Friday, October 31, 2003
The Incredible Lying BushCo by Mark Morford
The Incredible Lying BushCo
This just in: More irrefutable proof that Dubya's is the slimiest administration in 100 years
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, October 31, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Like you even needed more proof.
Like you even need to read about the incredible and ever-increasing list of lies and misinfo and deeply, colon-clenchingly humiliating wrongness shot forth from the mouth of the GOP machine, a truly jaw-dropping assortment of falsehoods and fabrications about war, and war, and war. Oh, and the economy. And the environment. And war.
Look. There is no doubt left. Zero. None. Even many high-ranking Republicans are deeply worried over the increasingly embittered national timbre regarding BushCo's lies, as reflected in his ever-slipping ratings and declining reelectability quotient and his smug little smirky emptiness.
Do you need to be reminded? Do you need to see it again?
Very good, then. Let us recap: No WMDs. Biggest joke on the American public in the past 50 years. Saddam doesn't have 'em, and probably never did. Over 1,400 of BushCo's own investigators and specialists and scientists -- affectionately known as the Iraq Survey Group -- canvassing postwar Iraq for six months, not to mention the teams of original U.N. investigators, and finding not a trace of anything resembling huge stockpiles of massive scary weaponry.
Which is to say, no nukes. No biotoxins. No big cannons full of scary Korans and rusty bullets and old gum. Nothing at all resembling what Condi Rice and Cheney and Rummy and Wolfowitz, et al., said were absolutely positively no question going to be found any day now because after all that's why we went to war. Except that it wasn't. And they knew it.
To paraphrase The Washington Post: Among the judgments of the above-mentioned Iraq Survey Group, as overseen by David Kay, who reports directly to CIA Director George Tenet, are these: Iraq's nuclear-weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991. Also, all those facilities with suspicious new construction (remember Colin "Emasculated" Powell's bogus satellite photos?) proved benign, and of no military use whatsoever.
This is not speculation. This is not liberal wishful thinking. These are facts. And BushCo knew them. And more.
Translation: Bush's urgent call back in March to bomb the living crap out of pissant Iraq because Saddam had irrefutably cranked up his nuke arsenal and might possibly bomb weak depressed New York at any minute and wipe out all the Starbucks and ruin Monday Night Football was not only completely bogus and impossible, it was shockingly dangerous, and unprecedented, and even borderline treasonous.
Remember how Saddam ostensibly loved al Qaeda? Remember how Uncle Dick helped drill that terrorism connection into the cultural consciousness, repeatedly, across all media for months on end just before the war, thus inducing upward of 50 percent of the disturbingly gullible U.S. population to believe that Saddam actually had a hand in 9/11? When he didn't? When there was no connection whatsoever? Remember that?
Ah, yes. It turns out that all intelligence and every piece of evidence points exactly the opposite way. As BushCo was well informed, Saddam might only make contact with al Qaeda -- his sworn enemies -- if his back was against the wall, and probably not even then.
More? Sure. How about Afghanistan? Remember that? Osama at large. Never captured. Taliban resurfacing. No aid for the country and no rebuilding (except for a shiny new oil pipeline) and complete devastation and neglect.
And even Rummy, in his private and damning memo, said as much, just last week, writing that there is absolutely no way to tell whether we are making any progress in the war on terror, and that "victory" would be "a long, hard slog," and that it was impossible to say whether we are killing known terrorists any faster than the increasingly furious and inspired madrassas, or Islamic fundamentalist schools, can manufacture them.
"This is a man that we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army." -- President Bush, Oct. 14, 2002
"Yes, there is a linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sept. 26, 2002
"There have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time." -- National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Sept. 25, 2002
Isn't that cute? Not a single one of those statements was true. And not a single one of those people is being accused of treason or malfeasance or of being a soulless anti-American warmongering drone, despite how their words were dripping with lies when they exited their mouths.
Look. Bush told Americans we were going to enter into this savage and bloody war no one really wanted because Iraq posed an immediate and imminent threat to the security of the U.S. and its citizens. He gutted the economy for it. He destroyed long-standing relationships with countless international allies for it. He made America into this rogue superpower brat, disrespected and untrustable and appalling, for it. And it was never true.
How about this? More soldiers have died since BushCo declared the war essentially over six months ago than during the war itself. And guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces have more than doubled over recent months to more than 25 per day, with fresh American causalities coming in nonstop.
No matter, says the GOP. All part of the clumsy "rebuilding" process, they say. By the way, that $87 billion BushCo just begged for to keep the Iraq war machine clunking along? That's more than the fiscal debt of all the gutted U.S. states combined. Iraq is, by every account, a devastating U.S. money pit.
Might it be worth mentioning here that comprehensive new nonpartisan investigation that reveals how at least 15,000 Iraqis, including a minimum of 4,000 civilians, were slaughtered by U.S. forces in the first days of the invasion? Or that some estimates of total Iraqi civilian deaths go as high as nearly 10,000? Do those people matter? All those women and children and poor families? Nah. Screw 'em.
And you know why they don't matter, according to the GOP? Because we got rid of a pesky evil pip-squeak tyrant, that's why. One who was zero threat to the U.S., and not much of a threat to neighboring countries, and had no 9/11 connection, but who we know killed lots of his own people 20 years ago, with America's full and complicit assistance, including the biotoxins we sold to him.
And how he's gone. Yay! Mission accomplished! Except, of course, he's not. Still alive, apparently. But he's hiding somewhere! And he's probably really furious that he had to shave his mustache, too! Ha! That oughta show him! That's $300 billion and hundreds of dead U.S. soldiers well spent, baby! God bless America.
This needs to be said. This needs to be repeated, over and over again, because apparently it is still not clear and apparently Republican apologists love to trot it out as some sort of justification, some sort of hollow and childish accusation, signifying nothing.
Yes, Bill Clinton lied, too. He lied about stupid adulterous sex. And the GOP savaged him like rabid feral swine attacking a rutabaga. Had him impeached over it. Loathe him still, and his wife, too, with unprecedented level of hatred and bile and vicious litigious action never before seen in this nation.
No such fate for BushCo. Shockingly, the GOP isn't the slightest bit upset about this pro-corporate, oil-drunk administration's deadly string of lies. Shall we wonder why? Or is it just too poisonous and sad to consider for very long, lest the intellect curdle and the soul recoil?
OK, I'll spell it out: George W. Bush and his entire senior administration lied, and continue to lie, flagrantly, openly, knowingly, with full intent, about the need to drive this nation into a brutal and unwinnable and fiscally debilitating war, one that protects no one and inhibits no terrorism and defends nothing but BushCo's own petrochemical cronies and political stratagems.
This much is obvious. This much is painfully, crushingly sad. And this much we must purge like so much clotted gunk from the collective social artery one year from now. Otherwise, we should just turn in our stained and bloody Superpower badge, and resign ourselves to our fate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Subscribe to Mark's deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES, SAYS THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 30, 2003
Eyes Wide Shut
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON — In the thick of the war with Iraq, President Bush used to pop out of meetings to catch the Iraqi information minister slipcovering grim reality with willful, idiotic optimism.
"He's my man," Mr. Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, a k a "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob," who assured reporters, even as American tanks rumbled in, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and, "We are winning this war, and we will win the war. . . . This is for sure."
Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob.
Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," he said.
In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."
The war began with Bush illogic: false intelligence (from Niger to nuclear) used to bolster a false casus belli (imminent threat to our security) based on a quartet of false premises (that we could easily finish off Saddam and the Baathists, scare the terrorists and democratize Iraq without leeching our economy).
Now Bush illogic continues: The more Americans, Iraqis and aid workers who get killed and wounded, the more it is a sign of American progress. The more dangerous Iraq is, the safer the world is. The more troops we seem to need in Iraq, the less we need to send more troops.
The harder it is to find Saddam, Osama and W.M.D., the less they mattered anyhow. The more coordinated, intense and sophisticated the attacks on our soldiers grow, the more "desperate" the enemy is.
In a briefing piped into the Pentagon on Monday from Tikrit, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno called the insurgents "desperate" eight times. But it is Bush officials who seem desperate when they curtain off reality. They don't even understand the political utility of truth.
After admitting recently that Saddam had no connection to 9/11, the president pounded his finger on his lectern on Tuesday, while vowing to stay in Iraq, and said, "We must never forget the lessons of Sept. 11."
Mr. Bush looked buck-passy when he denied that the White House, which throws up PowerPoint slogans behind his head on TV, was behind the "Mission Accomplished" banner. And Donald Rumsfeld looked duplicitous when he acknowledged in a private memo, after brusquely upbeat public briefings, that America was in for a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
No juxtaposition is too absurd to stop Bush officials from insisting nothing is wrong. Car bombs and a blitz of air-to-ground missiles turned Iraq into a hideous tangle of ambulances, stretchers and dead bodies, just after Paul Wolfowitz arrived there to showcase successes.
But the fear of young American soldiers who don't speak the language or understand the culture, who don't know who's going to shoot at them, was captured in a front-page picture in yesterday's Times: two soldiers leaning down to search the pockets of one small Iraqi boy.
Mr. Bush, staring at the campaign hourglass, has ordered that the "Iraqification" of security be speeded up, so Iraqi cannon fodder can replace American sitting ducks. But Iraqification won't work any better than Vietnamization unless the Bush crowd stops spinning.
Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Bright Shining Lie," recalls Robert McNamara making Wolfowitz-like trips to Vietnam, spotlighting good news, yearning to pretend insecure areas were secure.
"McNamara was in a jeep in the Mekong Delta with an old Army colonel from Texas named Dan Porter," Mr. Sheehan told me. "Porter told him, `Mr. Secretary, we've got serious problems here that you're not getting. You ought to know what they are.' And McNamara replied: `I don't want to hear about your problems. I want to hear about your progress.' "
"If you want to be hoodwinked," Mr. Sheehan concludes, "it's easy."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company