A Sense of Being Lied To

...All that has been discovered are two trailers suitable for housing biological laboratories, with no sign that they ever did...

...He said it would increase the perchild tax credit from $600 to $ 1,000, and the checks would start flowing in July to 25 million eligible families...

...about Monica Lewinsky, of course...

...That was written 25 years ago by the philosopher Sissela Bok in her post-Watergate book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life...

...President Bush signed the bill with evident pride, emphasizing that the Jobs and Growth Act, as it is called, would benefit not only investors but families with children...

...Today you can tell what is important on Capitol Hill simply by checking where the lobbying money is going...

...This was also the time Kennedy said, "Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan...

...Today we have Iraq...

...Belief in the Catholic Church has been damaged by cover-ups of pedophile priests...

...He is a former White House aide who famously said he slept better with Lyndon Johnson in the White House...

...Number three, at just under $221 million, was finance and insurance...

...A national security advisory group assembled by the Senate Democratic leadership, headed by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, turned in a memorandum saying the United States should express its willingness to accept a diplomatic outcome...

...Confidence in public officials and in professionals has been seriously eroded...

...In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the war against North Vietnam on the strength of a resolution wrongly charging unprovoked attacks on two U.S...

...Last January 28, in his State of the Union address, President Bush declared: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.' Those now famous 16 words set off a firestorm when it was discovered that 11 months earlier the CIA had determined the allegation was based on forged documents...

...The media got me up there like a criminal," he complains...

...Too Hot to Handle With its passion for secrecy, the Bush Administration is stonewalling the American public on various fronts...

...In intelligence lingo, "sources" has to do with undercover operatives and "methods" with technical means of spying...

...It makes lobbying for special interests a lot easier when you keep it all in the political family...

...The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud Faisal, went to the White House to express directly to the President his government's outrage at being unable to respond to charges of its complicity in the 9/11 attacks...

...America going to war on false pretenses is not without historic precedent, however...

...Whom can people trust when even Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa, the potential challenger to Hank Aaron's alltime home run record, turns out to have cork in his bat...

...Number two, at more than $221 million, was communications and technology...

...Eisenhower took full responsibility for the spy plane and refused to apologize for it, with the result that Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev stormed out of the Paris summit...

...He has not since repeated that obvious misstatement...

...At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senators were trying without success to elicit from Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz some estimate of the cost in cash and casualties of continued involvement in Iraq...

...But the first big headline spread across the front page of the New York Daily News was, "Hillary's bombshell: Why did you lie to me...

...In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was advised by several people—including his own brother, Milton—to blame the CIA for the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union, its pilot captured...

...It appears that "mistakes were made...

...Some public hospitals have had to shut down...

...That the 1990s are likely to have been the warmest decade in a thousand years in the Northern Hemisphere was deemed a fact too hot to handle...

...The Bush Disconnect Around the country Federal, state and local programs have been running out of money...

...The corporations have been attempting to water down post-Enron regulation, and the banks want to go deeper into the real estate business...

...But the outcome, I can tell you with certainty, was a formula for calculating the credit that omitted families in the income range of about $10,000 to $26,000...

...Why would Congress do that...

...The confrontation, predictably, made a big media splash...

...What he did not say was that, in the dark of night, the final Senate-House conference on the bill contrived to deny the increased benefit to about 12 million children in low-wage families...

...But, it added, diplomacy must be backed by a credible threat of coercive action, not excluding military force, if North Korea proceeds to serial production of nuclear weapons...

...Martha Stewart was indicted for obstruction of justice because she lied about the sale of some stock about to take a plunge...

...In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford's Administration warned that unless Congressional investigating committees agreedto stop leaking secrets, they would be cut off from all classified information...

...He replied: "Obviously this is a President who likes to make big announcements on his time frame...

...An Oval Office summit with the two committee chairmen, Senator Frank F. Church (D.Idaho) and Representative Otis G. Pike (D.-N.Y), produced an agreementthat basically recognized the final control of the Executive...

...Scott McClellan, successor to Ari Fleischer as White House spokesman, was asked by the Washington Post about an overly secretive White House...

...So cutting back on poor families without high-paid lobbyists to defend them seemed the way to go...

...Which industry was number one in lobby expenditures last year...

...Then White House staffer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in his book A Thousand Days, recalls that Kennedy had a statement issued saying, "as President, he bears sole responsibility and he opposes any attempt to shift that responsibility...

...President Reagan used a passive "Mistakes were made" to explain the Iran-contra affair...

...President Ronald Reagan, in 1983, ordered the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada on the dubious ground that American medical students there were being menaced by a Left-wing government...

...military control...

...In Oregon, schools had to close for the summer three weeks early...

...Rumblings in North Korea While the argument continued about whether President Bush and Prime Minister Blair exaggerated a nuclear threat from Iraq to justify the war, the nuclear threat from North Korea became more concrete...

...Among Democratic lobbyists, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association, is probably the best known...

...Remember when President Bush, in his State of the Union address, announced to great applause that the child credit should be raised to a thousand dollars now...

...President William McKinley and Congress declared war on Spain in 1898 after an explosion aboard the battleship Maine that was probably an accident...

...Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said his government used intelligence to support a decision already made to go to war...

...The Washington Post reports that Republicans, sometimes through threats and intimidation, are insisting that key positions in trade associations and corporate government affairs offices be given to their political friends...

...They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity...

...Health care, with a whopping $264 million...

...Had Phil lived, he would see that it has all gotten much worse...

...A scientific report of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, was censored to play down the risks of global warming...

...In the face of protests from Congress and from Saudi Arabia, the President said the censorship was to protect "sources and methods...

...Irritation was expressed by Republicans and Democrats alike...

...The issue of control of classified information has come up before...

...The Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn was in danger of closing...

...This after it announced that it has reprocessed enough nuclear fuel rods to make at least half a dozen weapons...

...normally an Administration supporter, denounced the "bureaucratic inertia, political caution and unrealistic expectations" that have marked the effort to bring peace and democracy to Iraq...

...that was cleared by the intelligence services," and left it to others to explain more fully...

...In Kansas, the 4-H Clubs were forced to cut back on their activities...

...Presidential 'Mistakes' How does A President act when things go wrong or responsibility has to be assigned...

...After the President objected in writing to the proposed release of certain information, the Senate could consider the matter in closed session and approve the release of the material, in whole or in part—in effect overriding the Presidential veto...

...No felony, no big deal...

...More worrisome than the possibility of a North Korean nuclear attack, said Perry, is the danger of a North Korean nuclear device being smuggled into the United States by some terrorist group and detonated in a major city...

...Our government can dispense "awe and shock" around the world, but seems unable to perform its primary task of governing...

...The President at his news conference seemed more comfortable justifying his past decisions on Iraq than facing up to a troubled future...

...That did not happen before the summer Congressional recess and is not likely to happen in a Republican-controlled Senate—despite Saudi Arabia itself calling for release of the suppressed 28 pages...

...President Harry S. Truman had that famous painted glass sign on his desk, "The buck stops here" And in his farewell address in January 1953, Truman said, "The President, whoever he is, has to decide...

...The Times reported evidence that Pyongyang has built a second secret plant for producing weaponsgrade plutonium...

...Peppered with questions about this on his recent African trip...

...Well, you see, the Senate had voted that the costs of the bill couldnot be more than $350 billion over 10 years, and with the cuts in taxes on dividends and capital gains, they were having trouble keeping the bill down to that figure...

...Valenti is expected to retire in the next year, and his successor is likely to be someone who sleeps better with George Bush in the White House...

...Even Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R.-Ind...

...Respect for veracity is taking a beating...

...Americans have a pervasive sense of being lied to...

...It provided that the President could veto a proposed release of classified information by certifying that it was in the national interest to do so...

...The Bush Administration reiterated that it would only meet with North Korea in multilateral talks including Japan and South Korea...

...By accident or design, the flap about the past served to divert attention from a flap about the future that was simultaneously in progress on Capitol Hill...

...Don't ask me to understand, let alone explain, the technicalities by which this was done...

...Many doubt that an imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction was the real reason for the invasion of Iraq...

...It was a damning analysis of the corruption of the legislative process by lobbying and campaignmoney...

...On such contradictions hangs that fragile thing called "credibility," which the Administration will need for future confrontations...

...And that has been made easy by PoliticalMoneyLine, a subscription Web site that tracks campaign and lobbying outlays...

...But it aptly describes today's erosion of credibility in our public institutions...

...Who gets to say, in the end, whether a Congressional committee can disclose secrets that the Executive does not want disclosed...

...Many wonder whether the resignation of two top editors of the New York Times resolves the issue of reporters who invent and steal their stories and fake their datelines...

...Tracking the Money My late friend, philanthropist Phillip Stern, wrote a book 15 years ago titled The Best Congress Money Can Buy...

...According to Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, North Korea represents the most immediate and serious threat of nuclear proliferation...

...Suddenly, in early August, light appeared at the end of a dark tunnel: An agreement was reached to hold a sixpower meeting consisting of North Korea, its neighbors, the United States, and Russia...

...A Senate resolution in 1976 formalized the arrangement, with one important change...

...Vice President Dick Cheney has suffered a setback from the Federal Appeals Court in his efforts to keep secret the dealings of his energy task force with industry advisers, including Enron's Ken Lay...

...Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the Administration position "incoherent...

...That was when the phrase "credibility gap" was born...

...Yet President George W Bush said in an interview with Polish television on May 29, "We found the weapons of mass destruction, and those who said otherwise were wrong...

...Dictator Kim Jong IPs government repeated its demand for a nonaggression pact with the U.S...

...The Wall Street Journal defended her editorially by saying, "She is accused of lying about something that wasn't illegal...

...Sissela Bok wrote, "Trust and integrity are precious resources easily squandered, hard to regain...

...CIA Director George Tenet loyally stated, "The CIA approved the President's State of the Union address before it was delivered...

...Executive Suppression At his July 29 news conference, Bush defended his ordering the deletion of 28 pages dealing with Saudi Arabia from the 900-page report of a joint Congressional committee on the events leading up to 9/11...

...destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin...

...Phil Stern would also find it interesting to observe that the Republicans in Congress want lobbyists to be more and more like them—that is, Republicans...

...The question agitating Congress is whether America was in immediate enough danger from weapons of mass destruction to justify a preemptive invasion, and if so, why has so little evidence of that turned up in a country now under U.S...

...Nothing better illustrates the disconnect between basic needs and negligent policies than the denouement of the battle over the third tax cut in three years...

...It has not helped the Administration's case that intelligence reports released by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who worked closely with the White House, turned out to contain at least one forged document and some material downloaded from the Internet that included an American student's thesis...

...That usually means blacking out a line or a paragraph or two...

...Fish and Wildlife Service has suspended designating tracts of land as critical habitats...

...As described in Michael Beschloss' book May Day, Ike barked back that if he blamed a subordinate he would have to fire him and that would be hypocrisy...

...Faith in our financial institutions has been undermined by scandals like Enron...

...He can't pass the buck to anybody.' In 1961 President John F. Kennedy was advised by Vice President Johnson, among others, to blame the CIA for the debacle of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion...

...Bush turned him down flat...

...Some other points: A group of Senate Democrats was fighting provisions of the Homeland Security Act that provide sweeping business exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act...

...But President Bush's lieutenants, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, made the tour of TV talk shows with emphatic assurances that the Administration had relied on intelligence and not prejudged the issue of war with Iraq...

...In Seattle, drug addicts were placed on a waiting list for methadone treatment...

...The U.S...

...Hillary Clinton's memoir, Living History, recounts a fascinating personal and political life...

...It was waging some major legislative battles involving Medicare, prescription drugs and malpractice settlements...

...During that session, there may be a one-on-one U.S.-North Korea conversation...

...Bush said tersely, "I gave a speech...

...Congress gets access to intelligence secrets on the understanding that it will not reveal anything the Executive branch calls "sources and methods...

...The media conglomerates have been fighting to get more conglomerated, trying to gain control of broadband technology, and seeking to protect music from pirating...

...But banning a 28-page section is unusual, and committee members who have read it called the deletion unwarranted...