The hydra has many mouths

Part of understanding my political philosophy is understanding how much power the president has outside of the checks and balances. On the liberal news program Democracy Now! they have noted several times that Gerry Ford didn't remember if he'd supplied the guns used in the East Timor massacre. I don't blame host Amy Goodman for having strong feelings about it, she was caught in the middle of it, but those feelings keep her from understanding what Ford was actually saying.
From what I know about Gerry Ford, he was a really honest guy, and it seemed to bother him that we treat the president like a king. He would put little hand made signs over the 'executive suite' sign on his hotel rooms that would say 'Gerry's Room'. He was trying to hold on to his humility. So on East Timor he might have been saying that he just couldn't remember if he signed off on giving away enough guns for a government to kill a 300,000+ of it's own people. But to me it's more of a comment on how insignificant major decisions are presented to the president.
The reason Ford probably doesn't remember is because some guy from the CIA or whatever very with the same urgency as approving new flotation devices for the Coast Guard said "We need you to approve this aid to the Timorese government."
Ford signs it real quick because he has literally a thousand other things to approve that day and genocide is subsidized in an unmemorable way.
The story that keeps getting buried in the lead up to the Iraq war is how we had that government on it's knees (or so the Bush administration thought) before we even did anything. It went like this (a lot of my info came from the Frontline special on the lead up to the Iraqi invasion):
After 9/11 the Bush administration was sure it would somehow lead back to Saddam. They asked the CIA to look into the viability of going into Iraq and taking Saddam out. Goes over there with several million dollars and infiltrates the highest echelons of the Iraqi military. The CIA comes back to the Bush administration, who already had a vendetta mentality towards Iraq, and told them that they had the Iraqi military in their pocket. Essentially bringing in the tanks would just be a formality at that point.
This is the true power of the US President. Asking one question can start a war. The mainstream media narrative on this war was that the administration cherry picked intel to justify something they wanted to do anyway. What really happened is they were trying to justify taking advantage of something they had already done.