Arthur, thanks
for posting this from WSJ, even though it’s by Al Hunt. NeoConservative Loyalists will
immediately denounce this piece because of Al Hunt’s politics, and some may
even remember a story during Campaign 2000: Candidate Bush walked up Hunt in a restaurant, and cursed
him for something he’d written in the WSJ, using language not suitable for
family publications. Hunt was
having dinner with his wife, Judy Woodruff, and their ten-year old son at the
time.
So it all comes
back to the public demanding to have questions answered, to exercise the system
of checks and balances the Constitution provides to us. The ghosts of Watergate linger. - KWC
Here’s the
link to a similar editorial piece in the Atlanta Journal, not a bastion of
liberalism, by deputy editor Jay Bookman: If One War
Fact on Iraq is False, What of Others?
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/index.html (some of these may require
registration)
Or the one in
the Chicago Tribune, Questioning the Case for War,
also today @ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0307100087jul10,1,3573196.story?coll=chi-newsopinion-hed
or in Bush
country, the Dallas Morning News editorial: Bush Needs to
Address the Uranium Question @ http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/stories/071003dnedihowaboutthis.76124.html
“President Bush has
always prided himself as a straight shooter. It's one of the traits that first
endeared him to fellow Texans down in Austin and later impressed other
Americans when he ran for president. And that plain-spoken candor can serve him
well again as he confronts nagging questions about how forthright the
administration was in making the case for war with Iraq.
...“Now, everyone admits the intelligence was wrong. The only question is whether Mr. Bush was misled himself or
whether he actually misled others.
No one doubts the
president's convictions about the nature of the Iraqi regime. But doubts are
mounting about the nature and quality of the intelligence in this case and the
administration's handling of it.
It's time for more
Bush straight talk.
Likewise, LA
Times columnist R. Scheer points
the finger at Cheney and introduces the d�j� vu of Watergate, chastising Wm.
Safire for invoking Nixon and quoting former diplomat JC Wilson on weekend news
shows: June 8, 2003 A Diplomat’s Undiplomatic Truth: They
Lied @ http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer8jul08,1,4994582.column?coll=la-util-op-ed
(excerpt) “In media interviews, Wilson said it was
the vice president's questioning that pushed the CIA to try to find a credible
Iraqi nuclear threat after that agency had determined there wasn't one. "I
have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to
Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi
threat," Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times.
"A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false
pretenses."
In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added, "It really comes down to the
administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental
justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying
about?" Those are the carefully chosen words of a 23-year career diplomat
who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by then-President
George H.W. Bush for his role as the last American to confront Hussein face to
face after the dictator invaded Kuwait.
… "There is no greater threat that we
face as a nation," Wilson told NBC, "than the threat of weapons of
mass destruction in the hands of nonstate actors or international terrorists.
And if we've prosecuted a war for reasons other than that, using weapons of
mass destruction as cover for that, then I think we've done a great disservice
to the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat."
The world is outraged at this pattern of lies used to justify the Iraq
invasion, but the U.S.
public still seems numb to the dangers of government by deceit.
Indeed, Nixon speechwriter William Safire this week in his column channeled the
voice of his former boss to reassure Republicans that the public easily could
be conned through the next election.
Perhaps, and far be it for me to lecture either Safire or a reincarnated Nixon
as to the ease of deceiving the electorate, but as we learned from the Nixon
disgrace, lies have a way of unraveling, and the truth will out, even if it's
after the next election.
Or back in
March 2003, Seymour Hersch wrote Who Lied to
Whom? in the New Yorker , asking WHY did the administration
endorse a forgery? excerpts:
“The Bush
Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have stemmed
from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged
documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy
toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N.
inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French,
the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom
that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened
by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now,
the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration
official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading
false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program—part of its Information
Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials in Washington. “I knew
that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration official said of the
British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the
Brits to prepare.”
Over the next year, a
former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the U.N.
inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable
intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be
funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London
and elsewhere.
“It was intelligence that was
crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and
around the world,” the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine
meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings,
usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme
eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. “I knew a
bit,” one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week,
“but I was never officially told about it.”
…Washington’s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet
its obligation to give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on
much more than a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African
nation. But George W. Bush’s war
against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout the world—in part because
one side is a superpower and the other is not. It can’t help the President’s case, or his international
standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.”
(end of excerpt.
Contact me if you want this 40 KB file if it doesn’t clear FW)
arthur wrote: Something is up. The op-ed of the
WSJ is raising some Bush questions
The Fog of Deceit
By Albert R. Hunt, 10 July 2003
The Wall Street Journal
Preparing for his State of the Union in January, President Bush faced a
challenge: American troops were amassed to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but
public support for war was slipping.
Iraq surely possessed dangerous weapons but an "imminent threat"
meant a
nuclear capacity. The president played that card. "Our intelligence
sources," Mr. Bush intoned, showed Iraq was seeking aluminum tubes to be
used for nuclear weapons. And he declared: "The British government learned
that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa."
These stories were wrong. At the time, most intelligence sources doubted the
tubes were suitable for nuclear weapons, and the alleged uranium purchase --
from Niger -- was bogus. Moreover, the president either knew the uranium
story was dubious or he was kept in the dark, and allowed to deceive the
public, by someone high in the administration.
The phony Iraq-Niger deal may be the smoking gun in what was a pervasive
pattern of exaggeration and distortion to justify the war against the Iraqi
dictator. Some of these claims -- the alleged Baghdad-al Qaeda ties, the
extent of his biological and chemical weapons or even his nuclear designs --
reflected selective use of conflicting intelligence.
The false Niger connection was much more. Yet Congress, under pressure from
the White House, is abdicating its responsibility to investigate why the
public was misled on such a momentous matter.
The Niger issue, widely reported the past few days, has a revealing
evolution. It starts with the CIA, in early 2002, asking former African
ambassador Joseph Wilson to check out reports of a Saddam effort to purchase
uranium from Niger; this, the agency explained, was in response to a query
from Vice President Cheney's office.
Ambassador Wilson spent eight days in Niger. He never was shown the alleged
documentation of any deal but interviewed top officials, analyzed the
possibilities and concluded -- as did the Bush ambassador to Niger -- that
there was little chance that any such transaction transpired. He reported
this back to the CIA and the State Department.
What happened then? It's inconceivable that the CIA, having sent a
high-level emissary at the request of the vice president, didn't report his
findings back to Mr. Cheney's office. Yet the British aired this charge in
September and in December the State Department published a fact sheet
asserting Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. That prompted the
International Atomic Energy Agency to request documentation.
But, as Rep. Henry Waxman's office revealed this week, the Bush
administration waited more than six weeks -- until one week after the
president's State of the Union speech with the uranium charge -- to respond
to the IAEA and then privately acknowledged there were doubts about the
validity. In quick order, that agency concluded the charge was fake, that
the documentation was clearly forged.
The revelations about a diplomat's trip to Niger didn't begin surfacing
until several months ago, and Mr. Wilson finally outed himself in a New York
Times column last Sunday. But in January, when President Bush gave the State
of the Union, notes Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, a former chairman of the
Intelligence Committee, it was widely known inside that the uranium report
"appeared to be a fabrication."
Did the president know that on January 28? If not, who failed to tell him?
Why did he cite the Brits rather than our own government? Did Dick Cheney
know about Mr. Wilson's findings? If not, what staffer kept them from him?
Why did National Security Chief Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld make the same baseless charges on a Saddam-Niger connection?
In contrast, why did Secretary of State Colin Powell omit any such reference
in his key United Nations presentation in early February?
The White House reluctantly acknowledged the presidential mistake this week
but produces no details of what happened or who knew this was a phony rumor
based on a forged document. Recently, Ms. Rice, in response to a question on
NBC's Meet the Press, suggested "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of
the agency, but no one our circle knew there were doubts and suspicions that
this might be a forgery." Ambassador Wilson, who also served as a National
Security Council top aide on Africa, dismisses that explanation, having no
doubt his conclusions reached the vice president's office.
But this administration, whether it's stonewalling the commission
investigating Sept. 11, or the facts leading up to the Iraqi war, is
contemptuous of the public's right to know. "This is the most secretive
administration at least since Richard Nixon," charges Sen. Graham.
The tragedy here is that there was a case to take out Saddam without
exaggerating or lying. He was a brutal despot, who aggressively destabilized
the region and was in clear violation of United Nations resolutions on his
weapons of mass destruction. (No other threat meets those particulars.)
But the ends-justifies-the-means duplicity employed to rally political
support was more than a disservice. If Bill Clinton could be impeached for
lying about sex, or Al Gore discredited for exaggerating his relationship
with James Lee Witt, then lying about the reasons for going to war --
whether it was the president or one of his subordinates -- ought to command
an inquiry from the people's representatives.
NEW YORKER WHO LIED TO WHOM.doc