Mr. Smoke and Mirrors
Comment Mr. Smoke and Mirrors George Bush is fond of slapping nicknames on people. His nickname should be Mr. Smoke and Mirrors. That applies not only to his Iraq machinations, but to the...
...Prior to the war, Bush said Saddam had huge quantities of sarin gas and anthrax...
...God forbid the voters know who is culpable before they cast their ballots...
...These are utterly and totally irrelevant to the war against terrorism," says Winslow Wheeler at the Center for Defense Information...
...Nor did his assertion that America has a "historic call" to promote freedom...
...Simply calling Saddam "a madman" over and over again did not wash...
...I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence...
...First, there is his profligate spending on the military...
...At times, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney seem to have almost a pathological propensity to repeat an assertion that has already been discredited...
...He is gouging the Environmental Protection Agency, which will lose 7.2 percent of its funding in the next year alone...
...It's too convenient to place all the blame on the intelligence agencies for screwing up...
...Bush's cuts are across the board when it comes to domestic discretionary programs...
...It quoted a senior CIA official who said the visits "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here...
...Now Bush has succumbed to the pressure to name an independent commission to look into the mysterious case of Iraq's vanishing weapons...
...And against evidence to the contrary, Bush still boasts of the success of these cuts...
...To get their way, they breathed heavily on the backs of the intelligence gatherers to come up with anything that could make the President's war wish-and their own-come true...
...It's a guns and caviar budget, with pittances for the poor and an abandonment of the environment...
...As Tenet himself said on February 5, one judgment the CIA made that got "overlooked" was that "Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009...
...And there is also an obvious flaw in the favorite Republican argument that even Bill Clinton thought Saddam had these weapons...
...In sum, it says, Iraq would have had "little to gain and perhaps everything to lose" by trying such a hand-off Bush failed to give an adequate answer to Russert's fundamental question about whether the war was "worth the loss of 530 American lives and 3,000 injuries...
...The more plausible theory is this: Bush wanted this war from day one, as did Cheney and Rumsfeld and their top aides...
...He's reducing grants to states, even though the states are in dire need...
...Bush's ex post facto justifications won't fly...
...There is a fundamental dishonesty in the argument that Bush was just following the lead of the intelligence agencies...
...She was serving in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia unit in 2002...
...That applies not only to his Iraq machinations, but to the deceitful budget he proposed...
...For instance, in the lead-up to the war, even after weapons inspectors had discounted the theory that Saddam had aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons, Bush kept mentioning the tubes...
...His approval rating has dipped below 50 percent, and John Kerry is beating him in some of the early polls...
...And to construct a panel that will not release its results till after the November elections is a disservice to our democratic process...
...Here are two other cruel cuts...
...The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reached a different conclusion in its recent report, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications...
...Either take the word of a madman or take action to defend the American people...
...But he has pulled this stunt at least one too many times...
...That's a sneaky, sophomoric trick...
...Cheney, the biggest hornswoggler of them all, was still contending in January that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs, though U.N...
...Bush's shifting rationales could not hide the fact that these American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice because he twisted intelligence to make it appear as though the United States were in grave peril...
...Some of his brutal cuts were hard to detect, though, because "the budget tables that would normally show these cuts are missing from the budget books" that the Bush Administration issued when it released its numbers, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...
...For instance, the reduction and ultimate elimination of the estate tax will cost the Treasury $9 billion in the next five years, but in the five years after that, it will cost $172 billion, according to Citizens for Tax Justice...
...He requested $420 billion for the military in 2005, and he couches this in terms of fighting the war on terrorism, but some of the most expensive arms systems are relics of the Cold War...
...And even as his search teams found no weapons, Bush continued to assert that Saddam somehow posed a "grave and gathering" threat...
...And Seymour Hersh reported for The New Yorker in October that senior Administration officials insisted on getting raw intelligence reports unvetted by the experts at the CIA...
...All the premier weapons systems that were planned by George Bush's father, with one exception, are alive and well...
...search teams had cast grave doubts on this...
...Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker "It strains credulity," the Carnegie report says, to believe individuals and agencies did not feel pressure "to reach more threatening judgments of Saddam Hussein's weapon programs than many analysts felt were warranted...
...foreign policy priority...
...The irony is that for all his cuts-eliminating sixty-five programs, reducing sixty-three more-Bush would be saving only $4.9 billion, according to The New York Times...
...These families consist of the disabled, the elderly, and the poor...
...Bush also repeated a rationale that the CIA had discounted prior to the war and the Carnegie report had debunked...
...The only reason he didn't insist on their permanence when he first proposed them was because doing so would have made the budget deficit look worse then...
...Even programs for which the Administration boasts it is seeking increases in 2005-such as the National Institutes of Health, Title I education [for disadvantaged youth], the Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and the low income energy assistance program-would be cut in 2006," the center notes...
...When CIA analysts came to more cautious conclusions than the Administration, they would face withering criticism...
...So why did Cheney say on Meet the Press last March 16, "We believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons...
...And not only did Saddam not have a nuclear weapon, he didn't have the ability to make one any time soon...
...inspectors were there...
...CIA Director George Tenet also provided cover when he asserted, "No one told us what to say or how to say it...
...Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD...
...A recent article by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest in Mother Jones, called "The Lie Factory," says that this unit "manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists...
...But he managed to cover the President in the process by saying that Bush hadn't let the American people down, but that the intelligence agencies had let Bush down...
...And that's not even counting what he intends to spend on Iraq or Afghanistan: not more than $50 billion more, his budget director assures us unconvincingly There are two big reasons Bush's budget is so out of whack...
...Bush's choices are telling...
...He refuses to increase Pell grants for poor students who want to go to college...
...The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments," one former CIA official told Hersh...
...The President's men were part of the Project for the New American Century, which had long advocated the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a top U.S...
...UN weapons inspectors were scouring Iraq, and the United States, France, Russia, and Germany had spy planes and satellites that were surveying practically every square inch of the country...
...Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out," Bush said in March 2002, as he interrupted a meeting Condoleezza Rice was having with some Senators, Time magazine reported...
...It casts doubt on "the notion that any government would turn over its principal security assets to people it could not control...
...The more the commission broadens its focus, the less the focus will be on Bush and Cheney...
...It's one thing to assume that Saddam had weapons when no UN...
...They are not forcing themselves to make any hard decisions about what gets thrown out...
...And it's not a guns and butter budget...
...It just may be that a majority of American citizens has finally concluded that enough is enough...
...Although such situations are not unusual, in this case, the pressure appears to have been unusually intense...
...The proposed Bush education budget is where good education programs go to die...
...Yet the Carnegie report says, "There was no positive evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD or agents to terrorist groups, and much evidence to counter it...
...That is less than 0.3 percent of his entire budget...
...The evidence "suggests, but does not prove, that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002," the report says...
...Bush's chief weapons inspector, David Kay, finally blew the lid off when he resigned and announced that "we were almost all wrong...
...By 2009, Bush will have axed the housing assistance from as many as 250,000 families, according to the center...
...Saddam, Bush told Russert, could have "let the weapons fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network...
...But once the UN...
...Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to Al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush Administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials," the Post article said...
...He is pulling back on dispensing AIDS money...
...That is much too simplistic a formulation, however...
...He did not have to rely on Saddam...
...I think the economy is coming around just fine, quite frankly," he told Russert...
...Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time...
...He is eliminating money for secondary school counselors and to combat alcohol abuse in the schools...
...None other than Cheney himself...
...The Carnegie report also mentions that "political appointees in the Department of Defense set up their own intelligence operation reportedly out of dissatisfaction" with the work of the CIA...
...inspectors arrived in Baghdad, received unprecedented access, and found nothing, the Bush Administration continued to hype the threat...
...Neoconservatives in the Pentagon also managed to "purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade," write Dreyfuss and Vest...
...Rather, the deficits loom large as far as the eye can see...
...It wasn't intelligence, it was propaganda," Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski told Mother Jones...
...Nor did his claim that "a free Iraq will change" the Middle East...
...Saddam Hussein had the ability to make weapons [of mass destruction] at the very minimum," Bush told Tim Russert on Meet the Press February 8. But there is a world of difference between having the ability to make those weapons and actually possessing them...
...The Carnegie report For 2005, Bush has submitted a whopping $2.4 trillion budget, which will be $521 billion in the red...
...By 2009, funding for such programs would be slashed "$50 billion below the 2004 level, adjusted for inflation," says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...
...weapons inspectors and U.S...
...Plus, Bush will have dropped child care subsidies for 365,000 children from low and moderate income families, the center says...
...It noted Cheney's own repeated, and extraordinary, visits to CIA headquarters, a fact The Washington Post disclosed on June 5, 2003, in an article by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest...
...But that wasn't his choice...
...Guess who played an instrumental role in its creation, membership, and mandate...
...And he is cutting "$38 million for projects to provide employment services to people with disabilities," The New York Times reports...
...And it makes the point that if Washington detected such a transfer, Iraq would face "the full wrath of the United States...
...It turns out he did not...
...Second, Bush is larding on the tax breaks for the wealthy, insisting on making permanent the giveaways he proffered in years past...
...Smoke and Mirrors has not proposed a budget that will greatly reduce the deficit...
...They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting," she said...
...It notes the enmity between Saddam and Osama bin Laden...
...On February 5, Bush told a crowd in Charleston, South Carolina, "We had a choice...
...On issue after issue, the truth for Bush seems to be merely a matter of convenience or happenstance, a malleable substance to be molded this way or that depending on the exigencies of the moment...
...Ralph Neas, People for the American Way...
...Bush says he'll reduce the budget deficit by half in five years, but many of these tax breaks-$900 billion of them-fall into the laps of the rich only after that five-year period is up, so the deficit will skyrocket from there on...
...Cheney's handiwork could be seen in the effort to empower this panel to look well beyond Iraq to some broader issues of intelligence failures...
Vol. 68 • March 2004 • No. 3
