July 2003

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All the President's Lies, Part II

The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism, Annotated

photo: Tyler J.

Posted by Steve Perry at July 30, 2003 1:41 PM

 

Bring 'Em On!

All the President's Lies, part 2

Bring 'Em On!

The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism
(links-annotated version)

by Steve Perry
City Pages
July 30, 2003 

1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to prevent a US invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront a radical plan for US control of the post-Cold War world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a US that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge the US Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

Information Clearing House [undated]: Bush Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before Becoming President

The Independent 4/23: Hans Blix vs the US: 'I was undermined'

Center for Cooperative Research [undated]: The Decision to 'Get Saddam'

Time Magazine [via Lisa Rein's Radar] 3/30: First Stop, Iraq

Bush Wars 4/7: Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the US, a belief supported by available intelligence evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq: "The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were many other important factors as well." Right. But they did not come under the heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence: They set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and ignored everything that contradicted it. In the end, this required that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the findings of analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau) and stake their claim largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal testimony from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But the administration did not just listen to the defectors; it promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place was that the Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these sorts of claims to every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted as saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not understand the nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure of senior administration officials to speak honestly about what the intelligence showed."

Bush Wars 4/16: Good King George

Michael Leon, CounterPunch, 6/13: Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media

Sydney Morning Herald 6/16: A mission in Iraq built on a lie

KCom Journal 6/14: A distinct lack of intelligence

Bush Wars 5/12: Hersh: Rummy's Hijacked the US Intelligence Apparatus

Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder, 6/6: Data didn't back Bush claims on Iraqi weapons, officials say

Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder, 10/08/02: Some in Bush administration have misgivings about Iraq policy

James Risen, New York Times, 6/18: Word That US Doubted Iraq Would Use Deadly Gas

Associated Press 6/11: Senate panel to investigate pre-war intelligence on Iraq

Mark Riley, Sydney Morning Herald, 6/16: Howard's Iraq evidence on parade in UK

Allister Sparks, The Star, 7/16: Bush and Blair are starting to hurt

Veterans for Peace 2/27: Career Diplomat Resigns over US Policy on Iraq

Simon Hoggart, Gulf News, 4/6: Blair's credibility crisis means a lonely US

Truth Out 2/27: John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation

CBS News 7/9: War Of Words Over WMD Heats Up

3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions, and here is W's most notorious case in point: Once the administration decided to issue a damage-controlling (they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of African uranium, they were obliged to couch it in another, more perilous lie: that the administration, and quite likely Bush himself, thought the uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the behest of the CIA and Dick Cheney's office and found them to be groundless, describes what followed this way: "Although I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in US government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure."

Richard Evans, The Inquisitor, 6/10: Blair's WMD Claims Look Increasingly Shaky

Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker, The Independent, 6/29: Ministers knew war papers were forged, says diplomat

David Sanger, New York Times, 7/8: Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says

Toronto Star 7/8: Iraq evidence wrong, White House admits

John Troyer, CounterPunch, 7/15: The Uranium Meltdown

Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue, 7/9: Conned big time

Allister Sparks, The Star, 7/16: Bush and Blair are starting to hurt

Bill Press, Nashville City Paper, 7/16: White House confesses fabricating case for war

4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was just as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit cagier in its formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." This is altogether false in its implication (that this is the likeliest use for these materials) and may be untrue in its literal sense as well. As the London Independent summed it up recently, "The US persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges." [emphasis added]

Warren P. Strobel et al, Knight Ridder, 10/08/02: Some in Bush administration have misgivings about Iraq policy

Rep. Henry Waxman's House homepage, last updated 7/29: Nuclear Evidence on Iraq

Marc Pritzke, CounterPunch, 6/23: An Interview with Ray McGovern

5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for the administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

No links.

6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has taken the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the Uranium address. As the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ... Morale inside the US national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war."

In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State of the Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it again.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, 6/23: Did the CIA Shut Out Congress on WMD?

Rupert Cornwell, The Independent [via Common Dreams], 6/18: CIA Deliberately Misled UN Arms Inspectors, Says Senator

Michael Isikoff and Tamara Lipper, Newsweek, 7/21: A Spy Takes the Bullet

7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons.

Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no such report existed.

Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker, The Independent, 6/29: Ministers knew war papers were forged, says diplomat

8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of 9/11.

One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's fibs, this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary threads imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated, handpicked Iraqi defectors that there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, a claim CIA analysts did not corroborate and that postwar US military inspectors conceded did not exist; and second, old intelligence accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad between a bin Laden emissary and officers from Saddam's intelligence service, which did not lead to any subsequent contact that US or UK spies have ever managed to turn up. According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory Thielman, the consensus of US intelligence agencies well in advance of the war was that "there was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation."

Bush Wars 4/28: Still no WMDs? No problem. Let's resurrect al Qaeda.

Walter Pincus, The Washington Post [via Charleston Post and Courier], 6/22: Iraq, al-Qaida link unclear, report says

Nicolaas Van Rijn, Toronto Star, 7/13: Al Qaeda claims exaggerated: analysts

9) The US wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

Democracy is the last thing the US can afford in Iraq, as anyone who has paid attention to the state of Arab popular sentiment already realizes. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid expulsion of US interests. Rather, the US wants westernized, secular leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to neutralize the politically ambitious anti-Western religious sects popping up everywhere. If a little brutality and graft are required to do the job, it has never troubled the US in the past. Ironically, these standards describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein. Judging from the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush administration will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and when they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, 6/28: Occupation Forces Halt Elections Throughout Iraq

10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than most people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed choice to lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his INC that funneled compliant defectors to the Bush administration, where they attested to everything the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and Iraq (meaning, mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The administration proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the combined intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and posed no imminent threat to anyone.

Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of Langley, but it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi National Congress and installed Chalabi at the helm back in the days following Gulf War I, when the thought was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an internal opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have disliked and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous ways have alienated practically everyone in the US foreign policy establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, and therefore the White House.

No links.

11) The United States is waging a war on terror.

Practically any school child could recite the terms of the Bush Doctrine, and may have to before the Ashcroft Justice Department is finished: The global war on terror is about confronting terrorist groups and the nations that harbor them. The United States does not make deals with terrorists or with nations where they find secure lodging.

Leave aside the blind eye that the US has always cast toward Israel's actions in the territories. How are the Bushmen doing elsewhere vis-à-vis their announced principles? We can start with their fabrications and manipulations of Iraqi WMD evidence--which, in the eyes of weapons inspectors, the UN Security Council, American intelligence analysts, and the world at large, did not pose any imminent threat.

The events of recent months have underscored more gaping violations of W's cardinal anti-terror rules. In April the Pentagon made a cooperation pact with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an anti-Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, American intelligence blamed it for the death of several US nationals in Iran.

Most glaring of all is the Bush administration's remarkable treatment of Saudi Arabia. Consider: Eleven of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudis. The ruling House of Saud has longstanding and well-known ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits, which it funds (read protection money) to keep them from making mischief at home. The May issue of Atlantic Monthly had a nice piece on the House of Saud that recounts these connections.

Yet the Bush government has never said boo regarding the Saudis and international terrorism. In fact, when terror bombers struck Riyadh in May, hitting compounds that housed American workers as well, Colin Powell went out of his way to avoid tarring the House of Saud: "Terrorism strikes everywhere and everyone. It is a threat to the civilized world. We will commit ourselves again to redouble our efforts to work closely with our Saudi friends and friends all around the world to go after al Qaeda." Later it was alleged that the Riyadh bombers purchased some of their ordnance from the Saudi National Guard, but neither Powell nor anyone else saw fit to revise their statements about "our Saudi friends."

Why do the Bushmen give a pass to the Saudi terror hotbed? Because the House of Saud controls a lot of oil, and they are still (however tenuously) on our side. And that, not terrorism, is what matters most in Bush's foreign policy calculus.

While the bomb craters in Riyadh were still smoking, W held a meeting with Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Speaking publicly afterward, he outlined a deal for US military aid to the Philippines in exchange for greater "cooperation" in getting American hands round the throats of Filipino terrorists. He mentioned in particular the US's longtime nemesis Abu Sayyaf--and he also singled out the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a small faction based on Mindanao, the southernmost big island in the Philippine chain.

Of course it's by purest coincidence that Mindanao is the location of Asia's richest oil reserves.

Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star [via Truth Out], 5/4: Real American Agenda Now Becoming Clear

Alejandro Lichauco, ABS-CBN, 4/30: Mindanao is next target of US oil imperialism?

Bush Wars 5/15: Bunker-Buster Nukes

Bush Wars [undated]: Overview...oil

12) The US has made progress against world terrorist elements, in particular by crippling al Qaeda.

A resurgent al Qaeda has been making international news since around the time of the Saudi Arabia bombings in May. The best coverage by far is that of Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad. According to Shahzad's detailed accounts, al Qaeda has reorganized itself along leaner, more diffuse lines, effectively dissolving itself into a coalition of localized units that mean to strike frequently, on a small scale, and in multiple locales around the world. Since claiming responsibility for the May Riyadh bombings, alleged al Qaeda communiqués have also claimed credit for some of the strikes at US troops in Iraq.

Michael Tomasky, American Prospect, 6/18: Guess who's appeasing the Taliban now?

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, 6/28: US shooting in the dark in Afghanistan

Bush Wars 5/19: Play It Again O-Sam-a

Bush Wars 5/20: New al-Qaeda Blueprint: Smaller is Better

Bush Wars 5/28: What if There's No Such Thing as "al-Qaeda"?

13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from terror on US soil.

Like the Pentagon "plan" for occupying postwar Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security is mainly a Bush administration PR dirigible untethered to anything of substance. It's a scandal waiting to happen, and the only good news for W is that it's near the back of a fairly long line of scandals waiting to happen.

On May 26 the trade magazine Federal Computer Week published a report on DHS's first 100 days. At that point the nerve center of Bush's domestic war on terror had only recently gotten e-mail service. As for the larger matter of creating a functioning organizational grid and, more important, a software architecture plan for integrating the enormous mass of data that DHS is supposed to process--nada. In the nearly two years since the administration announced its intention to create a cabinet-level homeland security office, nothing meaningful has been accomplished. And there are no funds to implement a network plan if they had one. According to the magazine, "Robert David Steele, an author and former intelligence officer, points out that there are at least 30 separate intelligence systems [theoretically feeding into DHS] and no money to connect them to one another or make them interoperable. 'There is nothing in the president's homeland security program that makes America safer,' he said."

Dan Higgins, Ithaca Journal, 6/20: FBI on the lookout for David Nelson, any David Nelson

Chris Harris, Hartford Advocate, 6/26: You can't talk back to the Office of Homeland Security

Frank James, Seattle Times, 6/30: Homeland security underfunded, unprepared

Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service News Agency [undated]: Post-9/11 Immigrant Roundup Backfired

14) The Bush administration has nothing to hide concerning the events of September 11, 2001, or the intelligence evidence collected prior to that day.

First Dick Cheney personally intervened to scuttle a broad congressional investigation of the day's events and their origins. And for the past several months the administration has fought a quiet rear-guard action culminating in last week's delayed release of Congress's more modest 9/11 report. The White House even went so far as to classify after the fact materials that had already been presented in public hearing.

What were they trying to keep under wraps? The Saudi connection, mostly, and though 27 pages of the details have been excised from the public report, there is still plenty of evidence lurking in its extensively massaged text. (When you see the phrase "foreign nation" substituted in brackets, it's nearly always Saudi Arabia.) The report documents repeated signs that there was a major attack in the works with extensive help from Saudi nationals and apparently also at least one member of the government. It also suggests that is one reason intel operatives didn't chase the story harder: Saudi Arabia was by policy fiat a "friendly" nation and therefore no threat. The report does not explore the administration's response to the intelligence briefings it got; its purview is strictly the performance of intelligence agencies. All other questions now fall to the independent 9/11 commission, whose work is presently being slowed by the White House's foot-dragging in turning over evidence.

Bush Wars 5/9: Has Graham Got 9/11 Goods on Bush?

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, 4/30: The Secrets of September 11

Bush Wars 5/12: The Bush 9/11 Timeline

Paul Thompson, Center for Cooperative Research [undated]: September 11: Minute by Minute

Michael Isikoff and Tamara Lipper, Newsweek [via Truth Out], 10/21/02: Cheney: 'Investigators, Keep Out'

Fox News Sunday transcript 5/4: Senator Bob Graham interview

Carl Limbacher, NewsMax.com, 5/7: Prez Wannabe Graham Eyeing Evidence That Bush Blew 9/11

Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, 7/28: The 9-11 Report: Slamming the FBI

15) US air defenses functioned according to protocols on September 11, 2001.

Old questions abound here. The central mystery--how US air defenses could have responded so poorly on that day--is fairly easy to grasp. A cursory look at that morning's timeline of events is enough.

8:13 Flight 11 disobeys air traffic instructions and turns off its transponder.

8:40 NORAD command center claims first notification of likely Flight 11 hijacking.

8:42 Flight 175 veers off course and shuts down its transponder.

8:43 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 175 hijacking.

8:46 Flight 11 hits the World Trade Center north tower.

8:46 Flight 77 goes off course.

9:03 Flight 175 hits the WTC south tower.

9:16 Flight 93 goes off course.

9:16 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 93 hijacking.

9:24 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 77 hijacking.

9:37 Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.

10:06 Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field.

The open secret underlying 9/11 is that stateside US air defenses had been reduced to paltry levels since the end of the Cold War. According to a report by Paul Thompson published at the endlessly informative Center for Cooperative Research website (www.cooperativeresearch.org), "[O]nly two air force bases in the Northeast region... were formally part of NORAD's defensive system. One was Otis Air National Guard Base, on Massachusetts's Cape Cod peninsula and about 188 miles east of New York City. The other was Langley Air Force Base near Norfolk, Virginia, and about 129 miles south of Washington. During the Cold War, the US had literally thousands of fighters on alert. But as the Cold War wound down, this number was reduced until it reached only 14 fighters in the continental US by 9/11."

But even an underpowered air defense system on slow-response status (15 minutes, officially, on 9/11) does not explain the magnitude of NORAD's apparent failures that day. Start with the discrepancy in the times at which NORAD commanders claim to have learned of the various hijackings. By 8:43 a.m., NORAD had been notified of two probable hijackings in the previous five minutes. If there was such a thing as a system-wide air defense crisis plan, it should have kicked in at that moment. Three minutes later, at 8:46, Flight 11 crashed into the first WTC tower. By then alerts should have been going out to all regional air traffic centers of apparent coordinated hijackings in progress. Yet when Flight 77, which eventually crashed into the Pentagon, was hijacked three minutes later, at 8:46, NORAD claims not to have learned of it until 9:24, 38 minutes after the fact and just 13 minutes before it crashed into the Pentagon.

The professed lag in reacting to the hijacking of Flight 93 is just as striking. NORAD acknowledged learning of the hijacking at 9:16, yet the Pentagon's position is that it had not yet intercepted the plane when it crashed in a Pennsylvania field just minutes away from Washington, D.C. at 10:06, a full 50 minutes later.

In fact, there are a couple of other circumstantial details of the crash, discussed mostly in Pennsylvania newspapers and barely noted in national wire stories, that suggest Flight 93 may have been shot down after all. First, officials never disputed reports that there was a secondary debris field six miles from the main crash site, and a few press accounts said that it included one of the plane's engines. A secondary debris field points to an explosion on board, from one of two probable causes--a terrorist bomb carried on board or an Air Force missile. And no investigation has ever intimated that any of the four terror crews were toting explosives. They kept to simple tools like the box cutters, for ease in passing security. Second, a handful of eyewitnesses in the rural area around the crash site did report seeing low-flying US military jets around the time of the crash.

Which only raises another question. Shooting down Flight 93 would have been incontestably the right thing to do under the circumstances. More than that, it would have constituted the only evidence of anything NORAD and the Pentagon had done right that whole morning. So why deny it? Conversely, if fighter jets really were not on the scene when 93 crashed, why weren't they? How could that possibly be?

Richard Wallace, UK Mirror [undated]: What Did Happen to Flight 93?

Jeff Pillets, The Record, 9/14/01: In rural hamlet, the mystery mounts; 5 report second plane at Pa. crash site; the investigation

William Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News, 9/16:02: Three-minute discrepancy in tape

Tom Gribb et al, Post-Gazette, 9/13/01: Investigators locate 'black box' from Flight 93; widen search area in Somerset crash

Richard Gazarik and Robin Acton, Tribune-Review [via Flight93crash.com], 9/14/01: Authorities deny Flight 93 was shot down by F-16

Albert McKeon, Nashua-Telegraph, 9/13/01: FAA worker says hijacked jetliners almost collided before striking World Trade Center

16) The Bush administration had a plan for restoring essential services and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the shooting war ended.

The question of what the US would do to rebuild Iraq was raised before the shooting started. I remember reading a press briefing in which a Pentagon official boasted that at the time, the American reconstruction team had already spent three weeks planning the postwar world! The Pentagon's first word was that the essentials of rebuilding the country would take about $10 billion and three months; this stood in fairly stark contrast to UN estimates that an aggressive rebuilding program could cost up to $100 billion a year for a minimum of three years.

After the shooting stopped it was evident the US had no plan for keeping order in the streets, much less commencing to rebuild. (They are upgrading certain oil facilities, but that's another matter.) There are two ways to read this. The popular version is that it proves what bumblers Bush and his crew really are. And it's certainly true that where the details of their grand designs are concerned, the administration tends to have postures rather than plans. But this ignores the strategic advantages the US stands to reap by leaving Iraqi domestic affairs in a chronic state of (managed, they hope) chaos. Most important, it provides an excuse for the continued presence of a large US force, which ensures that America will call the shots in putting Iraqi oil back on the world market and seeing to it that the Iraqis don't fall in with the wrong sort of oil company partners. A long military occupation is also a practical means of accomplishing something the US cannot do officially, which is to maintain air bases in Iraq indefinitely. (This became necessary after the US agreed to vacate its bases in Saudi Arabia earlier this year to try to defuse anti-U.S. political tensions there.)

Meanwhile, the US plans to pay for whatever rebuilding it gets around to doing with the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales, an enormous cash box the US will oversee for the good of the Iraqi people.

In other words, "no plan" may have been the plan the Bushmen were intent on pursuing all along.

Susan B. Glasser and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, 4/2: Reconstruction Planners Worry, Wait and Reevaluate

Bush Wars 4/2: Reconstruction Blues

Bush Wars 5/16: Chaos in Iraq

Bush Wars 5/21: Chaos in Iraq: Just What the US Wanted?

PBS Newshour transcript, 3/25: The Cost of War

Bill Walsh, Anniston Star [via Google cache], 3/23: Rebuilding Iraq: Bush's plan to rebuild postwar Iraq draws fire from Congress

Abid Ali, CNN, 3/31: Allies row over rebuilding Iraq

Ehsan Ahrari, Asia Times [via Google cache], 3/26: The lucrative business of rebuilding Iraq

Mike Allen, Washington Post [via The Iraq Foundation], 2/26: US Increases Estimated Cost Of War in Iraq

17) The US has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in Iraq during the postwar period.

"Some [looters] shot big grins at American soldiers and Marines or put down their prizes to offer a thumbs-up or a quick finger across the throat and a whispered word--Saddam--before grabbing their loot and vanishing."

--Robert Fisk, London Independent, 4/11/03

Despite the many clashes between US troops and Iraqis in the three months since the heavy artillery fell silent, the postwar performance of US forces has been more remarkable for the things they have not done--their failure to intervene in civil chaos or to begin reestablishing basic civil procedures. It isn't the soldiers' fault. Traditionally an occupation force is headed up by military police units schooled to interact with the natives and oversee the restoration of goods and services. But Rumsfeld has repeatedly declined advice to rotate out the combat troops sooner rather than later and replace some of them with an MP force. Lately this has been a source of escalating criticism within military ranks.

Bush Wars 4/16: "I Saw Marines Kill Civilians"

Bush Wars 4/11: Baghdad is Chaos

Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder, 7/1: Bremer requests more troops as violence, tension escalate

Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, 7/1: Mistrust Mixes With Misery In Heat of Baghdad Police Post

Robert Schlesinger, Boston Globe, 7/10: Rumsfeld is pressed on troops' return

18) Despite vocal international opposition, the US was backed by most of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member Coalition of the Willing.

When the whole world opposed the US invasion of Iraq, the outcry was so loud that it briefly pierced the slumber of the American public, which poured out its angst in poll numbers that bespoke little taste for a war without the UN's blessing. So it became necessary to assure the folks at home that the whole world was in fact for the invasion. Thus was born the Coalition of the Willing, consisting of the US and UK, with Australia caddying--and 40-some additional co-champions of U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, whose ranks included such titans of diplomacy and pillars of representative government as Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, and Micronesia. If the American public noticed the ruse, all was nonetheless forgotten when Baghdad fell. Everybody loves a winner.

LiveJournal 3/31: Who is in the Coalition of the Willing?

19) This war was notable for its protection of civilians.

This from the Herald of Scotland, May 23: "American guns, bombs, and missiles killed more civilians in the recent war in Iraq than in any conflict since Vietnam, according to preliminary assessments carried out by the UN, international aid agencies, and independent study groups. Despite US boasts this was the fastest, most clinical campaign in military history, a first snapshot of 'collateral damage' indicates that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi non-combatants died in the course of the hi-tech blitzkrieg."

The Herald (Scotland) [via Refuse and Resist] 5/23: Civilian Deaths in Iraq could be as high as 10,000

Associated Press [via The Globe and Mail] 4/1: 'Precise' bombs going astray

20) The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad was unanticipated.

General Jay Garner himself, then the head man for postwar Iraq, told the Washington Times that he had put the Iraqi National Museum second on a list of sites requiring protection after the fall of the Saddam government, and he had no idea why the recommendation was ignored. It's also a matter of record that the administration had met in January with a group of US scholars concerned with the preservation of Iraq's fabulous Sumerian antiquities. So the war planners were aware of the riches at stake. According to Scotland's Sunday Herald, the Pentagon took at least one other meeting as well: "[A] coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US Defense and State department officials prior to the start of military action to offer its assistance.... The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favor a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities.... [Archaeological Institute of America] president Patty Gerstenblith said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities through weakening the laws of archaeologically rich nations and eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export.'"

Liam McDougall, Sunday Herald, 4/6: US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques

Bush Wars 4/23: General Jay and the Museum

Bryan Pfaffenberger, Pfaffen Blog, 4/15: US failure to prevent looting...

21) Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups.

This is very concisely debunked in Walter Pincus's July 21 Washington Post story, so I'll quote him: "'Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,' President Bush said in Cincinnati on October 7.... But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the US intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating October 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States."

Walter Pincus, Washington Post [via SFGate], 7/21: Iraq link to terror judged not likely before Bush speech

22) Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological attack in 45 minutes.

Again the WashPost wraps it up nicely: "The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public 'dossier' on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair--and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable."

Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 7/20: White House Didn't Gain CIA Nod for Claim On Iraqi Strikes

John Dean, FindLaw, 7/18: Why A Special Prosecutor's Investigation Is Needed To Sort Out the Niger Uranium And Related WMDs Mess

23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable Palestinian state.

The interests of the US toward the Palestinians have not changed--not yet, at least. Israel's "security needs" are still the US's sturdiest pretext for its military role in policing the Middle East and arming its Israeli proxies. But the US's immediate needs have tilted since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the Bushmen need a fig leaf--to confuse, if not exactly cover, their designs, and to give shaky pro-U.S. governments in the region some scrap to hold out to their own restive peoples. Bush's roadmap has scared the hell out of the Israeli right, but they have little reason to worry. Press reports in the US and Israel have repeatedly telegraphed the assurance that Bush won't try to push Ariel Sharon any further than he's comfortable going.

Bush Wars 4/14: Sharon: New Melody, Same Lyrics

Bush Wars 4/4: Ha'aretz: The "Israelization" of America

Bush Wars 4/11: Ha'aretz: What Road Map?

Bush Wars 5/2: There Are No Bridges on Bush's Road Map

Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch [via Working for Change], 5/28: The road map hoax

24) People detained by the US after 9/11 were legitimate terror suspects.

Quite the contrary, as disclosed officially in last month's critical report on US detainees from the Justice Department's own Office of Inspector General. A summary analysis of post-9/11 detentions posted at the UC-Davis website states, "None of the 1,200 foreigners arrested and detained in secret after September 11 was charged with an act of terrorism. Instead, after periods of detention that ranged from weeks to months, most were deported for violating immigration laws. The government said that 752 of 1,200 foreigners arrested after September 11 were in custody in May 2002, but only 81 were still in custody in September 2002."

Bush Wars 4/24: Guantanamo: A Great Place for Kids, Too

Dale Russakoff, Washington Post, N.J. Judge Unseals Transcript in Controversial Terror Case

25) The US is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment of terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees.

The entire mumbo-jumbo about "unlawful combatants" was conceived to skirt the Geneva conventions on treatment of prisoners by making them out to be something other than POWs. Here is the actual wording of Donald Rumsfeld's pledge, freighted with enough qualifiers to make it absolutely meaningless: "We have indicated that we do plan to, for the most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with the Geneva conventions to the extent they are appropriate." Meanwhile the administration has treated its prisoners--many of whom, as we are now seeing confirmed in legal hearings, have no plausible connection to terrorist enterprises--in a manner that blatantly violates several key Geneva provisions regarding humane treatment and housing.

No links.

26) Shots rang out from the Palestine hotel, directed at US soldiers, just before a US tank fired on the hotel, killing two journalists.

Eyewitnesses to the April 8 attack uniformly denied any gunfire from the hotel. And just two hours prior to firing on the hotel, US forces had bombed the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera, killing a Jordanian reporter. Taken together, and considering the timing, they were deemed a warning to unembedded journalists covering the fall of Baghdad around them. The day's events seem to have been an extreme instance of a more surreptitious pattern of hostility demonstrated by US and UK forces toward foreign journalists and those non-attached Western reporters who moved around the country at will. (One of them, Terry Lloyd of Britain's ITN, was shot to death by UK troops at a checkpoint in late March under circumstances the British government has refused to disclose.)

Some days after firing on the Palestine Hotel, the US sent in a commando unit to raid select floors of the hotel that were known to be occupied by journalists, and the news gatherers were held on the floor at gunpoint while their rooms were searched. A Centcom spokesman later explained cryptically that intelligence reports suggested there were people "not friendly to the US" staying at the hotel. Allied forces also bombed the headquarters of Abu Dhabi TV, injuring several.

Robert Fisk, CounterPunch, 4/29: Did the US Murder Journalists?

Joel Campagna and Rhonda Roumani, C

Posted by Steve Perry at July 30, 2003 10:03 AM

 

News and links

by Mark Gisleson

MoJo blog

I'm not sure how long Mother Jones' new blog has been up, if it's entirely or just partly written by Tom Engelhardt, but this blog is a daily must read. Engelhardt also blogs for The Nation, and his work is characterized by some very cogent observations. Extended comments today at MoJo on Japan's rearmament, a prisoner release in the Middle East, and Liberia.

A couple of great links via Buzzflash today (and an especially good batch of original content/editorials worth checking out). The Toronto Star has a surprisingly hostile anti-war article, and The New Yorker has a very good, in-depth article on Osama bin Forgotten.

Surprisingly, big media has even more good articles up today, but that's just because it's Krugman-Kristof day at the New York Times. Today it's Paul Krugman teeing off on Iraq, with Nick Kristof taking point on Liberia. Krugman's money shot is worth quoting;

Here's what Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said in a speech last week: "To gauge just how out of touch the Democrat leadership is on the war on terror, just close your eyes and try to imagine Ted Kennedy landing that Navy jet on the deck of that aircraft carrier." To say the obvious, that remark reveals a powerful contempt for the public: Mr. Delay apparently believes that the nation will trust a man, independent of the facts, because he looks good dressed up as a pilot. But it's possible that he's right.

What must worry the Bush administration, however, is a third possibility: that the American people gave Mr. Bush their trust because in the aftermath of Sept. 11, they desperately wanted to believe the best about their president. If that's all it was, Mr. Bush will eventually face a terrible reckoning.

Kristof, on the other hand, focuses on the current big and ongoing tragedy: Liberia.

[W]ith Monrovia (named for James Monroe) now collapsing into killing and cholera, Mr. Bush has sent a symbolic presence to the waters off Monrovia for possible deployment later.

Africa needs a lot of things, but symbols aren't high on the list. Liberian children are not being slaughtered offshore, but on the ground, and that's where troops are needed. Sending troops to Liberian waters is a waffle, a gesture that saves no lives. After 9/11, Mr. Bush displayed leadership, moral clarity and decisiveness in sending troops to Afghanistan; today, Africa desperately needs those same qualities.

"Dithering only makes it worse," notes Ken Menkhaus, an Africa expert at Davidson College, arguing for intervention. "If we don't do it, it'll fester and blow up."

There's a tremendous divergency of opinion within the Left regarding military action. I am not a pacifist, and Liberia sums up for me why we need a well-functioning military force capable of intervening when countless lives are at risk. Guns for peace may sound like an inherent contradiction in terms, but it still pales next to "imperial democracy."

Oh, and the New York Times also has a decent editorial about the 9/11 report and the Saudis. We fought a revolution to free ourselves from one king, but imperial democracy apparently requires the assistance of a kingdom. Is anyone on the right paying any attention to what these bozos are doing in our name?

* * *

Plame update

The major print media have backed off on the Valerie Plame story, but The Hill has a new article today, and the list of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle demanding an investigation continues to grow. Even on Capitol Hill this seems to be a CIA vs. the Administration battle, with former CIA operative Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) saying any such investigation "could be part of a wider weapons-of-mass-destruction investigation."

JustOneMinute has an excellent chronology of the Valerie Plame scandal.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at July 29, 2003 10:00 AM

 

The unbearable murkiness of Paul Wolfowitz

by Mark Gisleson

Paul Wolfowitz needs to be put under oath and forced to testify before the appropriate Congressional committees, and then, when he says crap like the following, he should be slapped with contempt of Congress and arrested for perjury.

Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has directly linked the war on Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, signalling another shift in Washington's defence of a conflict that continues to claim American lives.

Wolfowitz, in a series of interviews on U.S. television networks yesterday, appeared to ignore intelligence reports, which have discredited links between Iraq and Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism.

He sought to defend President George W. Bush's administration against charges that it had misled Americans on the threat posed by deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, saying the government cannot wait for "murky" intelligence to crystallize because it may be too late.

"The battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle on the war on terrorism," Wolfowitz said on Meet the Press.

"Stop and think, if in 2001, or in 2000, or in 1999, we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden, and we had tried to say it's because he's planning to kill 3,000 people in New York, people would have said, you don't have any proof of that," he said.

"I think the lesson of Sept. 11 is that you can't wait until proof after the fact.

''It surprises me sometimes that people have forgotten so soon what Sept. 11, I think, should have taught us about terrorism," he added.

"And that's what this is all about," he said.

[more from the Toronto Star]

If that's not sufficiently ahistorical, check out Wolfie's closing statements:

"This is a war that's going to be won not by smothering the country with individual guard posts, it's going to be won by better and better intelligence, and the intelligence was improving even before the killings, and I think it's improved since then," Wolfowitz told Fox News Sunday

Wolfowitz did not respond directly when asked if he was specifically linking the Iraqi invasion to the war against Al Qaeda.

"I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you're not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you're going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country," he said.

* * *

Maybe it's just me, but I'm often amazed at how damn near impossible it is to get anyone to 'fess up to the obvious truth anymore. Patrick Dennehy is a good example. Texas investigators have now positively identified his body after only a couple of days. ??? Patrick Dennehy was six foot ten inches tall. I don't know about you, but if I found a corpse that size I'd jump to some conclusions pretty damn quick.

Steve Perry's still working on this week's cover story on Bush's lies. Our president's habit of lying is the six foot ten inch corpse of American politics, but no one seems willing to say the obvious yet. Stay tuned, Steve's not only going to state the obvious, he's got documentation. Bush's re-election hopes are deader than Bob Hope.

* * *

Sorry if you couldn't access Bush Wars over the weekend. More about that here.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at July 28, 2003 9:19 AM

 

Achieving critical mass

by Mark Gisleson

I missed this Wednesday Chicago Tribune report on Dick Durbin and the growing scandal over the outing of Valerie Plame, primarily because the ChiTrib had the good taste not to mention Joseph Wilson’s wife by name (link courtesy of TAPPED). So add the Chicago Tribune to the major media list. This made me stop and think a bit. Google News isn’t LexisNexis, but it is a powerful research tool and, maybe, I thought, I wasn’t running the right search. Alert reader Peter Danbury had just sent me a New York Times link that went up late last night (once Schumer commented, the ever alert NYTimes had to write about Wilson-Plame). Danbury, however, found the article by searching for "wilson wife CIA."

So I popped “Joseph Wilson wife” in, and immediately got 140 responses. I put quotes around “joseph Wilson” and that narrowed it to 51 hits, including The Guardian, Palm Beach Post, Falls Church News, Sify News (India), Arab Times, LewRockwell.com, The Herald (Canada), ABC News, IRNA Press Digest (Iran), and Hi Pakistan. All the links are new (although the information is essentially the same at all of these sites) — but there's still not a shred of proof that anyone anywhere had ever mentioned Valerie Plame (let alone Valerie Plame and the CIA) prior to Bob Novak's column outing her CIA employment status.

I think it's safe to say that this story has broken, and that between Schumer's call for an FBI investigation, and Dick Durbin's efforts in the Senate, this matter will be investigated, and it won't be good for the Bushies. Even Paul Krugman stalker Donald Luskin “gets it” on Valerie Plame (courtesy of CalPundit).

The Internet is, of course, all over this story. A regular Google search for "'joseph wilson' wife CIA" now pulls up 515 links. It’s been noted by many that rightwing bloggers avoid certain topics entirely. Valerie Plame is certainly appears to be one of those verboten topics. This doesn’t mean that online Bush supporters don’t respond to stories like Plame’s, it's just that they don’t always clearly reference what it is they’re responding to. I think that’s the case with this “legal analysis” currently being touted by Instahack regarding the vulnerability of bloggers to being charged with treason. Author Tom Bell won’t say who exactly is guilty, just that everyone should watch their step (shades of Ari Fleischer). And, since criticism of this administration is tantamount to treason...

***      

Steve Perry is busy reading all 800+ pages of the Congressional 9/11 Report over the weekend, and will post on it next week. In the meanwhile, he's asking for any readers who are doing the same to email him with their impressions of what's reported, what's redacted and what's left out. E-mail Steve here.

In any event, the report is here (.pdf format). That should save you some Google time. It's not as easy to find as you might think. It seems that many sites didn't bother to provide the link, and, strangely, they mostly tended to be Bush supporters or sympathizers.

***      

Vice President Dick Cheney finally speaks out:

"If we had not acted," Cheney said, "the torture chambers would still be in operation, the prison cells for children would still be filled, the mass graves would still be undiscovered."

Tim Noah nicely dissects Cheney's comments at Slate.

Just a personal comment, but wasn't Iraq running torture chambers, jailing children and filling mass graves back when they were our allies? Just asking.

***

Turns out peace activists weren’t imagining things — they were being targeted for harassment by airport security. [must be a member of Salon or watch an annoying Sprint commercial]

And, one last item that's begging for attention: Jim Hoagland's disgraceful shilling on behalf of Ahmed Chalabi in this morning's WaPost:

Chalabi sits at noon in a spacious reception hall, listening to a group of robed tribal sheiks from southern Iraq express support for the INC. A nuclear scientist who once worked for the regime sits waiting for a chance to lay out plans for a new science ministry.

Bobbing through the door next comes a wave of roly-poly Baghdadi businessmen in polyester suits to talk about the economy. Behind them are three Sudanese immigrants in jeans who are forming an association of political independents. And so it goes long after dusk, with visits from the Iranian and Turkish ambassadors thrown in for intrigue.

This is a scene that the Iraq experts at the State Department and the CIA said could never happen. They have consistently painted Chalabi and his organization as not having any local "roots."

These experts deployed the "rootless" argument in an unsuccessful attempt to get Bush to shut down all support for Chalabi, who they (correctly) figured could help provoke a war they did not want. Unfortunately, they were more successful in halting the administration's effort to train Chalabi's exile forces as military policemen, soldiers or translators who could have helped save American lives in the war and its aftermath.

So there you have the new Bush team spin on Iraq: Ahmed Chalabi would have had a police force in place, but the CIA wouldn't let him.

When exactly did the CIA become the GOP's new Bill Clinton? And when's the last time Jim Hoagland wrote anything you could respect?

 

Posted by Steve Perry at July 25, 2003 1:14 PM

 

Plame update

by Mark Gisleson

Dick Meyer at CBS News has posted a story entitled "George W. Nixon."

Eight days after Wilson published his piece, veteran reporter Robert Novak wrote a column that said, "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate [the reports]."

Wilson’s wife, it has been reported elsewhere, worked undercover. The "two senior officials" who blew her cover to Novak probably did something illegal. They certainly did something vile. Chuck Colson, the keeper of Nixon’s enemies list, would be so proud....

So far, the Bush Team hasn’t had as much luck with fall guys. CIA chief George Tenet tried to take the bullet for the "yellowcake" flap, but the flap flapped on. So NSC aide Stephen Hadley was sent out to take it on the chin. Neither resigned, neither was fired. They just took responsibility.

That is something the President has not done.

OK, now I think it's safe to say this story's not going away. So now, if you're keeping score, the major media covering Plame-gate are as follows:

Arizona Star

National Post & Canadian Press

CBS News

Chicago Sun-Times

Mother Jones

New York Press [second item]

Newsday

The Nation

Time

Washington Post

Frankly, I find it hard to believe that the major media is so reluctant to run with such a juicy story, so just to be super fair, I went directly to the New York Times and tried their search engine for "valerie plame." Sure enough, I got 28 hits — everything from crossword puzzles to travel articles. Nothing about Joseph Wilson's wife or this story. Paper of record my ass.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at July 24, 2003 1:00 PM

 

Pincus on point

by Mark Gisleson

And it comes back to those sixteen words. Dan Balz and Walter Pincus report on "Why Commander in Chief is Losing the War of the 16 Words." Interesting conclusions.

For all the purported discipline and unity within the Bush administration, disputes among members of the national security team have been common, particularly in the run-up to the war with Iraq. Those disputes, however, generally pitted the State and Defense departments against one another, but once Bush made a decision, the combatants generally accepted that and moved on.

What is unusual about this episode is that the combatants are officials at the White House and the CIA -- and that the White House has tried without success to resolve the controversy. The biggest lesson learned so far, said one administration official, is that "you don't pick a bureaucratic fight with the CIA." To which a White House official replied, "That wasn't our intention, but that certainly has been the perception."

White House allies outside the government have expressed surprise at the administration's repeated missteps over the past two weeks, using phrases such as "stumbled," "caught flat-footed" and "can't get their story straight." Said one senior administration official, "These stories get legs when they're mishandled and this story has been badly mishandled."

It was Walther Pincus who also broke the story about the more embarrassing parts of that White House redacted NIE report last Monday.

In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.

"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct," one key judgment of the estimate said.

It went on to say that Hussein might decide to take the "extreme step" of assisting al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it "would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

Pincus, not surprisingly, has many ties to the CIA, and I don't think it would be unfair to suggest that his recent stories have been the CIA's revenge on a White House that's quick to find scapegoats (i.e., the CIA). Ironically, this now infamous Robert Novak column reminds us that it was Walter Pincus who first made mention of Joseph Wilson's fact-finding mission to Niger back on June 12. [A big thanks to Steve Perry for links and insights.]

New Press Secretary Scott McClellan isn't having an easy time of it. Reporters threw Valerie Plame at him right out of the gate in yesterday's press conference. Mother Jones contrasts the case of Valerie Plame with the Dr. David Kelly story. NBC has joined in the fray with a report from Andrea Mitchell, but as of this morning, a Google News search for "Valerie Plame" brings up as its number one link this Bush Wars post from Wednesday. I guess Andrea's entitled to call her story an "exclusive." No one else in big media seems to want it.

Editor & Publisher ran an article on Iraq casualty reporting recently, and the reader feedback gets a bit toasty.

While it's hardly my place to offer strategic advice to Karl Rove, the way things are going, the Bushies are going to run out of Husseins to kill long before their scandals go away. Here are some other causes (other than Liberia and Korea) that Karl could use to distract the public while possibly achieving some good in the world.

Jump on Thailand's bandwagon to free Ang San Suu Kyi.

Help put an end to the epidemic of collegiate drunkenness by embracing the effort to legalize pot (and score big points with the "hate Ashcroft" crowd).

Launch a government-led project to develop "safe" ice cream.

Stab your pharma buddies in the back and throw your support behind Gil Gutnecht's prescription drug proposal.

Revitalize Log Cabin Republicans by unexpectedly championing the rights of Indonesian transvestites.

OK, that last one might damage the base, but any harm done will be more than offset by putting John Ashcroft in a gunny sack and dropping him off a bridge well before the 2004 election cycle starts in earnest. It's either that, or they could try telling the truth. (Just kidding.)

UPDATE: Ooh, nice chart here. And, a bit late, here's the Mark Kleiman post that layed out the key Plame questions back on July 1, as well as the new David Corn post.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at July 24, 2003 9:51 AM

 

All the President's Lies

by Steve Perry

From City Pages, street date 7/30/2003

WEB-EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

Editor's note: Hey, all--I'm back, for the moment anyway, and I want to thank Mark Gisleson for all his posts in my absence. Rob Johnson, too. Mark and a few others will be sharing posting duties with me here going forward.

Meantime, have a look at the essay portion of next week's "All the President's Lies" package. I'll be posting the annotated list of lies, winnowed down to a mere 40, next Monday, along with acknowledgments to the many BW readers who contributed ideas and links to this project. Let me know what you think.

Thanks again,

Steve

Today: Better Late Than Never: The Democrats and US media have tackled one Bush lie--what about all the rest?

Monday, 7/28: The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism, with annotations and links.

Read "All the President's Lies," part one: 
Better Late Than Never.

Posted by Steve Perry at July 23, 2003 12:24 PM

 

Better Late Than Never

All the President's Lies, Part 1

Better Late Than Never

In recent weeks, the press and
the Democrats have finally taken up
a critical White House deception about Iraq
and uranium. What took them so long?
And what about all the other lies?

by Steve Perry
City Pages

 July 30, 2003

POSTED 7/24; REVISED AND UPDATED 7/30

 

IT SEEMS A LONG TIME AGO NOW, but May 1 was a big day for the president--Victory in Iraq Day, even though he could not say so officially without putting U.S. occupation forces on the wrong side of still more international laws. But the occasion was designed with all the martial preening of a victory celebration and then some. The White House announced that Bush would close the day by delivering an address to the world from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln just off the coast of San Diego. And he would arrive on board in a Navy Viking jet.

This bit of gaudy theatrics was attributed to the president's desire to avoid a post-docking ceremony that would delay the sailors' homecoming. Afterward, when someone pointed out to Ari Fleischer that the carrier was within helicopter range of shore when W made his fighter-jet entrance, Fleischer essentially shrugged and said, The president really wanted to ride in that plane. According to the Washington Post, Bush also took a course of "underwater survival training" in the White House swimming pool to prepare for his odyssey.

That afternoon the president's plane broke through the clouds and glided to a tailhook landing with the whole country watching on television. Bush, grinning like a kid who got a real F-18 for Christmas, emerged in a camouflage flight suit and gave a thumbs-up to the cameras. But if it looked at first like the sequel to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, there was also more than a whiff of Triumph of the Will in that Flight of the Valkyries entrance, especially with Karl Rove's own film crew on hand to shoot the opening scenes of the Campaign 2004 biopic.

Then Bush swapped the jumpsuit for a business suit and ran an exultant rhetorical victory lap, during the course of which he proffered boast after boast that happened to be untrue. The shooting war is over and we won... We've defeated an ally of al Qaeda... The Iraqi people are liberated... We are rebuilding Iraq... We are in control of events in Iraq... Iraqis are celebrating the U.S. presence... We don't do business with countries that harbor terrorists...

Not only were these contentions false; they were already known to be so by anyone who had made a point of keeping up with the international English-language press, including a growing though still small number of internet-prowling Americans. The administration's May Day pageant was strictly for the undifferentiated mass of folks at home, that majority of Americans who had gotten their news from TV and later told pollsters that Saddam was behind 9/11 (70 percent), or we'd already found WMDs in Iraq (33 percent). Needless to say, misapprehensions like these were not failures of the Bush information plan, but successes.

But now the extent and gravity of the White House's lies are beginning to look manifest even on television. One regular guest on the news-chat circuit, former Nixon counsel and jailed Watergate conspirator John Dean, recently wrote, "In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.... To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause."

All very compelling, except for one thing. With the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, who's going to impeach him?

LATELY THE AMERICAN PRESS has demonstrated uncharacteristic spunk, dating to the White House's early July admission that the State of the Union uranium claim was false. The very first question--when did they learn this?--opened the floodgates, and incriminating details began swirling around Bush and Tony Blair alike. Before last week's triumphal shootout with Saddam's sons stole back the headlines for a day, the Bush gang had faced nearly three solid weeks of embarrassing revelations. Signs of open derision sprouted in the American press corps for the first time since September 2001. The heat on both sides of the Atlantic grew so intense that David Kelly, a member of Blair's intel staff and the source of a BBC report that Blair pressured his people to doctor intelligence, apparently killed himself.

Contrary to appearances, this is not some great spasm of reportorial enterprise we're witnessing. It is a window on the latest front in the administration's wars: the CIA versus George W. Bush et al. Every embarrassing leak to emerge so far has the Agency's fingerprints all over it; most involve matters only the CIA and the White House would know about. The White House humiliated the CIA in numerous ways while building Bush's case for war--ignoring the advice of its analysts, pressuring director George Tenet to sign off on the uranium claim when he had already stricken it from another Bush speech three months earlier, sticking him with the blame when the lie was exposed, and later, in a bit of blatant illegality, outing an undercover CIA agent--and now it's time for the Agency to settle a few accounts.

But if the tone of media reports and of political chatter has changed dramatically this month, it still leaves the past year to account for, all the months of numb collaboration in whatever the Bush administration chose to say or do to lay the foundations for an invasion. The most striking thing about the present age is not that a White House has lied and overreached itself in pursuit of its aims--hardly unique in the annals of the presidency--but that almost no one seemed to mind. No one who counted, that is; no one in a position to make his or her voice heard.

It's been said that this administration crucifies dissenters, and recent events bear that out. Valerie Plame, the CIA agent whose cover was blown recently by Bush officials speaking through columnist Bob Novak, is the wife of former Iraq ambassador Joseph Wilson. It was Wilson who traveled to Africa in 2002 at Dick Cheney's behest. He reported back at the time that the uranium story was bogus, and told the world he'd done so in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month. When Illinois Senator Dick Durbin brought up the Plame affair, the White House charged that he was discussing classified information publicly and tried to ride him off the Senate Intelligence Committee. On a more bizarre note, Bush fla