Hi KLP; Re: "Those newspapers (and other media) and folks with all the opinions that continually have articles that talk about the Administration "lying" will be found wrong, BIG TIME WRONG, and hopefully, it is they who will lose all credibility."
Unfortunately, our government (like every other government on the planet, of sufficient size and age) has a long history of lying.
When I was a kid, back before Watergate, Iran/Contra, White Water, Monicagate, or I knew about the Gulf of Tonkin, or the truth about what Kennedy / Johnson / Nixon were privately saying about the progress of the war in Vietnam, I might have agreed with you.
But with the sad lesson of history, I no longer am surprised to find that our politicians, (as well as most everybody else, I don't mean to pick on politicians, school teachers and CEOs are just as bad) put self-interest ahead of the interests of the country, and will lie to protect those self interests.
Once they get caught in a lie, they turn on "lie mode", and start lying like tarmac to try and save their butts.
And then there's the "loyalty" thing. People tend to be more loyal to their friends and even coworkers than they are to the country. Even the FBI swears to uphold the Constitution and all that, but when it comes down to deciding whether or not to turn in their buddies, well the country can go take a hike:
usatoday.com
People rationalize stuff. They fail to see the full consequences of their actions, and see their lies as only little white exaggerations, the kind of thing that everybody does. They even fail to see that their actions will result in the deaths of thousands, providing those thousands aren't people they actually know.
So don't get your hopes up too much that the government this time is telling the truth.
The truth has been out there for most of a year, but the warheads ignored it. It was reported in the newspapers at the time, but the bloodthirsty public ignored it in their clamor for revenge over the WTC attack. (Even though the revenge was to be taken against Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with the WTC.)
You guys are acting like these charges are some lately thought up technique to rob the Bush administration of the fruits of its glorious victory (soon enough to be defeat) against Iraq, but this is an old story. It's not something that the newspapers just made up, it's been widely reported for most of a year:
Maintain CIA's independence
USA Today, October 24, 2002
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: "A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war," the news service reported recently. "They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary."
In the case of Iraq, the consequence of a serious manipulation of the truth could be the loss of thousands of American lives. Fortunately, CIA Director George Tenet has apparently managed to keep the CIA on the straight and narrow during the debate over Iraq.
...
usatoday.com
As long as the Iraq war was a glorious victory, the fact that Bush and Blair lied like dogs to get it going would have been accepted (at least in the US for a while) as standard realpolitik. Of course our lying scoundrels and their dishonored promises (to leave Iraq alone if it got rid of its WMDs) would outrage the rest of the world, who would never trust us again, but if the Iraqis had treated us as liberators all this might possibly have blown over, even though Iraq was empty of WMDs.
The big problem for Bush and Blair is that they had to lie to Congress and Parliament in order to make them vote to give them the option of having a war. That means that the congressmen and MPs can wash the blood off of their hands (for killing people in a demented fiasco), by blaming Bush and Blair for lying to them. Or at least they can appear to get the blood off. Though really, I doubt that a single one of them was unaware that the administrations were giving a biased portrayal of the WMD issue. Instead, they voted for war because their bloodthirsty populations wanted one. (Some for revenge, some to be "safe", LOL.)
As it becomes more and more clear that the Iraq war was a really bad idea, easily the stupidest thing the US and UK have done since the War of 1812, Congress and Parliament become more interested in pushing the blame over to the executive branches.
So be prepared for a nasty fight.
As far as wishing the problem away, forget it. This is the real world, it doesn't work like that. Bush and Blair made their bed, (in a blindness caused by impotent rage), now they have to lie in it. But the truth will out, because other parts of government need to bring the truth out in order to cover their own butts.
If this is an illustration of anything, it is that of the importance of dividing the powers in government. People are corrupt. Our brilliant Founding Fathers recognized this fact, and they created a government that would not allow the power of making war to be held by a single man. What Bush did was to make an end-run around the Constitution by making a double lie. (That he would not attack Iraq if they disarmed, and that he had top secret information proving that Iraq had not disarmed.)
This whole thing makes me somewhat depressed, but I will eventually get over it. Unlike the people who believe in "my country is always right", I knew that in our hearts, we are all sinners and that we can only hope to be fair and just. But still, I wish that I had been born 60 years earlier so that I could not have witnessed this pathetic horror.
When I say that I am a "my country, right or wrong" person, what I mean is that I am for the United States, above all, but I recognize that sometimes we do wrong. To me, our country, the United States of America, is more important than my party, the Republicans, and is a hell of a lot more important than the reputation of a single man, George Bush. That to me is what "my country, right or wrong" means. And a lot of military or military related people feel the same way.
Yes, the stain is on all of us, but ignoring it will not make it go away. We are human, so of course we make mistakes. What is divine is not to avoid all mistakes, but instead to admit them as early as possible.
It's typical for military people to not appreciate being sent off to die in hopeless wars against civilians (Did you see that our kill ratio has fallen to near even? War is a heck of a lot more fun when you're killing 100 or more of them for every one of your buddies that ends up with his brains all over your uniform. On the other hand, taking casualties on a quid pro quo basis is no fun at all.) so the stories that will be told by returning soldiers, oh, maybe 3 or 4 months from now, should give another shock to the system. The military is just not going to be happy with this.
-- Carl
P.S. You mention "hopefully". Stock traders have a term for when a trade has gone wrong, but the trader feels that he has lost too much to end the trade, and so keeps the losing trade open. That state of mind, where you sit there watching the stock continue to go against you but you don't do anything about it, is called being in "hope mode". If it keeps getting worse and you still don't do anything about it, it's called "prayer mode". |
