Lying -- a Bush Family Value
consortiumnews.com
Lying -- a Bush Family Value
By Robert Parry
July 18, 2003
In most cases, it wouldn’t matter much that a 40-year-old long-time heavy drinker refused to admit to his alcoholism, nor that years later, he continued to play word games when asked about his cocaine use. Doctors might say that denial isn’t good for a person’s recovery, but that wouldn’t affect the rest of us.
The difference in this case is that the substance abuser somehow became president of the United States. And by hiding his earlier problems, George W. Bush learned what is becoming a dangerous lesson – that his family and political connections can protect him from the truth.
Politicians with less powerful friends may pay dearly for their little lies or perceived exaggerations, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore learned. But the Bushes are not like lesser-born men. The Bushes have asserted themselves as a kind of American royalty. When the rare question about their truthfulness penetrates the outer defenses, aides step in to spin the facts, or a cowed news media minimizes the offense, or if necessary, some subordinate takes the fall.
Meanwhile, the American people are supposed to bend over backward with testimonials, saying it would be unthinkable that "straight-shooting" George W. Bush would ever intentionally mislead the people. The Bushes simply aren’t capable of lying, even when the public is watching a train wreck of lies about the reasons for the Iraq War.
The American public's not even supposed to notice when Bush – as recently as July 14 – altered key facts about how the war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein began earlier this year. "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in," Bush said at the White House. "After a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power."
With U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan sitting next to him and White House reporters in front of him, Bush lied. In reality, Hussein’s government had allowed the U.N. inspectors to scour the countryside for months and was even complying with U.N. demands to destroy missiles that exceeded the range permitted by international sanctions.
In early March, U.N. inspectors were requesting more time for their work and noting that the Iraqis finally were filling in details about how they had destroyed earlier stockpiles of weapons. But Bush cut the inspections short and launched his invasion.
Now, asserting a kind of kingly right to say whatever he wishes without contradiction, Bush revised the history to put himself in a more favorable light. The lie was so obvious that some Bush watchers suggest it indicates either a growing brazenness in his deceptions or a disconnect between Bush’s mind and reality.
Still, Bush continues to chastise those who question his honesty about the Iraq War as "historical revisionists." He accuses them of trying to rewrite or falsify the history. Meanwhile, Bush’s own rewriting of the prologue to the Iraq War drew only passing notice from a U.S. news media that still accepts the myth of Bush, the "straight shooter."
A Family Legacy
Bush’s words and deeds around the Iraq War suggest that deception was one lesson that George W. Bush learned from his father.
With his blue-blood connections and his CIA experience, George H.W. Bush understood the expediency of truth. From his CIA tradecraft, the elder Bush also knew how a population could be manipulated through lies, which could then be covered up or forgotten in the glow of victory.
As CIA chief in 1976, the elder Bush led the counterattack against the historic congressional and press investigations of CIA abuses, including the agency’s involvement in assassinations of foreign leaders. Those cover-ups reached into Bush's own tenure at the CIA, with efforts to frustrate an investigation into the murder of Chile's ex-foreign minister Orlando Letelier, who was blown up while driving down Embassy Row in Washington on Sept. 21, 1976.
Though Bush promised that his CIA would do all it could to help identify the killers, senior CIA officials instead took actions to divert investigators away from the real killers – agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a Bush favorite.
Bush's CIA leaked a phony intelligence finding to Newsweek magazine. "The Chilean secret police were not involved," the CIA told Newsweek. "The agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile's rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime." [Newsweek, Oct. 11, 1976]
Years later, prosecutors would learn that the CIA had important evidence linking Chile's secret police to the assassination – assassin Michael Townley even had claimed the purpose of his trip to the United States was to visit the CIA – but CIA director Bush withheld that information. "Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case," said federal prosecutor Eugene Propper. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com "Bush & the Condor Mystery."]
Iran Capers
The senior Bush's hand appeared in other intelligence mysteries of the era. In 1980, with the Republican Party desperate to regain power, then-vice presidential nominee Bush allegedly joined other senior Republicans in secret talks with the radical Iranian government, obstructing President Jimmy Carter's attempts to win the release of 52 American hostages then held in Iran.
Carter’s failure paved the way for Ronald Reagan's election, followed by the release of the hostages on Reagan's Inauguration Day. [For details on George H.W. Bush’s role in these events, see Consortiumnews.com’s "October Surprise X-Files" or Robert Parry’s Trick or Treason.]
Later, the elder Bush became enmeshed in other secret negotiations with Iran, the illegal Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme. But he was always careful to cover his tracks. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke in fall 1986, Bush asserted that he was "not in the loop." He then got help from Representatives Dick Cheney and Henry Hyde, who protected Bush’s political flanks as the investigation wound through Congress in 1987.
By the time the elder Bush secured the Republican nomination for president in 1988, his role in the Iran-Contra scandal had been carefully concealed from the voters and was treated as "old news" by much of the U.S. news media.
In summer 1988, Bush still found himself trailing Democrat Michael Dukakis in the polls. So Bush realized that another lie was in order. Since the Massachusetts governor was refusing to rule out the possibility of a tax increase as a "last resort," Dukakis was open to a charge that he was a "tax-and-spend" liberal. Bush sealed the deal in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. After mocking Dukakis’s "last resort" comment, Bush declared, "Read my lips: No new taxes."
The lie helped the elder Bush get what he wanted: the presidency. He then broke his "read-my-lips" pledge by agreeing to raise federal taxes.
In 1992, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh uncovered evidence that proved George H.W. Bush was very much in the loop on the arms-for-hostages operation and had misled the American people. But Bush stanched further disclosures about his secret involvement with Iran’s fundamentalist government by pardoning a half dozen Iran-Contra defendants on Dec. 24, 1992. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Family Politics."]
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