Trust in Bush ebbing
Gene Lyons
"The president," a White House spokesman told reporters last week, "is not a
fact-checker."
Now there’s the understatement of the year. To paraphrase the late film
comic Oliver Hardy, this is another fine mess Junior has gotten himself and
the rest of us into.
The context of the fact-checker remark was the administration’s release of a
previously top secret "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq. The idea was
to prove that parroting a now notorious claim that the Brits had "learned"
Iraq was buying African uranium for nuclear weapons wasn’t Junior’s fault.
Instead, U.S. intelligence agencies were responsible for the blunder.
The problem with George W. Bush’s alibi, however, was that well-sourced
newspaper articles last fall quoted intelligence officers describing White
House pressure to cook the books. Also, the NIE document was full of
ambiguities.
As CIA director George Tenet put it in his carefully worded statement
ostensibly taking blame for not preventing Bush from uttering the
now-infamous 16 word sentence: "The estimate also states: ‘We do not know
the status of this arrangement.’ With regard to reports that Iraq had sought
uranium from two other countries, the estimate says: ‘We cannot confirm
whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these
sources.’ Much later in the NIE text, in presenting an alternate view on
another matter, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research
included a sentence that states: ‘ Finally, the claims of Iraqi pursuit of
natural uranium in Africa are, in INR’s assessment, highly dubious. ’" "We
do not know," " we cannot confirm, "" highly dubious. "How did Bush ignore
these warning signs? He did not entirely read the document, the White House
helpfully explained. That, of course, is perfectly in keeping with Junior’s
history.
The NIE report on Iraq’s weapons is all of 90 pages, footnotes included. Now
you’d think that any president preparing to commit American soldiers to
battle against" evildoers" supposedly equipped with weapons of mass
destruction would want to spend some time learning exactly what they might
be facing. But Bush had more important things to do.
And get this: According to the White House, so did national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice. She’s supposed to be the brains of the operation, Bush’s
intellectual nanny. The former provost of Stanford University, we’re told,
skipped the footnotes where the strongest cautions were found.
Assuming purely for the sake of argument that we believe this astonishing
excuse, exactly what does the woman do all day? Have we reached the point
where we expect American men and women to commit their lives and sacred
honor on the basis of what Bob Somerby calls "Cliff’s Notes" intelligence?
But the reality, of course, is that Rice’s story simply cannot be believed.
The CIA’s Tenet had personally warned her chief deputy, Stephen Hadley, off
the African uranium tale on two documented occasions in October 2002.
Nor is this the first time Rice has been caught uttering improbable stories
in defense of her boss. Seemingly above criticism, it was Rice, Joe Conason
points out, who pushed the later repudiated tale that Bush hightailed it to
Nebraska on 9/11 because of "intelligence" indicating terrorists had
targeted Air Force One.
It was also Rice who insisted that nobody could possibly have imagined a
plot so fiendish as to crash jetliners into buildings, although the
president had slept aboard a Navy vessel during his visit to Genoa, Italy,
during the 2001 G-8 summit for precisely that reason. It was Rice who warned
that not to attack Iraq would be to risk a "mushroom cloud" over an American
city; who pushed the dubious story about Iraq importing aluminum tubes to
manufacture nuclear weapons long after experts at the International Atomic
Energy Agency had found them technically unsuitable; and who went on "Meet
the Press" to deny knowing anything about Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s
debunking trip to Niger at the CIA’s behest weeks after Nicholas Kristoff
had written about it in The New York Times.
How did IAEA experts determine the African documents were phony? According
to Newsweek, it took them all of two hours. The answer, said one official,
was "‘ Google. ’... The IAEA ran the name of the Niger foreign minister
through the Internet search engine and discovered that he was not in office
at the time the document was signed."
The chances are between slim and none that this never occurred to anybody in
U.S. intelligence. Somebody must have put a lid on it. The bad news for
President Junior is that the intelligence agencies are fighting a
bureaucratic rearguard action, the press has rediscovered its mission and
Americans are awakening from a fearinduced post-9/11 trance to suspect that
they were duped into an unnecessary war for dishonest reasons. A recent
Harris poll shows 51 percent now "have doubts" that Bush is "a leader you
can trust." Once lost, that trust is extremely hard to recover.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of
the National Magazine Award.
http://proteus.affordablehost.com/~osment/GeneLyons/GeneLyons.html
--
"From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the
war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the
dinosaur in the tar pit – we would still be there, and we, not the United
Nations, would be bearing the costs of the occupation. This is a burden I am
sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take
on."
– Norman Schwarzkopf, from his 1993 autobiography, "It Doesn't Take a Hero."
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