Bush Tries to Deceive Us About Deceiving Us: Margaret Carlson
quote.bloomberg.com
Nov. 17, 2005 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush pushed back hard against his critics in a Veterans Day speech at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania.
Bush reprised the address at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska on Nov. 14, three days later, just as Senate Republicans were gearing up to attach an amendment critical of the Iraq war to a defense bill.
Neither speech got him much. What Bush did in both instances was engage in deception to defend himself against charges of deception.
There's been no Senate investigation exonerating the administration on prewar intelligence. The Senate investigators specifically kicked the question of the who and the why of intelligence failures down the road as too politically radioactive.
With the speeches, Bush changed course from his earlier defense that everything he believed was right to everything he believed was wrong, but, hey, who wasn't fooled? He also contends that everyone saw everything he saw and then concluded (rightly) as he did that Saddam had to be taken out. But the Congress never has access to the intelligence that the president has.
`Everyone Knew'
What Bush's latest effort reflects is the exhaustion and fear of a White House staff that would let the president go public with so feeble and transparent a case. With one top aide indicted and the leak investigation continuing, staffers are no longer willing to work behind the scenes to smear, deride, and muzzle critics, even family friend Brent Scowcroft. So Bush has to do his own dirty work, personally, in broad daylight.
Bush's ``everyone knew what he knew'' argument was being undermined even as he was making it by new information brought to light by Senator Carl Levin on Nov. 4 and reported in the New York Times on Nov. 6. The recently declassified information puts a lie to the administration's reason for going after Saddam, one pumped directly and repeatedly into the American bloodstream by the president himself.
``You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,'' Bush said in September 2002. In a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002, he said American intelligence had learned that Saddam had trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poison gas in camps in Iraq. In February 2003 the president said, ``Iraq has provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.''
Reliable as Chalabi
The documents released by Levin show that Bush's Pentagon intelligence operation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, didn't believe those statements at the time and said so -- at the time.
``Everyone'' didn't know that the DIA had concluded that the source of this information, an al-Qaeda military trainer out of Afghanistan named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, wasn't in a position to know what he was saying about Saddam. Not only did he lack authenticating details about weapons and locations, he was ``intentionally misleading the debriefers'' in an effort to retain their interest in him, the agency said. He was hoping to buy his way out of detention with information.
This guy was as reliable as so many other administration sources -- like Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi and his brother-in- law -- with an obvious motive to make things up and no real expertise in what they were saying about aluminum tubes, yellow cake uranium, aerial rockets or nuclear materials.
Cheney's `Evidence'
That other piece of intel that ``everyone'' believed was peddled by Vice President Dick Cheney in two appearances on ``Meet the Press'': There had been meetings in Prague and other places between Saddam's senior intelligence officials and al- Qaeda. This assertion has been shot down by the unanimous conclusion of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, which said there was no evidence that such meetings ever happened.
Should Democrats have pressed harder for more proof and pursued every footnote and caveat buried in the intelligence they did get access to? Yes. But to sweep them up in the ``everyone believed as Bush believed'' argument is to blame the victims of a misinformation campaign conducted at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
``Everyone does it'' is a weak enough excuse when invoked by a teenager caught drinking by his parents. From the commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful nation, it's pathetic, so obviously so that Bush immediately shored it up with his default argument that anyone who criticizes him is ``deeply irresponsible'' and sending ``the wrong signal'' to the troops, as well as providing solace to the enemy.
Critics do no such thing. And Levin isn't a partisan taking potshots at the president. He's a public official putting out documents from Bush's own hand-picked intelligence officials bent on giving him a slam-dunk case.
But they couldn't. Bush and Cheney and their acolytes knew this. Everyone else didn't.
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