Bill Press
White House admits fabricating case for war
Sun Jul 13 18:35:34 2003
208.152.73.60

White House admits fabricating case for war

Posted: July 12, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
by Bill Press
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33539

Here we go again: What did the president know? And when did he know it?

Those are the serious questions raised by a White House announcement that the president made a bogus case about the need to go to war against Iraq in this year's State of the Union address.

Don't give the White House high marks for candor, however. Presidential aides didn't volunteer word of the president's mistake. They were forced to admit his untruth only after a blockbuster revelation by former U.S. Acting Ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson.

Writing in the New York Times, the 23-year career diplomat Wilson revealed he was sent to Niger by the CIA in early 2002 to investigate rumors, based on letters intercepted by European intelligence agencies, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy uranium from the former French colony.

Eight days later, he reported back to the CIA there was no truth to the rumors. That information was shared by the CIA with the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House.

Imagine Wilson's surprise, then, when he heard President Bush declare in his Jan. 28 address to the nation: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Based on his own research for the Bush administration, Wilson knew that charge was untrue. He also knew the White House was aware of his findings, because the vice president's office had specifically requested a copy of his report.

Now, in a stunning admission, the White House confirms that the president's statement was simply not true. It was a mistake, aides acknowledge, to include it in the State of the Union. But as Ambassador Wilson notes, that confession simply begs the question. Indeed, it begs a whole set of questions.

How did such a blatant falsehood make it into the president's speech? Every line in the State of the Union address is vetted over and over again, double-checked for accuracy. And the president's communications director knows where every single statement came from. Someone forced this one in, knowing it was untrue, while cleverly crediting it to British intelligence in order to give the president later plausible deniability.

Why did the White House wait this long to admit the error? Only days after the State of the Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency examined the Niger documents and declared them phony, yet for months the president and members of his administration continued to assert the Iraq-Niger connection. They'd still be doing so if Joseph Wilson hadn't blown the whistle.

Why hasn't anybody been fired? It's one thing for Democrats to demand a full investigation, but why hasn't President Bush? If I were president and discovered that someone had deliberately inserted a false statement in one of my speeches, I'd be mad as hell. Instead, the White Houses shrugs off the lie as just one little glitch in an otherwise perfect case.

Final and most important question: If they lied about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa, what else were they lying about?

What about the president's assertion, in the same speech, that Saddam Hussein was connected to Osama bin Laden and Sept. 11? Or his possession of weapons of mass destruction: 35,000 liters of anthrax, 25,000 liters of botulinum toxin and 500 tons of nerve gas? Or his purchase of aluminum tubes to manufacture nuclear weapons? To date, there is zero evidence that any of those charges were true, either.

It is more and more clear, as former senior State Department official Greg Thielmann stated this week, that the Bush administration had a "faith-based policy" on Iraq. They "believed" Saddam Hussein was tied to Osama bin Laden and still had weapons of mass destruction, so they stretched, manipulated, exaggerated or simply misstated the available evidence in order to make their case and convince the American people.

You may believe, as Tom Delay and other Republican leaders insist, that this is much ado about nothing. I believe it's just the opposite. Whether or not to go to war is the most serious decision any president makes. There is no more serious violation of public trust than to make that decision based on a pack of lies.

What a difference. A Democratic president lies about oral sex and Republicans insist on impeaching him. A Republican president lies about going to war and Republicans insist on re-electing him. Where's the outrage?

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When Presidents Deceive

By Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times, 07/13/03

WASHINGTON—Democrats have pounced indignantly on the recent revelation that President Bush relied on forged documents when he asserted last January that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. "This may be the first time in recent history that a president knowingly misled the American people during the State of the Union address," said Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

But far from being an aberration, presidential manipulation of intelligence is an American tradition practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike. During the past century, presidents, in displays of both self-deception and deliberate chicanery, have used highly suspect intelligence to justify action or inaction abroad.

The manipulating began with America's rise to empire early in the 20th century. The architect of that empire, Theodore Roosevelt, relied upon America's only organized espionage unit, the Office of Naval Intelligence, to provide him with inflated threat assessments. To help justify building more American battleships, he seized on rumors reported by the U.S. naval attaché in Berlin that Japan's Adm. Heihachiro Togo was traveling around Germany buying weapons with bags of Chinese gold. He also demanded and got inflated estimates of foreign navies' shipbuilding programs. Naval intelligence officers were too cowed by Roosevelt to dispute his notion that battleships were key to American military supremacy. The result, writes Christopher Andrews in "For the President's Eyes Only," was that "at the outbreak of the First World War, the United States was to be desperately short of destroyers."

Nor was Roosevelt's domestic foe, Woodrow Wilson, immune to the temptation to exaggerate intelligence findings. With U.S. entry into World War I looming, Wilson played up German subversion, going far beyond what was actually known in insisting that Germans had filled "unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators, and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf And many of our own people were corrupted."

After World War II broke out, in an attempt to frighten the U.S. into entering the war, the British provided Franklin Roosevelt with false intelligence documents suggesting a Nazi plot to take over Latin America. Roosevelt was warned by the State Department and FBI that the British claims were greatly exaggerated. In particular, they questioned the authenticity of a letter that was supposedly from the Bolivian military attaché in Berlin.

Nevertheless, in a fireside chat Sept. 11, 1941, Roosevelt warned that Hitler was infiltrating Latin American governments to gain "footholds and bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans. Conspiracy has followed conspiracy." On Oct. 27, in his most important foreign policy speech before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt relied on a map he had been warned had probably been forged by British intelligence: "I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government — by planners of the New World Order This map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well."

On Aug. 4, 1964, Lyndon Johnson took the plunge into intelligence manipulation. In order to justify radically escalating the Vietnam War, he appeared on national TV with the sobering news that a U.S. ship had been attacked that day in the Gulf of Tonkin. Although there had been a skirmish in the area two days earlier, the events of Aug. 4 were not at all clear. Johnson delivered his message to the American people despite the fact that the ship's captain had already reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff his doubts about whether the attack had taken place, saying that "reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather reports and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports." The captain concluded by suggesting a "complete evaluation before further action."

Richard M. Nixon and his secretary of State, Henry A. Kissinger, also showed themselves willing to exaggerate or downplay threats in order to justify actions. In the administration's early years, Kissinger exaggerated the Russian missile threat, as he wanted Congress to approve an antiballistic missile system. But by 1972, he was soft-pedaling the Russian threat in an attempt to win approval for the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty. Later, when the CIA spotted Soviet infractions of SALT I, Kissinger, according to Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones in "The CIA and American Democracy," "exploited his dominant position to hush up the evidence."

During the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, intelligence again became highly politicized. Pressure from the administration for worst-case estimates prompted a declaration from the CIA that the Soviet Union was in no danger of collapse — even as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was dismantling the "evil empire." And while the administration was trying to sell arms for hostages to Iran, CIA official Robert Gates prevented Iran analysts from disseminating information to a White House that was uninterested in hearing news that didn't support the overture to the mullahs. Gates' reward for his loyalty to the Reagan administration was to be promoted in 1991 to head the agency by President Bush, who had himself been CIA director.

Given the historical record of the presidents who came before, it would have been more surprising if Bush had not manipulated intelligence.

"At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" - George Orwell
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"I am only one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do."
---Edward Everett Hale

• the guy who had to have the cake: Condi-Man Bob Joseph — rainesco, Mon Jul 14 16:17