[Mb-civic] Dirty Tricks

Fri Aug 6 18:17:27 PDT 2004

Dirty Tricks 

By David Corn, TomPaine.com
 Posted on August 5, 2004, Printed on August 6, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/19450/

Here come the dirty bombs.

I'm not referring to the most recent terror alert, which just so happened to
coincide with the conclusion of the Democrats' successful convention. (Isn't
it awful that the public  quite justifiably  cannot approach the Bush
administration's terror announcements without a healthy dose of cynicism?)
No, the dirty bombs being launched these days are coming from GOP HQ.

No sooner had Commander Kerry accomplished his mission in Boston  by
presenting himself as a serious, smart, firm and sensible alternative to
George W. Bush  the Bush campaign declared its intention to rip the former
war-hero-turned-war-foe into small pieces. It's not as if the Bush crew
hadn't already tried to blast Kerry to smithereens. In the first half of
this year, it spent tens of millions of dollar on ads that claimed Kerry was
a flip-flopping, equivocating, say-anything pol (who voted for the liberal
position 97 percent of the time). Those negative ads took a toll; polls
showed that some folks absorbed the GOP's anti-Kerry message. But they did
not produce as big a bang as many GOPers expected for all those bucks.

 And in the wake of a convention that highlighted Kerry's resolve as a
soldier (who actually killed the enemy) and his commitment to certain
bedrock principles (such as being honest when assessing threats to the
national interest) it might be tough for the campaign of a
missing-in-nonaction Guardsman who misled the nation into war to portray
Kerry as a weak, vacillating and untrustworthy fellow. So Bush's first
post-convention line of attack was to assail Kerry for having achieved
little in his 19 years as a senator.

Desperate times call for desperate negative ads. Bush is doing okay in some
polls against Kerry, not-so-okay in others. But his approval rating has been
on a steady decline for months. A majority of Americans tell pollsters they
believe the Iraq war was a mistake; more than 60 percent say the war was not
worth it, and in the past two months, Bush's credibility has fallen
dramatically, according to the polls.  Republicans ought to be worried. And
when they fret, they tend to lash out.

Two recent examples show how reckless and vicious GOPers can get. When the
news broke weeks ago that former Clinton national security adviser Sandy
Berger had removed classified documents related to terrorism and notes from
a secured viewing room at the National Archives, leading Republicans and
conservative commentators  including House Speaker Denny Hastert and House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay  went berserk.  With little information available
about what Berger had done  he claimed he had taken papers out with him by
accident and returned most of them later  they accused Berger of stuffing
documents down his pants and suggested he had swiped documents to cover up
misdeeds or mistakes committed by the Clinton administration and to prevent
the 9/11 Commission from finding out truths that would trouble or embarrass
the Clinton gang. 

But days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported, "Officials looking into the
removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton
National Security Adviser Samuel Berger say no original materials are
missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission
investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.... The conclusion by
archives officials and others would seem to lay to rest the issue of whether
any information was permanently destroyed or withheld from the commission."
This, of course, doesn't explain what actually happened, but it does take
the fizz out of attacks initiated by Republicans before the facts were in.

Before Berger became the target of the GOP hit squad, former ambassador
Joseph Wilson  whose wife was outed by unnamed Bush officials as an
undercover CIA officer after Wilson challenged Bush's claim that Iraq had
been uranium shopping in Africa  was in their crosshairs. The fuss began
when the Senate intelligence committee released its report on the prewar
intelligence on Iraq. The GOP-led committee declared that the intelligence
community had "overstated" and "mischaracterized" the intelligence on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction. It noted that prewar claims about Iraq's WMDs
"were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." The
committee also concluded that the CIA had "reasonably assessed" there was no
working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq.  This meant that Bush's
primary rationale for the war  Iraq posed an "immediate" threat to the
United States because Saddam Hussein was loaded with WMDs he could share
with his pals in Al Qaeda  was bullshit. But how did leading voices of the
right   The National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Times
columnist William Safire  respond to the damning report, which was bad news
for Bush? They pounced on Wilson and claimed that he, not Bush, was the
liar.

One section of the report focused on the claim that Iraq had been trying to
procure yellowcake uranium in Niger. In examining the Niger allegation  and
Bush's reference to it in his 2003 State of the Union address  the
committee looked at Wilson's role in the episode. And Wilson's detractors,
who also are supporters of Bush and the war, have cited material in this
chapter to charge that Wilson lied when he claimed his wife did not set up
his trip to Niger as an unofficial CIA envoy and when he declared his trip
had provided evidence that the Niger allegation was "highly doubtful."

But Wilson's foes made highly selective use of the committee's report. For
instance, Wilson's detractors pointed to the section of the report that
stated that some intelligence analysts had considered the information Wilson
reported back to CIA to be partial confirmation of the Niger allegation.
A-ha, his critics exclaimed, this shows that Wilson lied when he said his
trip proved the Niger allegation was unlikely. But here's what happened:
When Wilson was in Niger, he met with past and present government officials
and people connected to the uranium industry. After these discussions,
Wilson concluded it was unlikely such a uranium deal could have transpired,
given the tight controls imposed on Niger's uranium business by the
international consortiums in charge of it.  But, according to the Senate
report, some analysts thought that because a former prime minister had told
Wilson he had met with an Iraqi business delegation that the prime minister
had assumed was interested in uranium, the Wilson trip was partial
corroboration of the Niger allegation  even though the former prime
minister also said this meeting led to no further action. A senior State
Department analyst, however, told the committee that he considered Wilson's
report to confirm the State Department's view that the allegation was
"highly suspect."

Wilson's interpretation was not initially accepted by all the analysts. That
hardly makes him a liar. And the intelligence community eventually came to
the same conclusion he did. Over a year later, the CIA wrote a memo saying,
"we no longer believe that there is sufficient... reporting to conclude that
Iraq pursued uranium from aboard." Ultimately, Wilson's record on accuracy
has been better than that of his critics, who have twisted and manipulated
information in an effort to discredit Wilson and to change the subject from
Bush's false prewar assertions. But by throwing so much dirt at Wilson, his
conservative assailants managed to muddy the waters. And Wall Street Journal
editorialists, citing the phony charges against Wilson, called for ending
the criminal investigation into the leak that disclosed his wife's CIA
identity  as if it would be fine for the White House to out a CIA officer
if his or her spouse had fibbed in public.

No doubt, part of the motivation for the right's hyperbolic attacks on
Berger and Wilson was their position as foreign policy advisers to Kerry.
(Berger has since resigned from the campaign.) And in looking to destroy the
Democrats' top dog, the Bush campaign and its comrades will continue to comb
through the 6,000 votes Kerry has cast in the Senate. They will be looking
for votes they can depict as inconsistencies. (See, he voted for this
welfare reform bill, but voted against that welfare reform bill.) And they
will be searching for votes that can be misrepresented. (He's weak on
defense: He voted to slice a nickel out of this military appropriations
bill.) They will mock his positions (He wants to put the UN in charge of
U.S. security!). They will encourage various whispering campaigns (He wasn't
wounded that badly in Vietnam).

Political consultants always say that it is easier for a candidate to bring
down his opponent's numbers (with attacks) than to boost his or her own
(with positive messages). Bush's numbers have been trending south for most
of this year. He will have a difficult time convincing a majority of voters
he is trustworthy and has been doing a good job. So he and his team will
have to tear Kerry apart. After the Democratic convention, that is a tougher
assignment. But Republicans will not be reluctant to do whatever it takes to
make sure this mission gets accomplished. Just ask Berger or Wilson.