The Pentagon is getting the equipment to spy on everyone and everything. See The Village Voice.
July 12, 2003
Bush and Rice point the finger at the CIA
The Bush administration has apparently determined its strategy for dealing with the deepening doo doo of the phony intelligence that led the nation to war. Blame the CIA. The head of the CIA is a holdover from the Clinton administration. Perfect. The perfect fall guy. Point the finger back at the philandering liberal again. "The CIA cleared the speech..." Condoleezza Rice said. "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services," said Bush. The CIA spokesman was not available for comment. See ABC, the Boston Globe or "Bush team united Iraq front unravels" The CIA is spinning its own counter-story. See MSNBC.
July 13, 2003
The Buck Never Stops Here
According to an Associated Press report, Bush considers the matter "closed" about his use of the
forged documents about Iraq having nuclear weapons as a pretext for war. "The president has
moved on," Ari Fleischer said. It would be nice if "the president" would really move on. Time
for more of the "get over it rhetoric," perhaps. But will the American people stand for it as
the casualty rate continues to mount in Iraq?
The head of the CIA George Tenet is now "taking responsibility" for the "error", which is ridiculous. (See CNN.) There is no way the head of the CIA can be held responsible for taking the country to war based on fake allegations. The argument is as ridiculous as the idea that if weapons of mass destruction were found to exist in Iraq, that would justify the war. It's a phony argument, set up so that the administration can appear to be justified on the flimsiest of reasons. But it doesn't work. Even if Iraq had had WMD it would not justify Bush's war. Obviously even with that skewed reasoning, the Bush administration still can't justify itself.
Now that it is apparent that the administration's case for war was so flimsy it rested on information that was discredited nearly a year before, it is suddenly presented that it was the CIA's "fault" that the information just happened to end up in Bush's State of the Union address. Framing the argument this way makes it sound like it's just a scandal over a few words in a speech. But the administration is not some passive victim of an error that happened to appear in a speech. The administration was using everything it could find to justify attacking Iraq. To have Tenet now come forth with a statement saying that the CIA "should have ensured that it was removed" from the speech is impertinent. Removing it from the speech was not the problem. Putting it in the speech was a problem, and using it to justify a war was a huge problem. For that the administration cannot blame the CIA.
For a president to go to war requires the ultimate of justifications. It is the president's responsibility for that decision. He cannot blame some "underling" for failing to tell him right before the speech not to put in the information that the agency had already discredited. The information was already given the administration, but as usual the administration says it never got it. They see so much paperwork, how can they be expected to keep track of it all? That might work if we were talking about some minor detail. Not when this bogus claim was used as a pretext for war.
With a very compliant media and democratic opposition and an uninterested public, this explanation may be enough to smooth it over and put it to rest, similarly to how the outrage of the 2000 election theft was swept under the rug. But the public is aroused now and there is even some life showing in the media and the Democratic party. They may not be willing to let it lie.
The Washington Post has a rather tame article in Sunday's paper saying the Tenet had "successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior administration officials."
The article forgets that the information had been well discredited months before, but does say that Tenet wanted it removed because "it was from a single source." Shy as it is, it does push the question beyond the justification now being offered that all this is Tenet's fault because he didn't successfully get the presidential puppet to remove the claim when it came up again in January. The main purpose of all this nitpicking about details is to blur the distinctions to the point where people will lose clarity about the whole issue. But the question now is whether the strategy will work, or whether instead the issue has gained too much momentum.