| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
04 Jan 2006 10:36:00 AM |
| Object: |
Boy King George's Long War On the Truth |
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/010206.html
Bush's Long War On the Truth
By Robert Parry
January 2, 2006
George W. Bush’s dysfunctional relationship with the truth seems to be
shaped by two complementary factors -- a personal compulsion to say
whatever makes him look good at that moment and a permissive
environment that rarely holds him accountable for his lies.
How else to explain his endless attempts to rewrite history and
reshape his own statements, a pattern on display again in his New
Year’s Day comments to reporters in San Antonio, Texas?
In that session, as Bush denied misleading the public, he twice again
misled the public.
Bush launched into a defense of his honesty by denying that he lied
when he told a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2004 that "by the way, any
time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it
requires -- a wiretap requires a court order."
Two years earlier, Bush had approved rules that freed the National
Security Agency to use warrantless wiretaps on communications
originating in the United States without a court order.
But Bush still told the Buffalo audience, "Nothing has changed, by the
way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking
about getting a court order before we do so."
On New Year’s Day 2006, Bush sought to explain those misleading
comments by contending.
"I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the
Patriot Act. This is different from the N.S.A. program."
However, the context of Bush’s 2004 statement was clear.
He broke away from a discussion of the USA Patriot Act to note "by the
way" that "any time" a wiretap is needed a court order must be
obtained.
He was not confining his remarks to "roving wiretaps" under the
Patriot Act.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html
In his New Year's Day remarks, Bush further misled the public, by
insisting that his warrantless wiretaps only involved communications
from suspicious individuals abroad who were contacting people in the
United States, a policy that would be legal.
Bush said the eavesdropping was "limited to calls from outside the
United States to calls within the United States."
But Bush’s explanation was at odds with what his own administration
had previously admitted to journalists -- that the wiretaps also
covered calls originating in the United States, which require warrants
from a special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act of 1978.
The White House soon "clarified" Bush’s remarks to acknowledge that
his warrantless wiretaps did, indeed, involve communications
originating in the United States. [NYT, Jan. 2, 2005]
Though occasionally the news media notes these discrepancies in Bush’s
claims, it rarely makes much of an issue out of them and often averts
its collective gaze from the deceptions altogether.
Lying & Enabling
For years now, there has been a troubling pattern of Bush lying and
U.S. news media enabling his deceptive behavior, a problem especially
acute around the War on Terror and the Iraq War, which has now claimed
the lives of nearly 2,200 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of
Iraqis.
Yet, even on something as well known as the pre-war chronology, Bush
has been allowed to revise the history.
In one favorite fictitious account, he became the victim of Hussein’s
intransigence, leaving Bush no choice but to invade on March 19, 2003,
in search of Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Less than four months later -- facing criticism because no WMD was
found and U.S. soldiers were dying -- Bush began to claim that Hussein
had barred United Nations weapons inspectors from Iraq and blocked a
non-violent search for WMD.
Bush unveiled this rationale for the invasion on July 14, 2003.
"We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let
them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to
remove him from power," Bush said.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030714-3.html
The reality, however, was that Hussein had declared that Iraq no
longer possessed WMD and let the U.N. inspectors into Iraq in November
2002 to check.
They were allowed to examine any site of their choosing.
It was Bush -- not Hussein -- who forced the U.N. inspectors to pull
out in March 2003, so the invasion could proceed.
But this historical revisionism -- which Bush has repeated in varying
forms ever since -- spared him the need to defend his decisions
forthrightly.
By rewriting the history, he made it more palatable to Americans who
don’t like to see themselves as aggressors.
Iraqi Goals
Even before the invasion, Bush pushed the fiction that he went to war
only as a "last resort," rather than as part of a long-held strategy
that had a variety of goals including changing regimes in Iraq,
projecting U.S. power into the heart of the Middle East, and securing
control of Iraq’s vast oil reserves.
For instance, on March 8, 2003, 11 days before invading Iraq, Bush
said he still considered military force "a last resort."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030308-1.html
He added, "we are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if
Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by
force."
But former Bush administration insiders, such as Treasury Secretary
Paul O’Neill and counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, have since
disclosed that Bush long wanted to conquer Iraq, an option that became
more attainable amid the American fear and anger that followed the
Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Those insider claims about Bush's Iraq War premeditation -- heatedly
denied by the White House -- were buttressed in 2005 by the release of
the so-called "Downing Street Memo," which recounted a secret meeting
on July 23, 2002, involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his
top national security aides.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8709.htm
At that meeting, Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence
agency MI6, described his discussions about Iraq with National
Security Council officials in Washington.
Dearlove said, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action,
justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
The memo added, "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to
take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the
case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD
capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Despite the Downing Street Memo, Bush and his spokesmen continued to
deny that the White House was set on a course to war in 2002.
On May 16, 2005, White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected the
memo’s implication that Bush’s pre-war diplomacy was just a charade.
"The president of the United States, in a very public way, reached out
to people across the world, went to the United Nations and tried to
resolve this in a diplomatic manner," McClellan said.
"Saddam Hussein was the one, in the end, who chose continued
defiance." http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/05/16/iraq.memo/
Media Hypnosis
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Bush’s historical
revisionism still has mesmerized even elite elements of the U.S. news
media.
During an interview in July 2004, for instance, ABC News anchor Ted
Koppel repeated the administration’s "defiance" spin point in
explaining why he thought the Iraq invasion was justified.
"It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had
been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition,
would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do
was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out," Koppel told Amy
Goodman, host of "Democracy Now."
This media fear of questioning Bush’s honesty seemed to have reached a
point where journalists would rather put on blinders to the facts than
face the wrath of Bush’s defenders.
So, as Koppel showed, Bush had good reason to feel confident about his
ability to manipulate the Iraq War reality.
He even made his phony Hussein-defiance case during an important
presidential debate on Sept. 30, 2004.
"I went there [the United Nations] hoping that once and for all the
free world would act in concert to get Saddam Hussein to listen to our
demands," Bush said.
"They [the Security Council] passed a resolution that said disclose,
disarm or face serious consequences. I believe when an international
body speaks, it must mean what it says.
"But Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming. Why should he? He
had 16 other resolutions and nothing took place. As a matter of fact,
my opponent talks about inspectors. The facts are that he [Hussein]
was systematically deceiving the inspectors. That wasn’t going to
work. That’s kind of a pre-Sept. 10 mentality, the hope that somehow
resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more
peaceful place."
Virtually every point in this war justification from Bush was wrong.
The reality was that Hussein had disarmed.
Rather than the U.N. resolutions having no consequence, they
apparently had achieved their goal of a WMD-free Iraq.
Rather than clueless U.N. inspectors duped by Hussein, the inspectors
were not finding WMD because the stockpiles weren’t there.
Bush’s post-invasion inspection team didn't find WMD either.
Despite the importance of this setting for Bush’s rendition of these
falsehoods -- a presidential debate viewed by tens of millions of
Americans -- most U.S. news outlets did little or no fact-checking on
the president’s bogus history.
One of the few exceptions was a story inside the Washington Post that
mentioned Bush’s claim that Hussein had "no intention of disarming."
In the middle of a story on various factual issues in the debate, the
Post noted that "Iraq asserted in its filing with the United Nations
in December 2002 that it had no such weapons, and none has been
found." [Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2004]
But there has been no media drum beat -- either in mid-2003 when Bush
began revising the history of the U.N. inspections or since then --
that drove the point home to Americans that Bush was lying.
So his pattern has continued.
Snowing the Times
New revelations about Bush’s secret warrantless wiretaps indicate that
the Bush administration undertook another disinformation campaign
against the press during Campaign 2004 -- to keep the lid on his
wiretapping program.
In December 2005, explaining why the New York Times spiked its
exclusive wiretap story for a year, executive editor Bill Keller said
U.S. officials "assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of
legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that
the program raised no legal questions."
But the Bush administration was concealing an important fact -- that a
number of senior officials had protested the legality of the
operation.
In the months after the Times agreed to hold the story, the newspaper
"developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that had
been expressed during the life of the program," Keller said.
"It became clear those questions loomed larger within the government
than we had previously understood."
In March 2004, Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey refused to sign
a recertification of the wiretap program, the Times learned.
Comey’s objection caused White House chief of staff Andrew Card and
Bush’s counsel Alberto Gonzales to pay a hospital visit on
then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for
gallbladder surgery.
But Ashcroft also balked at the continuation of the program, which was
temporarily suspended while new arrangements were made. [NYT, Jan. 1,
2006]
After disclosure of Comey’s objection on New Year's Day, Sen. Charles
Schumer, D-N.Y., called for a congressional examination of the
"significant concern about the legality of the program even at the
very highest levels of the Department of Justice." [NYT, Jan. 2, 2006]
But at a crucial political juncture -- before the Nov. 2, 2004,
election -- the Bush administration kept its secret wiretapping
operation under wraps by misleading senior editors of the New York
Times.
The Times, which had been fooled about Iraq’s WMD, was fooled again.
This tendency to always give George W. Bush the benefit of every doubt
raises serious questions about the health of American democracy, which
holds that no man is above the law.
It’s also hard to imagine any other recent president getting away with
so much deception and paying so little price.
Charmed Life
Yet, the lack of accountability has been a hallmark of Bush’s charmed
life, from young adulthood through his political career.
When Bush ran for president in 2000, American political reporters --
both conservative and mainstream -- tilted that pivotal U.S. election
toward him by applying starkly different standards when evaluating the
honesty of Democrat Al Gore in comparison with Bush and ***** Cheney.
Reporters went over Gore’s comments with a fine-toothed comb searching
for perceived "exaggerations."
Some of Gore’s supposed "lies" actually resulted from erroneous
reporting by over-eager journalists, such as misquotes about Gore
allegedly claiming credit for discovering the Love Canal toxic waste
problem.
By contrast, Bush and Cheney were rarely challenged over falsehoods
and misstatements, even in the context of their attacks on Gore’s
honesty.
Cheney, for instance, was given almost a free pass when he falsely
portrayed himself as a self-made multimillionaire from his years as
chairman of Halliburton Co.
Commenting on his success in the private sector during the
vice-presidential debate in 2000, Cheney said "the government had
absolutely nothing to do with it."
However, the reality was that Halliburton was a major recipient of
government contracts and other largesse, including federal loan
guarantees from the Export-Import Bank.
But Cheney was allowed to get away his own resumé -polishing even as
he went out on the campaign trail to denounce Gore for supposedly
puffing up his resumé.
This pattern of "protecting Bush-Cheney" intensified after the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks when the U.S. news media rallied around the
embattled president and concealed evidence of Bush’s shaky reaction to
the crisis.
Though pool reporters witnessed Bush sitting frozen for seven minutes
in a Florida classroom after being told "the nation is under attack,"
the national news media shielded that nearly disqualifying behavior
from the public for more than two years, until just before the release
of Michael Moore’s "Fahrenheit 9/11," a 2004 documentary that featured
the footage.
War Cheerleaders
Major news organizations were equally solicitous of Bush and Cheney
during the run-up to war in Iraq.
While Fox News and other right-wing outlets were unabashed
cheerleaders for the Iraq War, the mainstream media often picked up
the pom-poms, too.
It took more than a year after the invasion and the failure to find
WMD caches for the New York Times and the Washington Post to run
self-critical articles about their lack of skepticism over Bush's war
claims.
Nevertheless, the Times’ top editors were still willing to give Bush
the benefit of the doubt in fall 2004 when his aides offered more
false assurances about the legal certainty surrounding Bush’s
warrantless wiretap program.
Now Bush's latest comments in San Antonio suggest that he still feels
he has the magic, that he still can convince the U.S. press corps and
the American people that whatever he says is true no matter how much
it diverges from the well-known facts.
One might also presume -- given the continued deceptions in his San
Antonio remarks -- that Bush did not make a New Year’s resolution to
stop lying.
______________________________________________________________
Yup
Harry
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