- Don't look now, but you're about to see this administration
pull another fast one on an all too gullible American public.
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- Now that the claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction and his supposed ties to al-Qaida have been debunked,
George Bush's cadre of handlers has come up with another idea: It wasn't
our fault, it was the CIA's.
-
- That's the message that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz
and the devious Karl Rove will try to drive home as the nation gets close
to next fall's presidential election.
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- David Kay, the U.S. weapons inspector who had been hand-picked
by the Bush team to find those weapons of mass destruction, got this strategy
rolling when he testified before Congress a few days ago. That was when
he made the dramatic announcement that not only are there no weapons of
mass destruction there now, they were most likely destroyed a decade ago,
if not by the first Iraq war, then by the bombing raids carried out by
the Clinton administration.
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- "We were all wrong," he remarked, but then
quickly added that it wasn't the president's fault, but the nation's intelligence
apparatus that gave him faulty information.
-
- That was the cue for the Bushies to announce the president
had now shifted his position on weapons of mass destruction and was appointing
an independent commission to take a thorough look at the country's intelligence
agencies. Oh, and by the way, it won't report back until after the November
elections.
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- What the administration hopes is that this tactic will
divert attention from long-running accounts detailing how the Bush people
demanded that the CIA and other intelligence sources give them information
that could be used to make the case to attack Iraq.
-
- Last fall, in fact, acclaimed journalist Seymour Hersh
detailed in the New Yorker how Cheney and Rumsfeld set up an independent
intelligence unit in the Pentagon that would serve as a place where the
"right" intelligence reports would be funneled to the White House.
-
- Hersh quoted Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security
Council expert on Iraq, as saying what the Bush people did was "dismantle
the existing filtering process that for 50 years has been preventing the
policy-makers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to
get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position
is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping
information from them.
-
- "They always had information to back up their public
claims, but it was often very bad information," Pollack added to Hersh.
-
- And Hersh wrote all that last Oct. 27, nearly four months
before David Kay made his confessions and his defense of the "innocent"
president.
-
- The question now is whether this administration will
get by with yet more lies.
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- Copyright 2003 The Capital Times
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- http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/zweifel/67664.php
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