From The Madison Capital Times, 2/9/04:
http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/zweifel/67664.php

In a tight spot on Iraq, Bushies just lie

By Dave Zweifel


Don't look now, but you're about to see this administration pull
another fast one on an all too gullible American public.

Now that the claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
and his supposed ties to al-Qaida have been debunked, George Bush's
cadre of handlers has come up with another idea:

It wasn't our fault, it was the CIA's.

That's the message that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the
devious Karl Rove will try to drive home as the nation gets close to
next fall's presidential election.

David Kay, the U.S. weapons inspector who had been hand-picked by the
Bush team to find those weapons of mass destruction, got this strategy
rolling when he testified before Congress a few days ago.

That was when he made the dramatic announcement that not only are
there no weapons of mass destruction there now, they were most likely
destroyed a decade ago, if not by the first Iraq war, then by the
bombing raids carried out by the Clinton administration.

"We were all wrong," he remarked, but then quickly added that it
wasn't the president's fault, but the nation's intelligence apparatus
that gave him faulty information.

That was the cue for the Bushies to announce the president had now
shifted his position on weapons of mass destruction and was appointing
an independent commission to take a thorough look at the country's
intelligence agencies.

Oh, and by the way, it won't report back until after the November
elections.

What the administration hopes is that this tactic will divert
attention from long-running accounts detailing how the Bush people
demanded that the CIA and other intelligence sources give them
information that could be used to make the case to attack Iraq.

Last fall, in fact, acclaimed journalist Seymour Hersh detailed in the
New Yorker how Cheney and Rumsfeld set up an independent intelligence
unit in the Pentagon that would serve as a place where the "right"
intelligence reports would be funneled to the White House.

Hersh quoted Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council
expert on Iraq, as saying what the Bush people did was "dismantle the
existing filtering process that for 50 years has been preventing the
policy-makers from getting bad information.

They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to
the top leadership.

Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately
and maliciously keeping information from them.

"They always had information to back up their public claims, but it
was often very bad information," Pollack added to Hersh.

And Hersh wrote all that last Oct. 27, nearly four months before David
Kay made his confessions and his defense of the "innocent" president.

The question now is whether this administration will get by with yet
more lies.

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"Destroy his fib or sophistry--in vain!
The creature’s at his dirty work again."

Alexander Pope

Harry