[Mb-civic] Bush's Long War with the Truth

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010306Q.shtml

 Bush's Long War with the Truth
    By Robert Parry
    Consortium News

    Monday 02 January 2006

    George W. Bush's dysfunctional relationship with the truth seems to 
be shaped by two complementary factors - a personal compulsion to 
say whatever makes him look good at that moment and a permissive 
environment that rarely holds him accountable for his lies.

    How else to explain his endless attempts to rewrite history and 
reshape his own statements, a pattern on display again in his New 
Year's Day comments to reporters in San Antonio, Texas? In that 
session, as Bush denied misleading the public, he twice again misled 
the public.

    Bush launched into a defense of his honesty by denying that he lied 
when he told a crowd in Buffalo, NY, in 2004 that "by the way, any time 
you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it 
requires - a wiretap requires a court order."

    Two years earlier, Bush had approved rules that freed the National 
Security Agency to use warrantless wiretaps on communications 
originating in the United States without a court order. But Bush still told 
the Buffalo audience, "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're 
talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a 
court order before we do so."

    On New Year's Day 2006, Bush sought to explain those misleading 
comments by contending. "I was talking about roving wiretaps, I 
believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the NSA 
program."

    However, the context of Bush's 2004 statement was clear. He broke 
away from a discussion of the USA Patriot Act to note "by the way" that 
"any time" a wiretap is needed a court order must be obtained. He was 
not confining his remarks to "roving wiretaps" under the Patriot Act. 
[For Bush's 2004 speech, click here.]

    In his New Year's Day remarks, Bush further misled the public, by 
insisting that his warrantless wiretaps only involved communications 
from suspicious individuals abroad who were contacting people in the 
United States, a policy that would be legal. Bush said the 
eavesdropping was "limited to calls from outside the United States to 
calls within the United States."

    But Bush's explanation was at odds with what his own administration 
had previously admitted to journalists - that the wiretaps also covered 
calls originating in the United States, which require warrants from a 
special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 
1978.

    The White House soon "clarified" Bush's remarks to acknowledge 
that his warrantless wiretaps did, indeed, involve communications 
originating in the United States. [NYT, Jan. 2, 2005]

    Though occasionally the news media notes these discrepancies in 
Bush's claims, it rarely makes much of an issue out of them and often 
averts its collective gaze from the deceptions altogether.

    Lying and Enabling

    For years now, there has been a troubling pattern of Bush lying and 
US news media enabling his deceptive behavior, a problem especially 
acute around the War on Terror and the Iraq War, which has now 
claimed the lives of nearly 2,200 US soldiers and tens of thousands of 
Iraqis.

    Yet, even on something as well known as the pre-war chronology, 
Bush has been allowed to revise the history. In one favorite fictitious 
account, he became the victim of Hussein's intransigence, leaving 
Bush no choice but to invade on March 19, 2003, in search of Iraq's 
supposed weapons of mass destruction.

    Less than four months later - facing criticism because no WMD was 
found and US soldiers were dying - Bush began to claim that Hussein 
had barred United Nations weapons inspectors from Iraq and blocked 
a non-violent search for WMD. Bush unveiled this rationale for the 
invasion on July 14, 2003.

    "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't 
let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to 
remove him from power," Bush said. [See the White House web site.]

    The reality, however, was that Hussein had declared that Iraq no 
longer possessed WMD and let the UN inspectors into Iraq in 
November 2002 to check. They were allowed to examine any site of 
their choosing. It was Bush - not Hussein - who forced the UN 
inspectors to pull out in March 2003, so the invasion could proceed.

    But this historical revisionism - which Bush has repeated in varying 
forms ever since - spared him the need to defend his decisions 
forthrightly. By rewriting the history, he made it more palatable to 
Americans who don't like to see themselves as aggressors.

    Iraqi Goals

    Even before the invasion, Bush pushed the fiction that he went to 
war only as a "last resort," rather than as part of a long-held strategy 
that had a variety of goals including changing regimes in Iraq, 
projecting US power into the heart of the Middle East, and securing 
control of Iraq's vast oil reserves.

    For instance, on March 8, 2003, 11 days before invading Iraq, Bush 
said he still considered military force "a last resort." He added, "we are 
doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein 
does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force."

    But former Bush administration insiders, such as Treasury Secretary 
Paul O'Neill and counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, have since 
disclosed that Bush long wanted to conquer Iraq, an option that 
became more attainable amid the American fear and anger that 
followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

    Those insider claims about Bush's Iraq War premeditation - 
heatedly denied by the White House - were buttressed in 2005 by the 
release of the so-called "Downing Street Memo," which recounted a 
secret meeting on July 23, 2002, involving British Prime Minister Tony 
Blair and his top national security aides.

    At that meeting, Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence 
agency MI6, described his discussions about Iraq with National 
Security Council officials in Washington.

    Dearlove said, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military 
action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the 
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

    The memo added, "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind 
to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the 
case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his 
WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

    Despite the Downing Street Memo, Bush and his spokesmen 
continued to deny that the White House was set on a course to war in 
2002. On May 16, 2005, White House spokesman Scott McClellan 
rejected the memo's implication that Bush's pre-war diplomacy was 
just a charade.

    "The president of the United States, in a very public way, reached 
out to people across the world, went to the United Nations and tried to 
resolve this in a diplomatic manner," McClellan said. "Saddam Hussein 
was the one, in the end, who chose continued defiance." [For more on 
Bush's pretexts for war, see Consortiumnews.com's "President Bush, 
with the Candlestick..."]

    Media Hypnosis

    Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Bush's historical revisionism 
still has mesmerized even elite elements of the US news media.

    During an interview in July 2004, for instance, ABC News anchor 
Ted Koppel repeated the administration's "defiance" spin point in 
explaining why he thought the Iraq invasion was justified.

    "It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies 
had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, 
would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do 
was say, 'All right, UN, come on in, check it out," Koppel told Amy 
Goodman, host of "Democracy Now."

    This media fear of questioning Bush's honesty seemed to have 
reached a point where journalists would rather put on blinders to the 
facts than face the wrath of Bush's defenders.

    So, as Koppel showed, Bush had good reason to feel confident 
about his ability to manipulate the Iraq War reality. He even made his 
phony Hussein-defiance case during an important presidential debate 
on Sept. 30, 2004.

    "I went there [the United Nations] hoping that once and for all the 
free world would act in concert to get Saddam Hussein to listen to our 
demands," Bush said. "They [the Security Council] passed a resolution 
that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. I believe 
when an international body speaks, it must mean what it says.

    "But Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming. Why should 
he? He had 16 other resolutions and nothing took place. As a matter of 
fact, my opponent talks about inspectors. The facts are that he 
[Hussein] was systematically deceiving the inspectors. That wasn't 
going to work. That's kind of a pre-Sept. 10 mentality, the hope that 
somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a 
more peaceful place."

    Virtually every point in this war justification from Bush was wrong. 
The reality was that Hussein had disarmed. Rather than the UN 
resolutions having no consequence, they apparently had achieved their 
goal of a WMD-free Iraq. Rather than clueless UN inspectors duped by 
Hussein, the inspectors were not finding WMD because the stockpiles 
weren't there. Bush's post-invasion inspection team didn't find WMD 
either.

    Despite the importance of this setting for Bush's rendition of these 
falsehoods - a presidential debate viewed by tens of millions of 
Americans - most US news outlets did little or no fact-checking on the 
president's bogus history.

    One of the few exceptions was a story inside the Washington Post 
that mentioned Bush's claim that Hussein had "no intention of 
disarming." In the middle of a story on various factual issues in the 
debate, the Post noted that "Iraq asserted in its filing with the United 
Nations in December 2002 that it had no such weapons, and none has 
been found." [Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2004]

    But there has been no media drum beat - either in mid-2003 when 
Bush began revising the history of the UN inspections or since then - 
that drove the point home to Americans that Bush was lying. So his 
pattern has continued.

    Snowing the Times

    New revelations about Bush's secret warrantless wiretaps indicate 
that the Bush administration undertook another disinformation 
campaign against the press during Campaign 2004 - to keep the lid on 
his wiretapping program.

    In December 2005, explaining why the New York Times spiked its 
exclusive wiretap story for a year, executive editor Bill Keller said US 
officials "assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal 
checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the 
program raised no legal questions."

    But the Bush administration was concealing an important fact - that 
a number of senior officials had protested the legality of the operation.

    In the months after the Times agreed to hold the story, the 
newspaper "developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings 
that had been expressed during the life of the program," Keller said. "It 
became clear those questions loomed larger within the government 
than we had previously understood."

    In March 2004, Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey refused 
to sign a recertification of the wiretap program, the Times learned. 
Comey's objection caused White House chief of staff Andrew Card 
and Bush's counsel Alberto Gonzales to pay a hospital visit on then-
Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder 
surgery. But Ashcroft also balked at the continuation of the program, 
which was temporarily suspended while new arrangements were 
made. [NYT, Jan. 1, 2006]

    After disclosure of Comey's objection on New Year's Day, Sen. 
Charles Schumer, D-NY, called for a congressional examination of the 
"significant concern about the legality of the program even at the very 
highest levels of the Department of Justice." [NYT, Jan. 2, 2006]

    But at a crucial political juncture - before the Nov. 2, 2004, election - 
the Bush administration kept its secret wiretapping operation under 
wraps by misleading senior editors of the New York Times. The Times, 
which had been fooled about Iraq's WMD, was fooled again.

    This tendency to always give George W. Bush the benefit of every 
doubt raises serious questions about the health of American 
democracy, which holds that no man is above the law. It's also hard to 
imagine any other recent president getting away with so much 
deception and paying so little price.

    Charmed Life

    Yet, the lack of accountability has been a hallmark of Bush's 
charmed life, from young adulthood through his political career. [For 
details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

    When Bush ran for president in 2000, American political reporters - 
both conservative and mainstream - tilted that pivotal US election 
toward him by applying starkly different standards when evaluating the 
honesty of Democrat Al Gore in comparison with Bush and Dick 
Cheney.

    Reporters went over Gore's comments with a fine-toothed comb 
searching for perceived "exaggerations." Some of Gore's supposed 
"lies" actually resulted from erroneous reporting by over-eager 
journalists, such as misquotes about Gore allegedly claiming credit for 
discovering the Love Canal toxic waste problem. [For details, see 
Consortiumnews.com's "Al Gore vs. the Media."]

    By contrast, Bush and Cheney were rarely challenged over 
falsehoods and misstatements, even in the context of their attacks on 
Gore's honesty. Cheney, for instance, was given almost a free pass 
when he falsely portrayed himself as a self-made multimillionaire from 
his years as chairman of Halliburton Co.

    Commenting on his success in the private sector during the vice-
presidential debate in 2000, Cheney said "the government had 
absolutely nothing to do with it." However, the reality was that 
Halliburton was a major recipient of government contracts and other 
largesse, including federal loan guarantees from the Export-Import 
Bank.

    But Cheney was allowed to get away his own resumé -polishing 
even as he went out on the campaign trail to denounce Gore for 
supposedly puffing up his resumé. [See Consortiumnews.com's 
"Protecting Bush-Cheney."]

    This pattern of "protecting Bush-Cheney" intensified after the Sept. 
11, 2001, attacks when the US news media rallied around the 
embattled president and concealed evidence of Bush's shaky reaction 
to the crisis.

    Though pool reporters witnessed Bush sitting frozen for seven 
minutes in a Florida classroom after being told "the nation is under 
attack," the national news media shielded that nearly disqualifying 
behavior from the public for more than two years, until just before the 
release of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," a 2004 documentary 
that featured the footage.

    War Cheerleaders

    Major news organizations were equally solicitous of Bush and 
Cheney during the run-up to war in Iraq. While Fox News and other 
right-wing outlets were unabashed cheerleaders for the Iraq War, the 
mainstream media often picked up the pom-poms, too.

    It took more than a year after the invasion and the failure to find 
WMD caches for the New York Times and the Washington Post to run 
self-critical articles about their lack of skepticism over Bush's war 
claims.

    Nevertheless, the Times' top editors were still willing to give Bush 
the benefit of the doubt in fall 2004 when his aides offered more false 
assurances about the legal certainty surrounding Bush's warrantless 
wiretap program.

    Now Bush's latest comments in San Antonio suggest that he still 
feels he has the magic, that he still can convince the US press corps 
and the American people that whatever he says is true no matter how 
much it diverges from the well-known facts.

    One might also presume - given the continued deceptions in his San 
Antonio remarks - that Bush did not make a New Year's resolution to 
stop lying.

    Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for 
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy and 
Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be 
ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at 
Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the 
Press and 'Project Truth.'

 
-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060105/7ae15e14/attachment-0001.htm