[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[Mike Blaxill]

One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 30 October 2005

    To believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will
be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe
that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G.
Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed
for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played
out for nearly two years after the gang that
burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted
by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for
more than a year after Nixon took
"responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his
two top aides and weathered the indictments of
two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing
months, America would come to see that the
original petty crime was merely the leading edge
of thematically related but wildly disparate
abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general,
John Mitchell, would name "the White House
horrors."

    In our current imperial presidency, as in its
antecedent, what may look like a narrow case
involving a second banana with a child's name
contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA
offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of
the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis
(Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly
the end of the story. That "Cheney's Cheney," as
Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to such
lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man
who challenged the administration's W.M.D.
propaganda is just one very big window into the
genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately,
mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell
the war in Iraq.

    After the heat of last week's drama, we can
forget just how effective the administration's
cover-up of that con job had been until very
recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak
investigation, there were two separate official
investigations into the failure of prewar
intelligence. With great fanfare and to great
acclaim, both found that our information about
Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong. But wittingly
or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough
inquiries actually protected the White House by
avoiding, in Watergate lingo, "the big
enchilada."

    The 601-page report from the special
presidential commission led by Laurence Silberman
and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as
a "sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a
passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no mention
whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their
semicovert propaganda operation (the White House
Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that
dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas
Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense
for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in
the Pentagon supplied the vice president with the
disinformation that bamboozled the nation.

    The other investigation into prewar
intelligence, by the Senate Intelligence
Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After
the release of its initial findings in July 2004,
the committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts,
promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the
White House had misled the public would arrive
after the presidential election. It still hasn't,
and no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday in
The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr.
Libby had refused to provide the committee with
"crucial documents," including the Libby-written
passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's
notorious presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to
the U.N. on the eve of war.

    Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation
has prompted the revelation of much of what these
previous investigations left out. But even so,
the trigger for the Wilson affair - the
administration's fierce effort to protect its
hype of Saddam's uranium - is only one piece of
the larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White
House subterfuge. We're a long way from putting
together the full history of a self-described
"war presidency" that bungled the war in Iraq
and, in doing so, may be losing the war against
radical Islamic terrorism as well.

    There are many other mysteries to be cracked,
from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of
the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq
to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly
Department of Homeland Security that was revealed
in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are
countless riddles, large and small. Why have the
official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib
and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in
the chain of command? Why does Halliburton
continue to receive lucrative government
contracts even after it's been the focus of
multiple federal inquiries into accusations of
bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it
take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be
told that their son had been killed by friendly
fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his
death that was sold relentlessly on TV before
then?

    These questions are just a representative
sampling. It won't be easy to get honest answers
because this administration, like Nixon's,
practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an
alternative reality built on spin and outright
lies.

    Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master
of these black arts. Long before he played
semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge
of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly
fictionalized crucial matters of national
security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared
on CNN to promote his new assignment, announced
that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide
review of U.S. "consequence management" in the
event of a terrorist attack. As we would learn
only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from
Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr.
Cheney never did so.

    That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's
unreliable pronouncements about the war, from his
early prediction that American troops would be
"greeted as liberators" in Iraq to this summer's
declaration that the insurgency was in its "last
throes." Even before he began inflating Saddam's
nuclear capabilities, he went on "Meet the Press"
in December 2001 to peddle the notion that "it's
been pretty well confirmed" that there was a
direct pre-9/11 link between Mohammed Atta and
Iraqi intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link was
disproved later, Gloria Borger, interviewing the
vice president on CNBC, confronted him about his
earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three
times that he had never said it had been "pretty
well confirmed." When a man thinks he can get
away with denying his own words even though there
are millions of witnesses and a video record, he
clearly believes he can get away with murder.

    Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His
own false claims about Iraq's W.M.D.'s ("We found
the weapons of mass destruction," he said in May
2003) are, if anything, exceeded by his repeated
boasts of capturing various bin Laden and Zarqawi
deputies and beating back Al Qaeda. His speech
this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda
plots is typical; as USA Today reported last
week, at least 6 of the 10 on the president's
list "involved preliminary ideas about potential
attacks, not terrorist operations that were about
to be carried out." In June, Mr. Bush stood
beside his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales,
and similarly claimed that "federal terrorism
investigations have resulted in charges against
more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half"
of those had been convicted. A Washington Post
investigation found that only 39 of those
convictions had involved terrorism or national
security (as opposed to, say, immigration
violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by
the combined number of convictions in the Jack
Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.

    The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed
reflects the same DNA as the hyping of Saddam's
uranium: in both cases, national security scares
are trumpeted to advance the White House's
political goals. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC
recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a
political downturn for the administration," from
revelations of ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings
to fresh news of detainee abuses, is "followed by
a 'terror event' - a change in alert status, an
arrest, a warning." To switch the national
subject from the fallout of the televised
testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen
Rowley in 2002, John Ashcroft went so far as to
broadcast a frantic announcement, via satellite
from Russia, that the government had "disrupted
an unfolding terrorist plot" to explode a dirty
bomb. What he was actually referring to was the
arrest of a single suspect, Jose Padilla, for
allegedly exploring such a plan - an arrest that
had taken place a month earlier.

    For now, it's conventional wisdom in
Washington that the Bush White House's
infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon
administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC
on Friday morning. But Watergate's dirty tricks
were mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to
crush the political competition at any cost.
That's a powerful element in the Bush scandals,
too, but this administration has upped the ante
by playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6,
2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq
stood at 169 and Mr. Wilson had just published
his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his
column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that
"weapons of mass destruction or uranium from
Niger" were "little elitist issues that don't
bother most of the people." That's what Nixon
administration defenders first said about the
"third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/103005X.shtml