October 30, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada
By FRANK RICH
TO believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon
you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G.
Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate
break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang
that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand
jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took
"responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and
weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those
ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime
was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate
abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name
"the White House horrors."
In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look
like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name
contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to
the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis
(Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of the story.
That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to
such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the
administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into the
genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud) that
the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.
After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective
the administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very
recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two
separate official investigations into the failure of prewar
intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that
our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong. But wittingly or
unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough inquiries actually
protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate lingo, "the big
enchilada.
The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by
Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a
"sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of *****
Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their
semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG)
created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas
Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue
intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied the vice president with
the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.
The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate
Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the release
of its initial findings in July 2004, the committee's Republican
chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the
White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential
election. It still hasn't, and no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday
in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to
provide the committee with "crucial documents," including the
Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious
presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to the U.N. on the eve of war.
Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has prompted the
revelation of much of what these previous investigations left out. But
even so, the trigger for the Wilson affair - the administration's fierce
effort toprotect its hype of Saddam's uranium - is only one piece of the
larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White House subterfuge. We're a long
way from putting together the full history of a self-described "war
presidency" that bungled the war in Iraq and, in doing so, may be losing
the war against radical Islamic terrorism as well. There are many other
mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure
of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter
ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that
was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless
riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee
abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantnamo spared all but a single officer in the
chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative
government contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal
inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why
did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that their
son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story
of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?
These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to
get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices
obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin
and outright lies.
Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts. Long
before he played semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge of
Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial
matters of national security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on
CNN to promote his new assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to
direct a government-wide review of U.S. "consequence management" in the
event of a terrorist attack. As we would learn only in the recriminatory
aftermath of 9/11 (from Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr.
Cheney never did so.
That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's unreliable pronouncements about
the war, from his early prediction that American troops would be
"greeted as liberators" in Iraq to this summer's declaration that the
insurgency was in its "last throes." Even before he began inflating
Saddam's nuclear capabilities, he went on "Meet the Press" in December
2001 to peddle the notion that "it's been pretty well confirmed" that
there was a direct pre-9/11 link between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi
intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link was disproved later, Gloria
Borger, interviewing the vice president on CNBC, confronted him about
his earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three times that he had never
said it had been "pretty well confirmed." When a man thinks he can get
away with denying his own words even though there are millions of
witnesses and a video record, he clearly believes he can get away with
murder.
Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His own false claims about Iraq's
W.M.D.'s ("We found the weapons of mass destruction," he said in May
2003) are, if anything, exceeded by his repeated boasts of capturing
various bin Laden and Zarqawi deputies and beating back Al Qaeda. His
speech this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots is typical;
as USA Today reported last week, at least 6 of the 10 on the president's
list "involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks, not terrorist
operations that were about to be carried out." In June, Mr. Bush stood
beside his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, and similarly claimed
that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against
more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half" of those had been
convicted. A Washington Post investigation found that only 39 of those
convictions had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed to,
say, immigration violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by the
combined number of convictions in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.
The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as the
hyping of Saddam's uranium: in both cases, national security scares are
trumpeted to advance the WhiteHouse's political goals. Keith Olbermann
of MSNBC recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a political
downturn for the administration," from revelations of ignored pre-9/11
terror warnings to fresh news of detainee abuses, is "followed by a
'terror event' - a change in alert status,an arrest, a warning." To
switch the national subject from the fallout of the televised testimony
of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley in 2002, John Ashcroft went
so far as to broadcast a frantic announcement, via satellite from
Russia, that the government had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot"
to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the
arrest of a single suspect, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a
plan - an arrest that had taken place a month earlier.
For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White
House's infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon administration,
as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning. But Watergate's dirty
tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to crush the
political competition at any cost. That's a powerful element in the
Bush scandals, too, but this administration has upped the ante by
playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6, 2003, when the American
casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr. Wilson had just published his
fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his column outing Mr. Wilson's
wife, declared that "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger"
were "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people."
That's what Nixon administration defenders first said about the
"third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.
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