[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112705Y.shtml

Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 27 November 2005

    George W. Bush is so desperate for allies
that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan
Bator, a first for an American president, so he
could mingle with the yaks and give personal
thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160
soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick
Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit
29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so
radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for
weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and
Scootergate.

    The whole world can see that both men are on
the run. Just how much so became clear in the
brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this
month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the
national debate ignited by John Murtha about how
our troops might be best redeployed in a
recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism.
Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead,
both impugned their critics' patriotism and
retreated into the past to defend the origins of
the war. In a seasonally appropriate
impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from
"It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went
so far as to label critics of the
administration's prewar smoke screen both
"dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and
shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from
a defibrillator.

    The Washington line has it that the
motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need
to push back against opponents who have bloodied
the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha
notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to
merit that strong a response. There is more going
on here than politics.

    Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence
that the doomsday threats marshaled by the
administration to sell the war weren't, in
Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible
but also corrupt and shameless. The more the
president and vice president tell us that their
mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the
same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in
the world, the more we learn that this was not
so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to
sell the war did not happen by accident; it was
woven by design and then foisted on the public by
a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose
in the White House. The real point of the
Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like
the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson,
is less to smite Democrats than to cover up
wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11
and shock and awe.

    The cover-up is failing, however. No matter
how much the president and vice president raise
their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring
out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last
Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush
and his aides had "issued increasingly dire
warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons
labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities
were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence
Service that the principal source for these
warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody
code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce
germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so."
The five senior German intelligence officials who
spoke to The Times said they were aghast that
such long-discredited misinformation from a
suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's
presentation to the United Nations and in the
president's 2003 State of the Union address
(where it shared billing with the equally bogus
16 words about Saddam's fictitious African
uranium).

    Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas
filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda
puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National
Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush
was told in a highly classified briefing that the
U.S. intelligence community had no evidence
linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the
attacks and that there was scant credible
evidence that Iraq had any significant
collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

    The information was delivered in the
President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also
given to the vice president and other top
administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush
and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit
(and at times specific) link between Saddam and
Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe
that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by
Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that
the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda
contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to
monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups,
which he regarded as adversaries of his secular
regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic
radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in
1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan
administration emissary, embraced the dictator as
a secular fascist ally in the American struggle
against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

    What these revelations also tell us is that
Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans
Day speech that more than 100 Congressional
Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution
"had access to the same intelligence" he did.
They didn't have access to the President's Daily
Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have
access to the information that German
intelligence officials spoke about to The Los
Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to
material from a Defense Intelligence Agency
report, released by Senator Carl Levin of
Michigan this month, which as early as February
2002 demolished the reliability of another major
source that the administration had persistently
used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda
collaboration.

    The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the
more we realize that it's a losing game to ask
what lies the White House told along the way. A
simpler question might be: What was not a lie?
The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation
to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian
Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she
writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

    If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were
truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for
them to make their case. Instead of falsely
claiming that they've been exonerated by two
commissions that looked into prewar intelligence
- neither of which addressed possible White House
misuse and mischaracterization of that
intelligence - they should just release the rest
of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar
documents that are now trickling out. Instead,
incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the
release of any such information, including
unclassified documents found in post-invasion
Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war,
neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported
in The New York Times last month, Vietnam
documents are now off limits, too: the National
Security Agency won't make public a 2001
historical report on how American officials
distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of
Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt
uncomfortable comparisons" between the games
White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

    Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the
accelerating pace of recent revelations - this
embarrassing information will leak out anyway.
But the administration's deliberate efforts to
suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted
its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar
story. There were other shadowy stations on the
disinformation assembly line. Among them were the
Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a
two-man Pentagon operation specifically created
to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's
apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House
Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen
Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary
Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this
propaganda into the veins of the press and
public. These murky aspects of the narrative -
like the role played by a private P.R.
contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James
Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet
to be recounted in full.

    No debate about the past, of course, can undo
the mess that the administration made in Iraq.
But the past remains important because it is a
road map to both the present and the future.
Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so.
Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in
which they vehemently deny having misled us then
- witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what
prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr.
Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the
terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in
Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of
operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency
is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and
Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of
Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's
W.M.D.'s.

    "We're not going to sit by and let them
rewrite history," the vice president said of his
critics. "We're going to continue throwing their
own words back at them." But according to a
Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal
last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now
believe that the Bush administration "generally
misleads the American public on current issues to
achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr.
Cheney's and the president's own words that are
being thrown back now - not to rewrite history
but to reveal it for the first time to an angry
country that has learned the hard way that it can
no longer afford to be without the truth.