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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (257353)	5/21/2002 5:48:46 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

And HONESTY and being FORTHRIGHT are key to any DEMOCRACY..... this does NOT include ones sexual activities which are PRIVATE AND PROTECTED BY THE CONSTITUTION> The Bush People Know How to Run and Hide Marie Cocco \| Newsday Tuesday, 20 May, 2002 In all the verbiage that has rained down since word leaked that President George W. Bush was warned that Osama bin Laden's crew might hijack a plane and strike at the United States, two words count: "No warnings." That is what White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sept. 11. He said it as the flames from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon lit the sky and the office workers and firefighters and deli-counter men were buried beneath the molten steel. It was a lie. We now know, by the administration's own account, that for at least five months before the terror attack, the intelligence community was in an anxious tizzy over an impending attack it believed would be "really spectacular," in the words of one official who briefed the White House. Since word leaked about the infamous memo Bush received on Aug. 6, the White House has spun another web of lies. Fleischer and others insisted last week that no one had ever considered the possibility of anything other than a "traditional" hijacking. In fact the idea that terrorists would plow a plane into a symbolic structure had long been discussed. This precise topic was developed from terrorist prosecutions here and abroad. You did not need a confidential FBI memo to know this. The newspaper would have sufficed. Now there is an unnerving shadow that will follow Bush through his presidency. It is not, necessarily, that the president could have done more to thwart the calamitous plot. Who knows what was, or wasn't, possible? Everyone's failures - at the White House, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA - will be sorted out soon enough. But Bush lied to us, and covered up. He tries, still, to keep everything under wraps, doggedly seeking to prevent even congressional intelligence committees from seeing the memo. Vice President Dick Cheney, when he isn't impugning the patriotism of duly elected officials, wants to hand-pick those committee members worthy enough, in his view, to "have a conversation" about the memo. But not to read it. This is their way. Bad news is supposed to result in no news. And no news is better than the informed consent of the governed. We had fair notice. During the presidential campaign, when concerns that Bush might have used drugs during his party-boy days were raised, he did not come clean, one way or the other. He initiated a bizarre dance with reporters, two-stepping about whether he could pass a routine background check for federal employees. Could he pass if the check went back 15 years, or just seven? When the campaign knew it had to confront Bush's history of excessive drinking, it spun a tale of decline and redemption, focusing on its man's forthright decision, after a 40th-birthday bash, to sober up. It left out the part about a drunk-driving arrest at age 30. That came to light only when the press dug it up on the eve of the election. It is impossible to keep an up-to-date count of topics the administration wants neither Congress nor the people to know about. The tally grows. It doesn't want us to know about its meetings with energy-industry lobbyists who helped write the energy policy. Nor the names of those it has detained since Sept. 11, or the charges against them. Nor to get historical papers from the long-departed Reagan administration, despite a law requiring their release. The president's men say they want to restore the prestige of the presidency, eroded after years of congressional pestering. This high-minded philosophy they apply only to themselves. The very same officials had no problem releasing to Congress e-mails from the Clinton White House. They handed over thousands of pages of documents relating to pardons, though the power to pardon is the president's alone and not subject to congressional oversight. They released verbatim transcripts of former President Bill Clinton's phone conversations with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, waiving the "state secret" privilege to do so. But now it is wartime and we must keep secrets and you must trust us, administration officials keep saying. Trouble is, they've broken the trust. CC