http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/opinion/27rich.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH
NY Times Op-Ed: November 27, 2005
GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took
him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle
with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some
160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose
honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey,
is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time
during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.
The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so
became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month
about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha
about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle
against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead,
both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to
defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of
the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president
went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen
both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded
but one epithet away from a defibrillator.
The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is
the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in
the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to
merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.
Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats
marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak,
just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more
the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely
innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in
the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths
and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven
by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly
for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney
verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph
Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the
executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.
The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice
president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly
7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr.
Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's
mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were
told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for
these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball,
"never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The
five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they
were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected
fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations
and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared
billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African
uranium).
Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the
prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal
that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified
briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the
Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant
credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al
Qaeda."
The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A.
assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration
officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an
implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until
Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out
by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible
reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to
monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as
adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic
radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld,
then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular
fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers
in Iran.
What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said
in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who
voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he
did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas
uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German
intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they
have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released
by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February
2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the
administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al
Qaeda collaboration.
The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a
losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler
question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's
explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a
dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and
'the.' "
If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the
war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that
they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar
intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and
mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest
of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now
trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the
release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in
post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly
Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam
documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make
public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted
intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might
"prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played
then and now to gin up wars.
SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent
revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the
administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that
contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were
other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were
the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation
specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's
apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which
Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin,
among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the
press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role
played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James
Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.
No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the
administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a
road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are
still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they
vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims
about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort
last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a
stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom,
says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and
Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they
once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.
"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president
said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back
at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal
last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush
administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to
achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own
words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal
it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that
it can no longer afford to be without the truth.
***
I got this yesterday, from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Presumably, that's the
address for subscriptions. Do it! -Ed
On November 29th, Publisher Zuade Kaufman and Editor Robert
Scheer will launch truthdig.com, a new Web magazine providing provocative
content and in-depth coverage of current affairs.
The inaugural issue's FEATURED DIG:
a.. China: Boom or Boomerang?
"Perhaps no country has so many positive and negative trends
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Amidst the backdrop of a major toxic chemical spill in one of
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Also in the first issue is:
a.. UNCOVERED - Dossiers of ongoing news subjects-including
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b.. EAR TO THE GROUND - Robert Scheer's weekly column and his
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d.. A/V BOOTH - Audio interviews, video clips, photo essays
and more. Features include Inside Chavez's Venezuela by Sharmini Peries,
journalist turned foreign policy advisor to Venezuela President Hugo Chavez.
Hope you had a great holiday!
Join us for the dig on Tuesday, November 29!
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