"As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about
my
relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While, technically, my answers
were
legally accurate, I was not entirely truthful with my information."
---President Bill Clinton, August 1998
"It didn't rise to the standard of a presidential speech, but it's
not
known, for example, that it was inaccurate. In fact, people think
it
was technically accurate."
--Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, July 2003
What we have here is a crisis of competence. Those
impertinent rascals
at Mediawhoresonline.com have posted some unintentionally
funny
photographs downloaded from the official White
House website. They show
President Junior with furrowed brow and pencil
in hand, making final
revisions to his State of the Union speech. As
if, as the kids say.
Cheap irony aside, nobody thinks Bush writes
his own speeches. People
don't even expect him to grasp with great particularity
what's in them.
Nobody holds him responsible; certainly nobody
ever has.
It's CIA director George Tenet's fault. No, it's
Dick Cheney's fault.
No, it's Condoleeza Rice's fault. Where
was Colin Powell? We had a
word for this kind of circular activity in junior
high, but it's unsuitable
for the newspaper. Anyway, it can't be Junior's
fault. He not only
doesn't know what's in the intelligence briefings,
he doesn't appear to
know what's in the newspapers.
On Monday, Bush told reporters the CIA raised
concerns about crudely
forged documents supposedly showing Iraq buying
African uranium only
"subsequent" to his speech. Not so. In fact,
the falsehood was scrubbed
from an October, 2002 Bush speech at the CIA
director's insistence.
Time reports Tenet personally intervened with
Condi Rice's chief deputy.
Somebody at the White House then stuck a weasel-worded
version back into
Bush's January 2003 speech. A good guess would
be Rice, who alluded to
the phony story in a November, 2002 New York
Times op ed entitled
"Why We Know Iraq Is Lying."
There was even a discrepancy between Tenet's blame-taking
and Bush's
actual words. See, what Condi and Rummy mean
by calling Junior's speech
"technically accurate" is that British intelligence
did cite the African tale in one
of what London newspapers call its "dodgy dossiers."
(Both dossiers turned out
to be substantially plagiarized from outdated
public sources.) That would arguably
make Bush's statement true in precisely the way
Bill Clinton's denial of "sexual
relations" with Monica Lewinsky was true--i.e.
literally factual, but calculated to deceive.
Except Junior said this: "The British government
has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa."
As Michael Kinsley notes, you don't "learn" something
false. Bush didn't
simply report the British claim; he endorsed
it.
Monday, Junior argued that he'd given Saddam Hussein
"a chance to allow
the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."
Evidently, he's forgotten the
elaborate diplomatic charade leading up to his
own March 2003 speech
warning U.N. inspectors out before the bombing
began.
To comprehend the stygian depths of the administration's
mendacity,
however, it helps to begin on Sept. 7, 2002,
when Junior and British
Prime minister Tony Blair appeared at the White
House together. Bush
alleged that a "new" IAEA report (International
Atomic Energy Agency)
stated that Iraq was "six months away" from building
a nuclear weapon.
"I don't know what more evidence we need," he
added.
"Absolutely," Blair seconded.
No such report ever existed, as our brilliant
Washington press corps, as
John R. MacArthur points out in the Columbia
Journalism Review, didn't
exactly knock itself out reporting. Next Condoleeza
Rice conceeded that
"there will always be some uncertainty about
how quickly [Saddam Hussein]
can acquire nuclear weapons...But we don't want
the smoking gun to be
a mushroom cloud."
Vice president Cheney told "Meet the Press," that
Iraq's "reconstituted"
nuclear weapons program was an incontestable
fact.
Calculated to stampede Congress and frighten Americans
into supporting
the radical doctrine of pre-emptive war, almost
word every in Bush's speech
regarding Saddam's non-existent nukes has been
shown to be false.
"The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed
in the 1990's that
Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons
development program, had
a design for a nuclear weapon, and was working
on five different methods
of enriching uranium for a bomb" Bush said. After
citing the discredited
British story, he added that "our intelligence
sources tell us that he has attempted
to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable
for nuclear weapons production.
Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these
activities. He clearly has much to hide."
Saddam's not the only one who does. U.N. inspectors
found Iraq's nuclear
weapons program destroyed after the Gulf War.
The aluminum tubes business
has been thoroughly debunked by IAEA experts.
As with all incompetent
propagandists, the Bush team's cocksure attitude--its
vaunted air of
corporate-style "leadership"--is pure illusion.
They appear decisive precisely because they cook
the books and have only
contempt for anybody who disagrees.