[Mb-civic] Cheney's Trouble with Truth - Robert Scheer

Fri Nov 25 18:27:51 PST 2005

Cheney's Trouble with Truth

November 23, 2005  You've got to hand it to Dick Cheney; no other modern
politician has come so close to perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even
as he protests his innocence of lying about matters of state, he lies about
matters of state.

In speeches Friday and Monday, the vice president, who has long insisted
Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were allies, Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction, we would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad, and that the
Iraqi insurgency is in its ''last throes," again evidenced his trademark
inability to speak the truth.

Continuing the administration's recent shrill defensive barrage over whose
fault the Iraq mess is and with the truth chasing the lies in full view,
Cheney had the gall to smear the war's critics as ''corrupt and shameless."
Then, within a few sentences, he showed again why 52 percent of those polled
by Newsweek believe Cheney deliberately "misused or manipulated" prewar
intelligence.

First, he shamelessly repeated the absurd notion that a bum-rushed Congress,
most of which does not have high security clearance, was privy to the same
intelligence as he and his war-salesmen allies. In fact, not only was Cheney
and his staff poring over the classified testimonials of an array of known
liars, forgers, drunks, opportunists and desperate exiles we now know
supplied White House speechwriters with their best lines, he also had access
to the intelligence community's combined disclaimers, rebuttals and outright
denunciations of these sources and their conveniently tawdry tales.

"Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to
war," wrote former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., in a devastating statement in
the Washington Post on Sunday. ''Most of them, though, like their Republican
colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his
administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a
gathering menace  that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would
become a mushroom cloud."

Graham, then the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the
declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate was a sham. "It
represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed (WMD), avoided a
discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting
opinions contained in the classified version," wrote Graham.

Parsed out, Cheney's recent statements amount to a defensive claim the Bush
administration didn't lie so much as it was just calamitously incompetent,
too eager for invasion to bother to do its due diligence.

The reality, however, is that while the Yalie president may not be the
brightest star on the horizon, the owlish Cheney is nobody's dummy. What he
is, and has always been, is the most bald-faced of the administration's war
hustlers, shamelessly peddling, for example, the cloak-and-dagger tale of a
Hussein operative meeting with Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague long
after U.S. intelligence had dismissed it.

Similarly, it was Cheney who was instrumental in getting Colin Powell to
make the astonishing claims of the intelligence source code-named
"Curveball" the centerpiece of the secretary of state's prewar presentation
to the United Nations.

Now, thanks to a definitive investigation by the Los Angeles Times published
Sunday, we find out that top German intelligence sources in charge of
interrogating Curveball had already declared him an unreliable source.

"'We were shocked" a high-level German intelligence officer told the Times.
"Mein Gott! We had always told (the United States) it was not proven  it
was not hard intelligence."

But perhaps the most outrageous lie Cheney and the White House kept  and
keep  making is that invading Iraq was a sensible part of the response to
Sept. 11.

''In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in
Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was
being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted
from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq  a war more than a year
away," noted Graham on Sunday. ''Even at this early date, the White House
was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency
that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda."

In making his continued one-man jihad against the facts, Cheney is
apparently throwing Hail Mary passes to that part of the Republican base
that will believe anything it is told  having already lost the trust of the
majority of Americans.

But as Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said in response to the slander by a
Republican congresswoman that he, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, is a
coward for arguing for the quick and complete withdrawal from Iraq, "You
can't spin this. You've got to have a real solution. This is not a war of
words, this is a war."