March, 2004, Week 4

By Colleen Redman, Liberal Slant

On March 15th The New York Times reported that a video put forth by the Bush Administration is being studied by Federal investigators because of its potential to be misleading.?

The video, made for local television news stations to air, portrays President Bush receiving a standing ovation, and paid actors posing as journalists praising Bush's new Medicare law. It prompted Washington Post staff writer, Howard Kurtz, when asked about it, to say this: "It's become common practice for companies and trade associations to put out these video news releases, which sometimes are not identified as such. But for the government to get into the same business is troubling." About the use of paid actors, he said, "I'm sure the Bush administration would prefer that all questions came from such faux journalists and not the authentic variety."?

The Bush administration has also gotten some flak for using paid actors - firefighters, construction workers, children and the elderly - in re-election campaign ads (Washington Post, March 4). But these recent incidents are only the latest in a long and troubling trend. While all presidential administrations have used public relations to further their agendas, the Bush administration has taken it to new heights (or should I say "new lows") and seems to cross the line from public relations to propaganda.?

An early indication of the Bush administration's slick corporate approach happened when White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, was asked about the timing of the Iraq war by a New York Times reporter and replied, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." But even before that, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, John J. DiIulio, revealed in an Esquire magazine interview the Bush administration's preoccupation with political image over substance when he said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm."?

The War in Iraq was sold and billed to the public on unsubstantiated claims. Even though experts pointed out that Iraq was largely disarmed after the first Gulf war, and warned about the extreme difficulties of uniting warring fractions in Iraq, the Bush team went ahead and launched an unprecedented pre-emptive war based on claims of WMD and Iraq ties to Al Qaida that have not been proven and are unlikely to be true. Two years before the war, at a press conference in Egypt, Colin Powell said, "He (Saddam) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." Still, the Bush team went ahead to invoke images of mushroom clouds on the basis of speculation and outdated intelligence for the purpose of convincing the public that Iraq was an urgent threat to the U.S.?

Once the war was underway we continued to see evidence of the Bush administration's penchant for wowing the public dizzy with spin and distortion. In another unprecedented move, the pentagon hired (with our tax dollars) a Hollywood set designer to create a million dollar media center from which to report the war in Iraq. Designer, George Allison, was quoted as saying, "I like to achieve a level of detail that makes it difficult to distinguish a set from reality."?

Then we had to endure the dramatized rescue of Jessica Lynch, of which many of the initial reports proved to be false. That didn't stop the networks from making a commercial TV movie about it, though.?

Controversy stirred again when President Bush donned a pilot's uniform and appeared to fly a fighter jet onto an aircraft carrier to make a grand entrance for a televised speech. He then stood in front of a banner, which presumptuously announced, "Mission Accomplished." And I doubt that many people realize that the turkey used in another photo-op, when Bush was in Iraq on Thanksgiving Day, was a fake. In reality it was 6 a.m. and the soldiers ate, not the Norman Rockwell-looking (fake) turkey that was presented, but from cafeteria style steam trays (Mike Allen, Washington Post, December 4, 03).?

More recently, (Associated Press 2/18/04) The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report stating that the Bush administration distorts scientific findings and seeks to manipulate experts' advice to avoid information that runs counter to political beliefs. "The scope and scale of manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented," the scientists concluded, illustrating once again that the truth is like an inconvenient detail when it gets in the way of the Bush administration's plans.?

Besides setting the record for the biggest U.S. deficit in history and having the worst job creation record since Herbert Hoover, President Bush has held the fewest number of press conferences of any president in modern history. It seems that he and his handlers prefer photo-ops, environments they can control, or the heroic Hollywood portrayals of Bush, such as the one in the made-for-TV movie, "D.C. 9/11," in which the actor playing Bush incredulously says, "If some tinhorn terrorists wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!"?

In the real life presidency of George Bush, citizens protesting his policies aren't allowed in view of the president, caskets from fallen U.S. soldiers aren't allowed to be publicly shown, the Iraqi civilian death toll caused by the war is not counted, and journalists who ask hard questions are sent to the back of the press room.?

Apparently, the Bush administration is intent on producing their own version of reality and then selling it to the public. Sadly, with the right props, flags and slogans, half the country seems willing to buy it.

By William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t

I went to New York City this weekend to cover the protests marking the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It was a good showing as far as these things go; having covered the massive demonstrations last year, I was impressed by the number of people who turned out. The protest wended its way down many blocks of Madison Avenue, and then down the Avenue of the Americas, pretty much cutting that portion of the city in two. The protesters themselves were well-behaved - vocal, colorful, angry, but well-behaved - and the police stayed out of the way.

Later that afternoon, I jumped into a cab and headed down to the financial district to do something I hadn't done yet. A few minutes later, I found myself at the corner of Church St. and Vesey St. standing between two graveyards. The one on the left was small fenced in by a black wrought-iron fence, and very old. It reminded me of the Revolutionary War-era Granary on Tremont St. in Boston, where Paul Revere and Samuel Adams rest. The graveyard on the right was much newer, massive, fenced in by a towering gray barrier. There were no old headstones, no grass for the wind to ruffle.

This was Ground Zero, and it still smelled like burning.

It occurred to me, as I tried to take in the enormity, that I could be standing on a spot where someone died instantly after jumping from a window that used to stand high above in those lost towers. The street was crowded with ghosts, and I couldn't stay long for the chill they left in their wake. As I dove into another cab, I remembered that George W. Bush wants to give his acceptance speech at the GOP nomination from that sacred, scarred place. You have to stand at Ground Zero to appreciate the staggering arrogance of anyone who would consider, for a nanosecond, using the place for political theater.

The chill of that place was fresh in my bones on Sunday night when I turned on '60 Minutes' to see Richard Clarke, former Director of Counter-Terrorism for the National Security Council and veteran of every administration since Ronald Reagan, denounce George W. Bush and his whole crew for their failure to deal with terrorism before and after September 11, and for attacking Iraq when no threat to our country was present there.

"Frankly," said Clarke, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know. I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

On September 11, fears that an attack on the White House were imminent caused that building to be evacuated. Richard Clarke was one of the few to stay behind, to stand inside that juicy target while rogue planes were still in the air, so he could keep working from the Situation Room. "I kept thinking of the words from 'Apocalypse Now,' the whispered words of Marlon Brando," said Clarke, "when he thought about Vietnam. 'The horror. The horror.' Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows. People falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America."

Clarke's horror was compounded by the fact that he and others had been clarioning warnings about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda within the Bush White House for months and months. "On January 24th, 2001," said Clarke, "I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo wasn't acted on. I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they came back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

"George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead," continued Clarke. "He said that in June, July, August." For the record, Bush's response to these warnings was to go to Texas for a month-long vacation. No actions of any significance were taken to address the al Qaeda threat until after the towers came down.

In pressing for action against the looming al Qaeda threat, Clarke finally got a meeting with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

The focus remained on Iraq even after the attacks. In the days after September 11, Clarke along with the heads of the American intelligence community attempted to direct the Bush administration towards the true threat. "Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," said Clarke. "And we all said no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.' Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking."

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection," continued Clarke, "but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

The pressure to attack Iraq, to come up with some sort of justification for an invasion, was not only coming from Don Rumsfeld. "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this,'" said Clarke. "Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer."

"We wrote a report. It was a serious look," continued Clarke. "We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. Do it again.' I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."

The rest is history. A year after the invasion of Iraq, there have been no weapons of mass destruction nor infrastructure to create them found in that country. No evidence of an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda has been put forth. 583 American soldiers have died there, thousands more have been wounded and maimed, and over 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. The dying continues to this very day.

The Bush administration continues to defend its actions in Iraq, and continues to claim that the invasion of Iraq was central to the War on Terror. Their defense of their actions has led to some profoundly embarrassing moments for various officials, none more so than the day Don Rumsfeld appeared on the CBS news program 'Face the Nation.' The transcript of the March 14th encounter tells the tale:

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The... RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says 'some have argued that the nu'--this is you speaking--'that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'

RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--suppose I've...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know.

In response to Richard Clarke's damning words on '60 Minutes,' Bush administration officials have frantically fanned out to attack him as a disgruntled employee, a stinking Democrat, as someone who spent time near Bill Clinton and is therefore not to be trusted. This will not hold water. Richard Clarke began shaping American policy regarding terrorism under President Reagan, and continued this work under the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be his 'terrorism czar,' then held over again by the current President Bush.

Sidney Blumenthal, the former Clinton advisor who worked with Clarke, told me via email, "Dick Clarke is a consummate professional, who served Republican and Democratic administrations, and his integrity is impeccable. His account of what happened is rock solid, as he is. The attacks on him have only affirmed the facts as Clarke presents them. Not one fact he presents has been overturned in the desperate effort to discredit him. The attack on Clarke, filled with new deceptions, diversions and lies, reveals ever more clearly the character of the Bush administration--and the fear Bush has that the American people will learn the truth about his record."

Richard Clarke stands now in a line of accusers that includes senior Bush Administration terrorism advisor Rand Beers, who resigned his position in disgust after watching the administration's actions. The line includes career Air Force officer Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon and witnessed Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans manipulate data about Iraq to justify an invasion. The line includes Greg Thielmann, a top State Department intelligence officer who likewise resigned in disgust and accused the White House of cooking the data about Iraq.

The line includes former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who witnessed the Bush administration gear up for an Iraq war literally moments after entering the White House in January 2001. The line includes Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program by investigating the matter in Niger. His reward for telling the truth was the annihilation of his wife's career as a deep-cover CIA operative by vindictive White House officials. The line is getting longer by the day. The White House would have you believe these career diplomats and military officers are all lying Bush-haters.

The corner of Church St. and Vesey St. in New York City is crowded with ghosts today. The beds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are crowded with the wounded bodies of American soldiers who were sent to Iraq. The tarmac at Dover Air Force Base has held the dead bodies of almost 600 American soldiers after their final journey home from Iraq. The soil of Iraq is filled with the blood and bones of over 10,000 innocents. The halls of the White House are crowded with liars, men and women who have the blood of soldiers and civilians alike running in freshets from their fingers.

I've been to the graveyard. I believe Richard Clarke.

William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead writer for truthout. He is a New York Times and international bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

? : t r u t h o u t 2004

Reprinted from truthout:
http://www.truthout.org/
docs_04/032304A.shtml

By Michael Kinsley
Wednesday, March 24, 2004; Page A21

President Bush seems to be running his reelection campaign on the basis of the Powell doctrine: Go in with overwhelming force from the start and strike a blow from which the enemy can never recover. Like the United States in Iraq, the Bush campaign has superior firepower and far more money. The lesson of Vietnam, articulated by Colin Powell, is: Use your superiority -- don't fritter it away in gradual escalation.

One of the weapons in Bush's arsenal is an old family heirloom. Bush fired it himself during his big Florida rally over the weekend. He asserted that John Kerry had voted for higher taxes 350 times during his 20 years in the Senate. Vice President Cheney and other presidential surrogates have been using this statistoid for several weeks, and it has been picked up and repeated in the conservative media echo chamber. In 1992, Bush's father charged that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, had raised taxes 128 times. This shabby and deeply disingenuous allegation became an embarrassment to the elder Bush, but it took weeks and months of pounding by the media and the opposition to make it this way. I'm hoping to spare us all that with a Powell doctrine-like strike early on.

The purpose of a phony statistic such as this one isn't to convince people of its own accuracy. The purpose is to trap your opponent in a discussion he doesn't want to have (in this case about his past votes on taxes), bog down the discussion in silly details that few people will follow, and leave a general impression that where there's smoke there must be fire. And certainly, if what matters to you above all else is paying fewer taxes, you'd be a fool to choose Kerry over Bush. But this isn't about taxes; it's about honesty. Honesty means more than factual accuracy, it means avoiding disingenuousness: not talking rot when you know it's rot. If that matters to you above all, you may be out of luck with either candidate this election. But if you wish to measure comparative rot, this 350-tax-increases business may be hard for Kerry to top.

Counting tax increases is an absurd way to measure a candidate's general propensity on taxes. George the elder's list of Clinton tax increases included such things as an extension of the dog-racing season, on the logic that a longer season meant more tax revenue. George the younger's first item asserts that "In 1995, Kerry Voted For [a] Resolution That Said Middle Class Tax Cuts Were Not Wise." This turns out to be a vote in the midst of that nearly forgotten frenzy, the Gingrich revolution. It was a vote against a particular tax cut of $700 billion, on a resolution declaring with almost tautological justice that subtracting $700 billion from revenue would make it harder to balance the budget. The resolution passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate, but a decade later the Republican president uses it to tar his Democratic opponent.

The documentation on the GOP Web site about Kerry's supposed 350 votes to increase taxes lists only 67 votes "for higher taxes." Most of these are votes against a tax cut, not in favor of a tax increase. The 67 include nine votes listed twice, three listed three times, and two listed four times. The logic seems to be that if a bill contains more than one item (as almost all bills do), it counts as separate votes for or against each item. The Bush list also includes several series of sequentially numbered votes, which are procedural twists on the same bill. And there are votes on the identical issue in different years. The only tax increase on Bush's list (counted twice, but hey . . . ) is Kerry's support for Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction plan. That's the one that raised rates in the top bracket and led to a decade of such fabulous prosperity that even its most affluent victims ended up better off.

The best way to see the absurdity of saying that Kerry voted for higher taxes 350 times is to apply Bush's madcap logic to Bush himself. Every year, in the president's budget, there is a table called "Effect of Proposals on Receipts." It lists the president's proposed changes in the tax rules and how they will affect government revenue for various periods up to 15 years. Most of Bush's proposals will cost revenue, obviously. But in the four fiscal years between 2002 and 2005, Bush has proposed 63 actual "revenue enhancers," as his father used to call them. This doesn't include, as Bush includes for Kerry, his opposition to any tax cuts (and there have been some, such as Democratic proposals to reduce the payroll tax). Nor does the list seem to include any "supply-side" revenue enhancement by magic or growth. These are actual proposals to take more money out of people's pockets and give it to the government.

At Bush's current rate of 16 "tax increases" a year, he'd have 320 under his belt if he could stay in the White House for 20 years. Depending on how you figure -- but without wandering beyond Bush himself into the jungles of absurd logic -- this is as many as eight times the number that Bush has managed to pin on Kerry. But isn't it unfair to call, for example, more efficient administration at the IRS a tax increase? And isn't it simply ridiculous to suggest that George W. Bush is more complacent about higher taxes than John Kerry? Yes, it's unfair. It's ridiculous. That's the point.

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 30, 2004

last week an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin said, "This isn't America; the government did not invent intelligence material nor exaggerate the description of the threat to justify their attack."

So even in Israel, George Bush's America has become a byword for deception and abuse of power. And the administration's reaction to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" provides more evidence of something rotten in the state of our government.

The truth is that among experts, what Mr. Clarke says about Mr. Bush's terrorism policy isn't controversial. The facts that terrorism was placed on the back burner before 9/11 and that Mr. Bush blamed Iraq despite the lack of evidence are confirmed by many sources — including "Bush at War," by Bob Woodward.

And new evidence keeps emerging for Mr. Clarke's main charge, that the Iraq obsession undermined the pursuit of Al Qaeda. From yesterday's USA Today: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures."

That's why the administration responded to Mr. Clarke the way it responds to anyone who reveals inconvenient facts: with a campaign of character assassination.

Some journalists seem, finally, to have caught on. Last week an Associated Press news analysis noted that such personal attacks were "standard operating procedure" for this administration and cited "a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Richard Foster," the Medicare actuary who revealed how the administration had deceived Congress about the cost of its prescription drug bill.

But other journalists apparently remain ready to be used. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer told his viewers that unnamed officials were saying that Mr. Clarke "wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics — even compared with Nixon's. Even more disturbing is its readiness to abuse power — to use its control of the government to intimidate potential critics.

To be fair, Senator Bill Frist's suggestion that Mr. Clarke might be charged with perjury may have been his own idea. But his move reminded everyone of the White House's reaction to revelations by the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: an immediate investigation into whether he had revealed classified information. The alacrity with which this investigation was opened was, of course, in sharp contrast with the administration's evident lack of interest in finding out who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to Bob Novak.

And there are many other cases of apparent abuse of power by the administration and its Congressional allies. A few examples: according to The Hill, Republican lawmakers threatened to cut off funds for the General Accounting Office unless it dropped its lawsuit against Dick Cheney. The Washington Post says Representative Michael Oxley told lobbyists that "a Congressional probe might ease if it replaced its Democratic lobbyist with a Republican." Tom DeLay used the Homeland Security Department to track down Democrats trying to prevent redistricting in Texas. And Medicare is spending millions of dollars on misleading ads for the new drug benefit — ads that look like news reports and also serve as commercials for the Bush campaign.

On the terrorism front, here's one story that deserves special mention. One of the few successful post-9/11 terror prosecutions — a case in Detroit — seems to be unraveling. The government withheld information from the defense, and witnesses unfavorable to the prosecution were deported (by accident, the government says). After the former lead prosecutor complained about the Justice Department's handling of the case, he suddenly found himself facing an internal investigation — and someone leaked the fact that he was under investigation to the press.

Where will it end? In his new book, "Worse Than Watergate," John Dean, of Watergate fame, says, "I've been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy."