving the White House Document Numbers, To, From, Date and other header information, as well as all the text. I wrote on the bottom of each, "signed by George W. Bush." The most damning memo raked the Associate Director (EE) over the coals for allowing the destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, setting America's biological weapon development program back several years at the cost of hundreds of more millions, losing the lives of over two hundred valuable scientists and other staff, and especially for letting unknown enemy agents steal ALL the lab's bioweapon data and samples. Bush had ranted for two paragraphs about the international security consequences of the thefts, mentioning the "very real danger of the weapons being used against Americans." The closing paragraph was a collection of scathing comments about EE's incompetence. Bush had obviously been pissed off when he wrote it.

The "enemy agents" aspect had never been mentioned on TV, as the Government had just said that there'd been an unspecified accident at Fort Dodge. That's partly why the "tens of millions of Americans could die in an accident" was scaring so many people. The media could see the "unspecified accident" was a big one, but if they'd known what the President (thought he) knew, the media would have been screaming even louder.

I returned to the living room, saying, "Steven, Felicity, Prof, Vanessa, can I show you something over here please?"

Julia considered herself invited too. She was the shortest, so I gave the pages to her to hold so the parents could read over her shoulders.

The best one was on top, so it didn't take long for Dad to say, "FUCK! Did the..." I cut him off by NP'ing his lips together, giving Dad quite a surprise. He got the idea though: there were other people in the living room that we didn't want to know.

I said, "I saw the original paper versions."

"So he knows?" asked Mom.

"Totally. Probably has for years."

Prof asked, "Are all the details correct? The Document Number especially?"

"Yes. They're perfect copies. I memorized them deliberately."

Prof pointed to the "enemy agent" phrase, asking me, "You?"

"Yeah. Smoke and mirrors. I think they still think that, but I can't be sure."

"He was sure of it on February 21. Either way, there'd still be a great deal of impact from this. Show us the next one, Julia."

Julia was busy hugging me in admiration of my ability to fuck the President, so she had to let me go to find out if I could fuck him in two different ways.

I let them read the next two. They both postdated the first rant, and were less emotional in tone, but they were on the same theme and just confirmed some of the points in the first.

Prof said, "I'm going to burn these now, okay?"

There were no objections, so Prof threw them on the fire and stood over them until they were gone.

Later that evening, when the visitors had all gone, Vanessa said, "You showed us those pages for a purpose, Ron?"

"Yes. I don't think you'll ever be able to lay responsibility for what happened to Mark at his feet, but he shouldn't be allowed to lie his way out of everything."

We discussed how they should be used. Vanessa had the best idea. We didn't know that the essential prerequisite for her plan would definitely happen, but the issue was big enough that we thought it would. We'd sit on the memos while we waited for it.

Pressure built daily, and after only a couple of days it was announced that Bush would be interviewed about Dodge-Gate on TV. Not live, very unfortunately, but even a pre-recorded interview would probably be good enough for us. The network and interviewer chosen to get the interview had a slight tendency to support Bush's Republican Party, but not as fanatically as Fox. Presumably they were chosen to give the interview the appearance of fairness and legitimacy. We would've done the same thing regardless of the network chosen, but we were happy it was a relatively middle-of-the-road one.

I flew the 1,500 miles to Oklahoma City, found a computer left on in the DMV that was within twenty four feet of the wall so I could type the easiest [I later practiced typing just as fast from outside my proximity range - touch-typing, to misuse that phrase], and I sent an email to the producer of the show which:

• Identified myself as the original sender of the Dodge-Gate emails to the media. I wasn't using the same email address as last time, as the CIA, DHS, and God knows who else would have their hooks into that email address by now, and would probably be intercepting all emails from it. But to make this email seem more authentic, but without specifying the exact address in case that triggered an interception, I wrote, "For those emails I used a semi-majestic countdown address." (It'd been ljesjtc321@gmail.com.)

• Stated I was using a 'borrowed' computer again.

• Provided my retyped reproductions of the three presidential memos to Ernesto Elliott.

• Ended with, "If you want your network to continue to receive newsworthy facts from me in the future, use the above information well in the presidential interview."

One of the worst things about biological weapons - probably THE worst thing - is that they don't exempt Republicans. That's my tongue-in-cheek way of saying that even among Republicans, Bush's popularity was now at an all time low. Vanessa had predicted that even his own party would have to distance itself from him soon, otherwise they'd be dragged down too far with him. She also predicted that the TV networks would be even less loyal to Bush, or their viewer numbers would drop too much. They also couldn't ally themselves with a dead duck like Bush at the cost of cutting themselves off from the source of the biggest story in months (so implied my last bullet point), so they should use the information well. If not, we'd send it to everyone else and see what happened, which should still be spectacular.

We gathered around the TV to watch the interview. It started with the usual soft-pedaling, easily answered fluff (probably more accurately called "soft-peddling"). Bush's position was that the CIA had exceeded their authority, and that it appeared to be the fault of two senior CIA managers. "I'd like to say more," he said sincerely, "but there's an ongoing investigation."

There was lots of meaningless crap, such as Bush assuring the public that there was no risk whatsoever, "We have the situation under complete control and the cleanup is going wonderfully well," something I knew was the exact opposite of the truth, especially as there wasn't actually any "clean up", merely a search and recovery operation.

Several minutes were wasted explaining how the CIA's budget and expenditure had been kept secret for many years by every administration, and the necessity for that, which in this circumstance excused Bush and all his senior staff from having any knowledge and responsibility. It was, he clearly explained, a terrible, internal CIA judgment error.