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Video: Alternative
Views
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Censured Casualties
features rare footage
of war crimes against the Iraqi people suffered during
and after the Gulf War. The footage is from former Attorney
General Ramsey
Clark in his attempt to document the injustice
of United States military actions in the region.
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Video: Alternative
Views
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Another Unknown
War
features a film on the
struggle of the indigenous people of West Papua to remain
sovereign in the face of an Indonesian invasion backed
by world capital. Footage of Noam
Chomsky on Western involvments in the region and
the relation to East Timor.
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Doug's New Books & Related
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TV/Radio
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Sunday, October 22, 2006
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Saturday, October 21, 2006
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Friday, October 20, 2006
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Thursday, October 19, 2006
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Judge Orders Cheney Visitor Logs Opened
and now let's see all the corrupt lobbyists who visited Cheney....
Salon.com News Wires
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006
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Monday, October 16, 2006
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Friday, October 13, 2006
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Counting The Iraqi Dead - washingtonpost.com
The new Lancet study that claims 6500000 dead Iraqis was dismissed by Bush as "not credible" before he even looked at it (not that he would or could); whatever the number, Bush's Blunder has been a bloodly and violent US military intervention beyond our imagination; the numbers are now being debated...
Counting The Iraqi Dead - washingtonpost.com
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Thursday, October 12, 2006
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Countdown with Keith Olbermann - MSNBC.com
Olbermann has an exclusive on a new book Tempting Faith which shows how Bush-Cheney-Rove Gang play Christian right as suckers, holding them in contempt; this could blow away major christian support for the most unChristian administration ever....
Countdown with Keith Olbermann - MSNBC.com
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Monday, October 09, 2006
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Sunday, October 08, 2006
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Rice's Tour of Mideast Yields Little Progress on Key Issues - washingtonpost.com
Rice is a miserable failure once again; Woodward's State of Denial quotes US weapons inspector David McKay saying the she was the worst national security advisor in the history of the institution, while her mentor Brent Scowcroft deemed her a big disappointment, as did George H.W. Bush who added she was "not up to the job." Chuck Hagel, according to Woody, described her as "weak."
Rice's Tour of Mideast Yields Little Progress on Key Issues - washingtonpost.com
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It's Time for Him to Go - washingtonpost.com
its clear as hell that Rumsfeld is a miserable failure. Woodward's State of Denial shows how as utterly incompetent as well as petty, arrogant, bullying etc and the only reason he's survived is Bush's demented sense of loyalty and weak ego, unable to stand up to tough guys Cheney and Rummy
It's Time for Him to Go - washingtonpost.com
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U.S. Casualties in Iraq Rise Sharply - washingtonpost.com
US troops are targets for insurgents in Iraq; let's face the troop: US troops in Iraq are viewed as Israeli troops would be in Lebanon; its time for a Lebanon solution: US troops out and UN, NATO, Arab League and other troops in; keeping in US troops just helps recruit terrorists, create chaos in Iraq and get people killed
U.S. Casualties in Iraq Rise Sharply - washingtonpost.com
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Saturday, October 07, 2006
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
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Wednesday, October 04, 2006
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A GOP propaganda film, The Path to 9/11 and its aftermath
The Path to 9/11 as Rightwing Propaganda Film
Douglas Kellner
As the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks arrived, media culture in the U.S. had a wealth of commemorative events. While image of the fateful attack were clearly inscribed in social memory, the meanings and background of the attack was not. The Bush administration had exploited the spectacle to push through a rightwing agenda, including a highly unpopular war in Iraq, but the origins, meaning, and effects of the initial attacks were not clear and were indeed highly contested by different political factions. While resonant images like the planes hitting the World Trade Center and the traumatic aftermath were burned into social memory, no coherent narrative of the events were able to contextualize, explain, and allow the public to understand them.[i]
Social memory is constructed by historical narratives, political discourses, and media culture, as well as resonant images. In this context, a two-part ABC TV-movie, The Path to 9/11, scheduled to open on the eve of the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and to conclude on September 11, 2006 became a pivotal event in the construction of the origins, meaning, and story of the 9/11 terror attacks. In this study, I will argue that The Path to 9/11 is a blatantly rightwing piece of political propaganda that blames the 9/11 attacks on deficiencies of the Clinton administration, while presenting the Bush administration as inheritors of a disaster which motivates them to heroic struggle and resolute action. We shall see that this event was orchestrated to present the Bush administration position on 9/11 for the upcoming 2006 Congressional elections, in which the Republicans were doing very poorly in the polls. The Path to 9/11 was part of a Republican effort to counter the bad publicity for the failed Iraq invasion and failures of the Bush administration on multiple fronts and to be part of a campaign that presented the Bush administration as stalwart in the war on terror and the most reliable defender of the American people in a time of trouble.
An earlier TV-movie DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003) had also projected the myth that Bush was a strong leader.[ii] As Sheldon Rampton reminds us:
This is not the first time that Hollywood has used 9/11 as a pretext to air pro-Bush propaganda in the guise of a docudrama. On the second anniversary of the terrorist attack, the Showtime cable network broadcast "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," written by conservative Republican Lionel Chetwynd. Dubbed "a [2004] reelection campaign movie" by Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, the film starred actor Timothy Bottoms in the role of George W. Bush, depicting him as a leader of Churchillian stature who takes personal charge in the 9/11 aftermath while brushing off worries about his own safety with declarations such as, "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come on over and get me. I'll be home!" In reality, as opposed to the bizarro world of docudrama, Bush's safety on 9/11 was guaranteed by hustling him off to an undisclosed location, while Cheney went into hiding for months.[iii]
Rampton points out that The Path to 9/11 is different from the Showtime potboiler by its claim “to be based on the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission)” (ibid). Written by a rightwing activist, Cyrus Nowrasteh and directed by David Cunningham, the narrative features FBI agent John O’Neil (Harvey Keitel) and national security advisor in charge of counter terrorism (Richard Clarke). Both are portrayed as heroes, deeply worried about a terrorist attack by the Osama Bin Laden Al Qaeda group who run into constant bureaucratic blockades, when seeking to attack Al Qaeda or Bin Laden. Over 800 DVDs of the two-part TV-movie were pre-released and circulated to conservative groups and media to hype up viewers and publicity for the event, but some got in the hands of former members of the Clinton administration, leftwing activists, and critical members of the media. Probably never has there been such a fierce movement to block release of a TV-movie and in response to specific critiques that the propaganda film demonized Clinton and glorified Bush and his administration, there were some edits showing a slacker Bush and the ending added on statements blaming both administrations.
Max Blumenthal revealed that the director of the TV-movie that exploited 9/11 for political purposes, David Cunningham, was a long-time extreme right Christian-conservative activists and both he and script-writer Cyrus Nowrasteh were connected to David Horowitz’s far-right group that for years has been attacking the mainstream media, trying to establish a rightwing presence in Hollywood, and attempting to blame 9/11 on Bill Clinton. As Max Blumenthal reports:
On this project, a secretive evangelical religious right group long associated with Horowitz, founded by The Path to 9/11's director, David Cunningham, that aims to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision, has taken the lead.
Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC signed David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). According to Sara Diamond's book Spiritual Warfare, during the 1980's YWAM "sought to gain influence within the Republican party" while assisting authoritarian governments in South Africa and Central America. Cunningham, Diamond noted, was a follower of Christian Reconstructionism, an extreme current of evangelical theology that advocates using stealth political methods to put the United States under the control of Biblical law and jettison the Constitution. Cunningham instilled his radical ideology in young missionaries by sending them to "Discipleship Training School." A former student of Cunningham's school claimed "similarities between cult mind controlling techniques and the [Discipleship Training School] program instituted by YWAM."
When the young Cunningham entered his father's ministry, he helped found an auxiliary group called The Film Institute (TFI). According to its mission statement, TFI is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry." Cunningham has placed over a dozen interns from Youth With A Mission's Discipleship Training School in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.
Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled Untitled History Project. "TFI's first project is a doozy," a newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!" (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted last week after its publication by the blogger Digby, but has been cached on Google at the link above).
The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the 'Untitled History Project,'" the Post noted.
Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to write the script of his secretive Untitled film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.
Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo--both friends of Nowrasteh-- they were "partnering" with Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."[iv]
As the revelations of the rightwing activists producing the propaganda film unfolded, as rightwing groups began promoting it after receiving the prescreening DVDs, and as former members of the Clinton administration and progressive media activists put pressure on ABC to cancel the event, the Disney network made some edits, but basically aired the rightwing version.[v]
In response to the criticism, ABC first claimed it was objective and then claimed it was a not a documentary, but a “dramatization, drawn from a variety of sources including the 9/11 Commission Report, other published material and personal interviews. As such, for dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue and time compression.”[vi] Former Gov. Thomas Kean, who was co-chair of the 9/11 Commission and an adviser to the series, claimed that the TV-movie was truthful: “This is the story of how it happened,” and indicated that he corrected inaccuracies during filming.[vii] As Joe Conason notes, Kean’s involved with the series seriously discredited the former governor, and, I would add, the whole 9/11 Commission which was long under attack for not more vigorously investigating the 9/11 attacks.
There were reports of fights on the production set and over editing as those in the project fought with the rightwing activists constructing a propagandistic version of 9/11. The original FBI advisor quit in disgust because “they were making things up,”[viii] and actor Harvey Keitel reports fierce fights over his own portrayal of FBI Agent John O’Neil and his desire not the misrepresent the facts of 9/11. A New York Post report on the production set notes:
Meanwhile, sources on the set told The Post that during filming there were arguments over the veracity of the content.
That legitimacy problem, they said, was exacerbated by the fact that no experts were on hand to get things straight.
When Oscar nominee Harvey Keitel signed on to play Deputy FBI Director John O'Neill, who perished in the World Trade Center attacks, he thought the film's aim was to be historically correct, he said.
"It turned out not all the facts were correct," which led to "arguments," he said on CNN.
Virtually from Day 1 of shooting, "Keitel put his own researcher on the case," looking to correct historical, character and other inaccuracies he found in the script, said John Dondertman, a production designer on the film.
That led to Keitel rewriting most of his own lines -- which in turn meant almost daily revisions for cast members who had scenes with him.
A particular point of contention was a scene in which O'Neill, observing reams of Arabic documents, asks his assistant, "Do we have Arab translators?" only to be told, "I don't know of any. I'll call around."
"Keitel couldn't understand why the FBI didn't have Arabic translators, so the dialogue was changed on the spot," said a script supervisor.
On one occasion, Keitel holed up in his hotel for an entire day with director David Cunningham revising the script.
Other times, Cunningham would "fumble through the 9/11 Commission book trying to figure out how to correct details Keitel called into question," said the script supervisor.[ix]
Both before and after the broadcasting, several real-life figures portrayed in the movie (Bill Clinton, Richard Clarke, Madeline Albright and Sandy Berger) raised factual objections and in Clinton’s case fiercely defended his administration in an interview with Fox TV where Clinton attacked the interview and Fox for their rightwing hit on him and fiercely defended his attempts to stop Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, while admitting his failure. Richard Clarke, a major advisor on terrorism to both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and a hero in the docudrama, strongly contested a scene which showed U.S. soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan poised to attack and take Bin Laden, and then canceling of the assault because of bureaucratic objections raised by Clinton administration national security advisor Sandy Berger. Clarke insisted that no U.S. military or CIA personnel were on the ground in Afghanistan and saw Bin Laden; likewise, contrary to the docudrama, Afghan Northern Alliance leader and U.S. ally Masood who no where near the Bin Laden camp and never saw him; the CIA cancelled the proposed hit on the Bin Laden camp portrayed in the movie because there was only a single source for the report that Bin Laden was present and a small chance that a cruise missile shot at the area would actually get him.[x]
The nearly four-and-a-half-hour two-part TV-movie presents an epic panorama of characters and places, from New York and Washington to Afghanistan and the Middle East. Often deploying, jerky handheld cameras, tight close-ups, and fast-editing, the film attempts to overwhelm the viewer with visual and audio techniques, and to frighten American and global public over the terrorist threats. While The Path to 9/11 is cartoonist in character and a distortion of the facts, it attempts to be realistic and is surprisingly sympathetic to the terrorists who are shown as serious and dedicated, perhaps rendering them even more frightening than standard Hollywood caricatures.
The first half of the two-part docudrama, explores the terrorist threat starting with the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, and there are shots throughout of an unsavory appearing Bill Clinton, shown in unflattering clips, including scenes from the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal which the docudrama implies crippled his efforts to deal with terrorism, while failing to depict the rightwing attack and attempted impeachment of Clinton which caused the diversion, and in a surprising reversal of the spectacle, rendered Clinton more popular than ever (see Kellner 2003).
The narrative focuses on the Clinton administration’s failure to stop Al Qaeda and when in 1998 the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Africa is attacked, with many killed, mostly Africans, a CIA agent in the docudrama yells at CIA head George Tenet, that they should have ordered the killing of Bin Laden when they had a chance and that Clinton now “has to do something!”
The drama cuts to the new Secretary of State Madeline Albright, portrayed as reluctant to go after the Taliban and Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and then depicts failed attacks by Clinton on a location in Afghanistan where Bin Laden was supposedly hiding and a supposed Al Qaeda chemical weapons factory in Sudan. The latter turns out to be a pharmaceutical factory and Republicans at the time mocked Clinton for this failure, and a reporter in the movie mentions that Republicans and pundits are claiming that Clinton is trying to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal through reckless military action (whereas later they attack him for not doing anything). Albright herself objected to a scene where she was portrayed insisting on warning the Pakistani government before an air strike on Afghanistan, with the movie then insinuating that the Pakistanis had warned Bin Laden who escaped the attacked. Albright insisted that she had not told the Pakistanis of the attempt on Bin Laden until the missile was in the air and so “the scene as explained to me is false and defamatory."[xi]
The first part ends with Bin Laden discussing with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “the plane operation.” The second part of The Path to 9/11 portrays the day of the attacks and top Bush administration officials' response -- though we only see President Bush in his speech to the nation where he appears resolute and ready for revenge, not in the Florida classroom with "The Pet Goat," or flying around the country the day of the attack without making a major intervention. It also shows Condoleezza Rice looking at the CIA threat assessment that “Bin Laden [was] determined to strike at U.S.” and had plane hijack plans, but does not depict her showing the assessment to Bush and him dismissing the threat while on his uninterrupted August vacation at the Crawford Texas “ranch” just weeks before the 9/11 attacks.
On the whole, the TV-movie shows an incompetent Clinton administration that passed onto the Bush administration terrible terrorist threats and shows the Bush administration resolute and committed to fighting terrorism. In fact, no major figure of the Bush administration had terrorism on their top agenda; the top Bush administration security “principals” group refused to meet with terrorist advisor Richard Clarke in the nine months before the 9/11 attacks and demoted him just before the attack; Clinton’s national security advisor Sandy Berger claimed that when he tried to impress upon Bush’s national security team the dangers from Al Qaeda, they ignored him, as Bush allegedly ignored Clinton when as he was leaving the White House he warned Bush about Al Qaeda; and the Bush administration ignored copious warnings from multiple sources in the days before the 9/11 attacks of imminent attacks from Al Qaeda via airplane hijacking.[xii]
The propaganda movie was sharply attacked by critics, the first part lost out in the ratings to a football game, and the event deeply discredited the ABC/Disney network and everyone associated with it. The Path to 9/11 is a ludicrous propaganda film that would have pleased Hitler and Joseph Goebels and no doubt pleased Karl Rove and David Horowitz. One surprising aftermath of the film was the unleashing of Bill Clinton on Fox News that I alluded to above and an escalade of scandals in the Republican party, accompanied by the publication of Bob Woodward’s highly critical State of Denial. Obviously, The Path to 9/11 was positioned by Republican activists to aid the party in the 2006 Congressional elections with the message that 9/11 was the fault of the Clinton administration, that Democrats were weak in the “war on terror,” and that Republicans were the strong and trustworthy party that good Americans should support and vote for.
Indeed, Bush himself interrupted the broadcasting of the second part of the Path to 9/11 ABC network screening with a speech on terrorism, seamlessly seguing into the narrative that showed his administration as tough on terror, unlike the wimpy Democrats. The Bush-Cheney-Rove Gang had long planned a sequence of events on terrorism to carry them into the November 2006 congressional elections that would present them as the best group to fight terrorism, while arguing that the Democrats were deficient. The Path to 9/11 was part of this campaign and conservative groups went all out to promote the event.
This strategy may have backfired, however, as in the weeks following the Republican propaganda effort, Bill Clinton gained the initiative through a dramatic TV appearance defending himself and his administration; a National Intelligence Estimate was leaked and then partly published that showed the Bush administration Iraq policy was recruiting terrorists and threatening US National Security;[xiii] Bob Woodward’s State of Denial (2006) presented Iraq as a disaster that the Bush administration was mendacious about and showed Bush as a weak leader and his war cabinet as completely dysfunctional; and a Republican sex scandal in which a Florida Congressmen Foley had sent for years salacious e-mails to teenage Congressional interns, and broadcasting of the e-mails and failures of the Republican House leadership to address the issue created national revulsion, and seriously undermined the Republican hope to maintain control of Congress in the upcoming 2006 elections.[xiv]
Hence, while the Republican’s had a game plan for the 2006 Congressional elections that would exploit the TV-movie The Path to 9/11 as part of a campaign to denigrate the Democrats on national security, while blaming 9/11 on the Clinton administration and selling the public that the Bush administration was the most reliable bulwark against terrorism, events in the real world undermined the campaign. Hence, the events of 9/11 remain a raw sore in the U.S. public’s social memory and a highly contested political terrain of struggle whose outcome may well determine the future of the United States.
[i] This is part of a larger paper on “9/11 and the Spectacle of Disaster in Contemporary Hollywood Film.”
[ii] I say “myth” because recent books on the Bush administration, including Bob Woodward’s State of Denial (2006) present Bush as disengaged and incompetent. In the words of Michiki Kakutani: “In Bob Woodward’s highly anticipated new book, ‘State of Denial,’ President Bush emerges as a passive impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war.” See “A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude,” New York Times, September 30, 2006.
[iii] Sheldon Rampton, “Hijacking 9/11,” posted on September 5,2006 and accessed September 29, 2006), at www.alternet.org/story/41288/. For a thorough critique of the background and text of the earlier rightwing propaganda film DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, see Danny Schecter, “9/11 Propaganda, Hollywood Style,” Posted on September 8, 2003 and accessed September 28, 2006 at http://www.alternet.org/story/16735/.
[iv] Max Blumenthal, “The Right-Wing Roots of ABC’s 9/11 Movie,” posted on September 13, 2006 and accessed September 29, 2006, at www.alternet.org/story/41546/. On the scriptwriter, see also the post at http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/01/nowrasteh-conservative-activist/:
ABC will air a “docudrama” next weekend called “The Path to 9/11 which blames President Clinton for the 9/11 attacks while praising President Bush.
The writer of the movie is an unabashed conservative named Cyrus Nowrasteh. Last year, Nowrasteh spoke on a panel titled, “Rebels With a Cause: How Conservatives Can Lead Hollywood’s Next Paradigm Shift.” He has described Michael Moore as “an out of control socialist weasel,” and conducted interviews with right-wing websites like FrontPageMag.
The problem isn’t that Nowrasteh is conservative. The problem is that Nowrasteh and ABC are representing “The Path to 9/11” as an unbiased historical drama. Promos for the movie say it is “based on the 9/11 Commission Report.” Nowrasteh claims he “wanted to match the just-the-facts tone of the report,” and describes the project as “an objective telling of the events of 9/11.”
Here’s some of the objectivity you can expect: Nowrasteh says the film shows how Clinton had “frequent opportunities…in the 90s to stop Bin Laden in his tracks — but lacked the will to do so.” He has referenced Clinton’s “lack of response” to Al Qaeda “and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests.” A review today in Salon.com says the film paints Clinton “as a buffoon more interested in blow jobs than terrorists.”
[v] Editor and Publisher compared the originally circulated DVD with the final version and found it one minute shorter, with shortening of the scenes with Sandy Berger allegedly refusing to sanction a CIA hit on Bin Laden; see E&P Staff, “ABC Airs 9/11 Film -– Contested Scenes Remain,” posted September 10 2006 and accessed September 30, 2006 at http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003119721. I saw the original on BBC and then a videotape of the ABC edited version and noticed some cuts and additions, but substantially the propaganda film was the same.
[vi] Cited in William Triplet, “Pols pound ‘Path’”, Variety, posted September 8, 2006 and accessed September 29, 2006 at www.variety.com.
[vii] Cited in Joe Conason, “Jersey hustler,” Salon, September 15, 2006 and accessed September 28, 2006 at http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/09/15/kean/.
[viii] See “FBI Agent Who Consulted On Path to 9/11 Quit Halfway Through Because ‘They Were Making Things Up’”, September 7, 2006 and accessed September 30, 2006 at http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/07/fbi.agent-quit/.
[ix] Philip Recchia and Jennifer Fermino, “Cast's on-set turmoil revealed,” New York Post, September 10, 2006.
[x] See Laura Barcella, “More 9/11 Lies,” posted on September 6,2006 and accessed September 29, 2006, at www.alternet.org/bloggers/41365/.
[xi] See Albright’s letter at . http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2006/images/09/07/iger.letter.pdf.
[xii] These facts were known right from the aftermath of 9/11 and are laid out and documented in detail in Douglas Kellner, From September 11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.
and taken up again in my most recent book Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy. Boulder, Col.: Paradigm Press, 2005.
[xiii] See Mark Mazzetti, “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” New York Times, September 24, 2006. For the released portions of the report, see http://www.npr.org/documents/2006/sep/redacted_nie.pdf.
[xiv] For an overview of the Foley scandal, see Salon’s “War Room” on October 4, 2006 at http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/?calendar=200609#archiveCalendar (accessed on October 4, 2006.
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Dan Froomkin - The Covered-Up Meeting - washingtonpost.com
one of the big scandals of Woodward's book is meeting with CIA and terrorist experts who warned Rice about imminent 9/11 attacks in weeks before the Event-- and she blew them off. Now her office is remembering the meeting after initial denial; how will this play out?
Dan Froomkin - The Covered-Up Meeting - washingtonpost.com
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Tuesday, October 03, 2006
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Lying in Politics: Bush and Iraq
Lying in Politics: The Case of George W. Bush and Iraq
Douglas Kellner
“Political Language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell
The Downing Street Memos leaked by a high-level British official reveal that the Bush administration had decided on an Iraq war as early as summer 2002, that the British were worried about the legality of the war and lack of post-war planning in Washington, and that both governments sought to shape intelligence and policies that would provide legitimate grounds for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The first memo published on May 1, 2005 in the conservative London Times cited a July 23, 2002, briefing in which a British official, generally identified as Sir Richard Dearlove, the had of M16, the British security services, reported on a meeting in Washington:
There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [i.e. U.S. National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.[i]
The citation from the Memo suggests that by July 2002, eight months before the bombing of Iraq officially started the Iraq war, that the Bush administration had decided on war and that the British intelligence and political saw it as “inevitable.” Moreover, the Memo indicated that a war against Iraq could be justified “by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD” and that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Moreover, initially, the British intelligence concluded that core members of the Bush administration had little use for a “UN route” and had done little planning for the aftermath of a war.
The Memo also indicated that Britain was concerned about the legality and justification of such a war and that Prime Minister Tony Blair “said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD)[ii] were linked in the sense that “it was the regime that was producing the WMD.... If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.”
The Downing Street Memos thus suggest that the British devised a plan to give the Saddam Hussein regime an ultimatum to let in weapons inspectors and that if Iraq refused, this would constitute justification for the war. In retrospect, we know that the US and UK did get the UN to provide an ultimatum to Iraq, that Iraq allowed weapons inspectors in, that they did not find any WMD, and that the US and UK attacked Iraq anyway, while insinuating a Big Lie that the Iraqi regime was not cooperating with the inspectors (see Kellner 2005). The Downing Street Memos suggest, however, that sectors of the Bush and Blair administrations used the UN as a pretext to carry out their war plans and that all of the pious declarations that they were seeking a peaceful solution to the Iraq weapons threat were a lie, and that all along the US and UK were planning for war against Iraq.
In my remarks here, I want to put the Downing Street Memo in the context of Bush administration propensity for pursuing a politics of lying. In the past, conservatives traditionally defended values of truth and integrity, while attacking dishonesty and lying. During the Clinton administration, conservative defenders of the value of truth like William Bennett, constantly attacked Bill Clinton for lying and dishonesty. Yet few, if any, conservatives have spoken up to criticize the Bush administration for its systematic policy of deception and lying.
The Politics of Lying
As Paul Krugman has demonstrated in his New York Times columns and books (2001 and 2004), Bush administration economic policy has been based on “fuzzy math” and outright lying concerning deficit figures, about who would benefit from the giant tax cuts, concerning the effects of the tax breaks for the rich on job production and social services, and the impact on the federal deficit. President Bush said in 2002 that his tax cut would generate 800,000 jobs and repeatedly claimed that “everyone knows” that tax cuts create jobs. Yet major economists took out newspaper ads saying that this simply was not true and following Bush’s initial statements another million jobs were lost, and unemployment and underemployment continued at near record levels into 2005, although there was a slight rise by 2006.
Bush administration spokespeople continue to lie about the extent of the federal deficit and its potential harmful effects. Bush and Cheney have repeatedly claimed that the Bush tax cuts constitute only 25% of the mushrooming federal deficit, while the White House’s own Office of Management and Budget shows that the tax cuts account for 39%. As Krugman (2004) and others have repeatedly shown, the projected record deficit will be much larger than current Bush administration figures that do not include sky rocketing expenses for U.S. programs in Afghanistan and Iraq —- or the billions needed to reconstruct the Gulf coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Moreover, it is by now well known and documented that Bush’s policy of launching a preemptive strike on Iraq was based on deception and lies. Bush and others in his administration constantly made false claims about alleged Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and the threat that the Iraqis posed to the U.S. and the entire world. The failure to find such threatening weapons and media exposure of claims that U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies were skeptical of these claims from the beginning have led to critical scrutiny of the case for war offered by the U.S. and Britain. In the latter country, a major inquiry was carried out presided by Lord Hutton into government deception over Iraq, but it was interpreted by much of the public as a whitewash (the London Independent published the first page of their paper a blank white the day after the inquiry report was made public in protest).[iii]
Robert Greenwald’s remarkable 2003 documentary Uncovered systematically demonstrates the mendacity and manipulation that characterized Bush administration discourse and policy over Iraq from the beginning. The documentary contrasts statements by members of the Bush administration including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice, with statements by former members of the US intelligence and political establishment demonstrating that Bush administration claims concerning alleged Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” were utterly bogus. In the documentary, former intelligence analysts dissect Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations claiming to document Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction and show in detail how key facts and statistics Powell appealed to were simply false, his satellite imagery pictures claiming to present Iraqi weapons were appallingly misinterpreted, and his major claims concerning the immediate threat of Iraqi weapons were utterly false in what has to be the nadir of US diplomatic argumentation before an international audience.[iv] The documentary also presents critics such as former Ambassador Joseph Wilson convincingly arguing that Bush administration claims concerning ties between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime are completely unproven, a position affirmed by the official 9/11 Report,[v] while a variety of critics argue that the Iraq occupation has created new terrorist enemies for the US and has not made the US safer, as Bush administration officials continually claim.[vi]
In my books Grand Theft 2000 (2001), From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy (2003), and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy (2005), I criticize “Bushspeak” as a mode of systematically engaging in the discourse of deception, manipulation, and lies. I document a wealth of Bush falsehoods in the 2000 and 2004 election campaign, the 36-Day Battle for the White House, fallacious claims about his economic policies, and other deception and lies on the economy, environment, energy policy, and foreign affairs. It has therefore been interesting to see best-selling books emerge by Al Franken with the title Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) (2005) and by Joe Conason called Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth, with another book by David Corn on The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception demonstrating Bush administration mendacity. In addition, Web-sites like www.spinsanity.com expose lies from all sides of the political spectrum, while MoveON.org has a web-site www.misleader.org, Bob Somerby has a web-site www.dailyhowler.com that for years has been attacking Bush administration lies and duplicity, while www.smirkingchimp.com; www.Bushwatch.com, and my own blogleft (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/blogger.php) have posited examples of Bush administration deception and lying throughout the Bush-Cheney Gang’s reign of deceit and deception.
Bushspeak: Big, Bold, and Brazen Lies
From the beginning, the Bush administration has practiced the Goebbels-Hitler strategy of the Big Lie,[vii] assuming that if you repeated a slogan or idea enough times the public would come to believe it, that words would become reality. For years, the Republican Propaganda Ministry insisted that Bush was a “compassionate conservative,” that his tax breaks would help everyone, that Iraq was a dangerous threat to US national security and that invasion was necessary, or that Bush’s plan to privatize social security would save it. Bushspeak involves continual repetition of simplistic slogans aimed to mobilize conservative support and without regard for truth.[viii]
Bold Lies involve knowing that you are lying and doing it anyway, boldly proclaiming whoppers that informed people know are lies, and in the face of facts, counterevidence, and arguments, continuing to intrepidly and resolutely repeat the untruth. Bush Bold Lies on Iraq include whoppers such as progress is being made in the Iraq war, we have to fight terrorism in Iraq or we’ll fight them at home, leaving Iraq will embolden terrorists and lead to defeat in Iraq, thus victory is the only option. Such Bold Lies are repeated over and over until they take on the ring of truth, at least for the Bush base and those who cannot think critically about politics and the media.
But such was the chutzpah of the Bush administration that they could boldly lie to media reporters and pundits knowing that the media knew they were lying. Once Tucker Carlson of CNN recounted a surreal experience with Karen Hughes where she lied brazenly to him, knowing that he knew she was lying. It is therefore a Brazen Lie when media figures know that the speaker is lying and he or she does it anyway, hoping to get away with it. To enforce Bold and Brazen Lies requires intimidation and retaliation against anyone who catches you in your lie and confronts you with the untruth that is spoken.
Conservative pundits are complicit in reproducing Bold and Brazen Lies because they are part of a Republican attack group that is willing to do and say anything to maintain power. Liberals and media types who see themselves as fair and objective are put in a troubling position when confronted with Bold and Brazen Lies. There are a number of reasons why lying comes so easily to the Bush-Cheney Gang. On one hand, there is a raw lust for power evident in Cheney, Rove, Bush, and others in the Bush administration by which the ends justify the means, and anything can be done or said to get elected and maintain power. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney perhaps best represent the raw, brutal power politics of the Bush administration in which telling lies constantly and systematically is justified by economic gain for the administration’s beneficiaries and the political power secured. Karl Rove, deemed by some a “Mayberry Machiavellian” to denote the combination of his provincialism and utter ruthlessness (see Suskind 2004), seems to be driven by a fanatic love of power and money for himself and his Republican allies. Rove lies constantly, shamelessly, and aggressively because he knows that lies help gain his political ends. For Rove, winning is all and anything that helps him win is justified.
Dick Cheney also probably fits into the utterly amoral power politics camp, believing that the ends justify the means. Cheney’s audacious mendacity was clear the night of the 2004 Vice-Presidential debate with John Edwards when Cheney first denied that he had ever linked Al Qaeda and Iraq, and then falsely declared that he’d never seen John Edwards before that night. The former claim was, as everyone knew, a Brazen Lie, as Cheney had countless times insinuated and even asserted direct connections between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, as an impressive array of news images and print clippings documented the next day, as did pictures showing him besides Edwards on earlier occasions. The episode revealed Cheney’s proclivity to simply say whatever he felt was politically expedient at the moment and to have zero respect for truth or even concern that he would get caught up in his lies, since truth and lying were of no interest to the power- and money-mad Cheney.
There is also the possibility that Cheney is so caught up in his ideological world that he can no longer tell the difference between truth and falsehood, fantasy and reality, and thus believes many of the lies that he articulates. Why, though, do Bush administration members lie so regularly and why does their base and others accept this? There are a range of elaborate theological and philosophical justifications for lying evident among certain sectors of the Bush cabal. The influence of the German philosopher Leo Strauss, who legitimated Plato’s “Noble Lie” as an important tool for ruling the ignorant masses, has been often cited. Strauss was also a devotee of Machiavelli, and his philosophy provided justification for the raw power politics and economic graft of the Bush administration. In a moment of candor, leading neocon Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the Bush administration pushed the issue of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify their Iraq war largely because manipulation of fear of Iraqi weapons was the best way to sell the Iraq policy to the public, suggesting that among Bush’s neocons a neo-Straussian proclivity to lie to justify policies that the ignorant masses cannot understand is perfectly kosher.
The religious right, which makes up a significant segment of Bush administration core support, has an elaborate theological justification to legitimate lying. As Mark Miller suggests (2004, 279ff.), certain Christian fundamentalist groups that fervently support Bush take the biblical story of Rabab (Joshua 2, 1–24) to legitimate the principle of deception in a state of war. For the Christian right, Bush represents the godly side in the war on terror as well as the multiple cultural wars at home; hence anything that he says or that is said on his behalf is justifiable as advancing the cause of good versus evil. Likewise, cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who owns the right-wing Washington Times and strongly supports the Bush family, preaches a doctrine “called Heavenly Deception. Religious recruits are told that the ‘non-Moon world’ is evil. It must be lied to so it can help Moon take over” (Brock 2004, p. 179).
The political genius of George W. Bush is that it is not certain that he is lying because he seems to believe many of the things that Cheney, Rove, Hughes, Rice, and his other handlers tell him. Often when he lies daily on the campaign or political trail, he is just repeating what he’s been told to say and may not even know it’s a lie. Seymour Hersh ends his book Chain of Command (2004) with reflections on Bush’s relation to truth and falsity: “There are many who believe George W. Bush is a liar, a President who knowingly and deliberately twists facts for political gain. But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there. A more plausible explication is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterances of the phrases make them real. It is a terrifying possibility” (367). The charitable interpretation of Bush’s constant spinning and lying is that Bush will say anything that he is programmed to say and is blissfully unaware of the mendacity in his daily assault on truth. A less charitable interpretation would be that he is a complete cynic who doesn’t really care about the truth or falsity, or that he is a cool, calculated, skilled, and highly accomplished liar who will willingly deceive to promote his agendas.
Thus, whereas at one time conservatives were defenders of truth, and from the 1960s into the 1980s battled “relativists” in the academy and polity, curiously, conservatives are now systematic practitioners of the Big Lie –- a point that John Dean makes in his book Conservatives Without Conscience (2006). When the Bush administration decided to attack Iraq, they committed themselves to the politics of mendacity. Several books make it clear that George W. Bush was highly interested in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein from the very beginning of his administration. Richard Clarke’s 2004 memoir Against All Enemies depicts Bush as obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq from the beginning of his administration, a point confirmed by the Ron Suskind’s memoir of the White House experience of Bush’s fired Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill (2004). Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (2004) cites Bush’s religious fundamentalism and belief that he was doing God’s will in invading Iraq. Woodward’s book also indicates that the Bush administration had started doctoring intelligence in August 2002, shortly after the Downing Street Memo. Woodward documents how Cheney, Rice, and Bush began hyping threats from Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” insinuated links with Iraq and Al Qaeda, and pressured U.S. intelligence to find documentation of Iraqi weapons and reasons to go to war against Iraq.[ix]
Woodward’s State of Denial exposed lies, flaws, and deeply dangerous failures of the Bush administration foreign policy and the utter incompetence and disarray in the White House. Woodward argued that key members of the Bush administration were in a “state of denial” about Iraq, and refused to tell the public the bad news that their intelligence services were reporting. Bush allegedly refused to use the word “insurgency” for years and administration officials have continuously failed to tell the truth about the mounting insurgency, increased violence and anarchy, and impossibility of a military factory in Iraq.
Woodward’s State of Denial thus presented Iraq as a disaster that the Bush administration systematically lied about, and that showed Bush as a weak leader and his war cabinet as completely dysfunctional. In the words of Michiki Kakutani (2006): “In Bob Woodward’s highly anticipated new book, ‘State of Denial,’ President Bush emerges as a passive impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war” (See Kakutani 2006).
War Crimes?
The publication of the Downing Street Memos on 2002 British discussions of Bush administration policy to invade Iraq and the legal difficulties involved in British participation provide smoking guns that point to the extent and duplicity of Bush administration lying and possible war crimes charges. At the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946, Nazi leaders like Goering, von Ribbentrop, Jodl and Streicher were sentenced to death by hanging for "Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing."[x]
The Downing Street Memos and related documents leaked to the press in May and June 2005, combined with the series of books critical of the Bush administration that I have cited, reveal that the Bush administration planned, prepared, initiated and waged a war of aggression against Iraq in violation of international treaties. Just before the Iraq invasion of March 2003 Kofi Annan, head of the United States, declared that a US-British war against Iraq would be illegal,[xi] and the Downing Street Memos indicate that high-level British legal authorities and politicians were deeply concerned about the war’s legality. Moreover, Nixon’s lawyer during the Watergate John Dean argues in Worse Than Watergate (2004: 155) that Bush administration lies about Iraq and specious “determination” to Congress concerning the need to take military action against Iraq constitutes an “impeachable offense.” Dean argues that the Congressional support for Bush to take military action against the Iraqi regime required a “determination” that all diplomacy had failed and that there was an imminent threat from Iraq that would require immediate military action and that Bush’s determination was utterly specious. Dean describes Bush’s “extraordinary document” as “accurately analogized to male bovine droppings” (2004: 148) and, against the backdrop of his intimate knowledge of Congressional impeachment actions against Nixon when he was the former president’s lawyer, argues that there are constitutional grounds for impeachment.
In addition, former federal prosecutor William Cox argues that Bush administration invasion of Iraq and use of military force to overthrow the Iraqi regime violated sections three and four of Article 2 of the United Nations Charter which stipulates that: “All members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered [and shall] refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”[xii]
Shamefully, the mainstream U.S. corporate media ignored the Downing Street Memo for weeks and in response to fierce Internet and alternative media attacks on its suppression, the mainstream corporate media used figures like Dana Milibank and Michael Kinsey to downplay their significance, claim there was nothing much new in the memos, and defend the US corporate media’s ignoring of the Memos. This response in turn was savaged by bloggers and alternative media that made it clear once again that the US corporate media is too cowardly and conformist to take on Bush administration lies and that the survival of a politics of truth and speaking truth to power lies with the alternative media.[xiii]
There was, however, an important opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Smith, the reporter who published the original memo in the London Times. Smith highlights how Bush and Blair planned to trap Hussein into refusing UN ultimatums to justify war and in addition planned to provoke him with increased air strikes in the so-called “no flight zone” in Iraq. In Smith’s words:
Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the UN was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about 'wrong-footing' Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war. British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B... Put simply, US aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.[xiv]
In other words, not only were Bush and Blair lying when they said that they were going to the UN to avert war, but they were trying to provoke the Iraqi regime through ultimatums and an intense bombing campaign that started months before the official invasion. When Bush was confronted with the Memos by the press for the first time, with Tony Blair by his side on June 8, 2005, both denied that they had decided on war in 2002 and Bush repeated the Big Lie that they had done everything possible to avoid war, insisting “Look both of us [him and Blair] didn’t want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It’s the last option.”
Hidden Iraq Agendas
This response to the Downing Street Memo highlights both the mendacity and failure to take responsibility that characterizes Bushspeak and the entire Bush-Cheney regime for, as noted above, there is clear evidence that the Bush administration had planned and were advancing an invasion of Iraq by Fall 2002. Indeed, mendacity and lack of accountability are defining features of the Bush administration legacy as a whole. On December 14, 2004, George W. Bush gave the distinguished Medal of Freedom to three US officials who had miserably failed their country: CIA head George Tenet, whose agency failed to detect the imminent threats from Al Qaeda and then allowed the Bush-Cheney Gang to cherry-pick intelligence on alleged Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” and according to Bob Woodward (2004), told key Bush administration operatives that they had “slam-dunk” evidence of Iraqi possession of such weapons; Tommy Franks, US military head of the Afghanistan operation which by failing to put US troops on the ground allowed bin Laden, Mullah Omar and other key Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders to escape in Afghanistan, and whose botched plan for Iraq was evident from the looting and chaos at the very beginning of Iraq’s “liberation”; and Paul Bremer, head of the US occupying forces in Iraq who experts believed made one blunder after another, making the situation in Iraq worse by the week.
Being a high-level member of the Bush administration means never having to say you are sorry and being able to dissemble and lie at will, and never to be held accountable. During his June 29, 2005 speech at Fort Bragg, where Bush attempted to defend his failing Iraq policy, he repeated the Big Lie that his invasion of Iraq was a response to 9/11 and an integral part of the “war on terrorism.” Bush repeated the mantras 9/11, Al Qaeda, war on terrorism, and Iraq countless times, as if these events were integrally interconnected. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) concluded that there was no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, or the Saddam Hussein regime and Al Qaeda, but the Bush administration continued to make these rhetorical links on a regular basis and the public continued to believe them. Obviously, the Bush administration has not been able to concoct a legitimate justification for their invasion of Iraq and, sadly, there has been little discussion of the Bush agenda for invading Iraq in the mainstream media.
While it is still not clear exactly why the Bush administration undertook to invade and occupy Iraq, there are a set of reasons quite different than the official Ones. Whereas the explicit war aims were to shut down Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” and thus enforce UN resolutions mandating that Iraq eliminate its weapons, there were many hidden agendas in the Bush administration offensive against Iraq. To be reelected, Bush needed a major victory and symbolic triumph over terrorism in order to deflect from the failings of his regime both domestically and in the realm of foreign policy. When asked in summer 2002 why the Bush administration was not more vigorously promoting the need for a war against Iraq, Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card said that “you do not roll out a new product in August.” During Fall 2002, by contrast, the Bush administration began hyping the dangers of Iraq —- just before the November 2002 mid-term elections where the Republicans asserted that they were the firm national security party, ready to protect the country, while the Democrats, who were opposing an Iraq invasion, were said to be weak on defense.
Moreover, ideologues within the Bush administration wanted to legitimate a policy of preemptive strikes and the so-called “Bush doctrine,” and a successful attack on Iraq could inaugurate and normalize this policy. Some of the same unilateralists in the Bush administration envisage U.S. world hegemony, the elder Bush’s “New World Order,” with the United States as the reigning military power and world police (Kellner, 2003 and 2005). Increased control of the world’s oil supplies provided a tempting prize for the former oil executives who maintain key roles in the Bush administration. Contracts for corporations like Halliburton and sectors of the military-industrial complex would be an even more highly profitable source of revenue for groups that support the Bush-Cheney regime, and oil companies have profited by the chaos in the region through higher prices and profits.
Furthermore, key members of the neoconservative clique in the Bush administration were linked to Israel’s reactionary Likud party, which wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime because he was seen as a threat to Israel. Finally, one might note that George W. Bush’s desire to conclude his father’s unfinished business and simultaneously defeat evil to constitute himself as good helped drive Bush Junior to war against Iraq with the fervor of a religious crusade.
Complex events in history often have multiple causes and there were no doubt different agendas at work driving the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. But to sell the policy to the public the Bush-Cheney Gang had to provide reasons that would resonate and generate support. After 9/11, the Bush administration used fear to mobilize consent for its hard rightwing domestic and foreign policies, and to gain support for Iraq they utilized a discourse of fear, evoking nuclear mushroom attacks, chemical and biological weapons attacks, and connections between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda to attack the United States. Intelligence was “cherry-picked” and “stove-piped” (Hersh 2004).
Yet the Downing Street Memos disclosed that at least eight months before the war against Iraq began, the Bush administration was set on war, that the UN diplomatic campaign was a charade, and that the Bush and Blair administrations were seeking a rationale to sell the war to the public –- one that backfired when the alleged “weapons of mass destruction” were never found.
Now is the time for liberals, conservatives and those who believe in truth in politics to demand straight talk from the Bush administration and other politicians, and for the media and critics of the politics to lying to take the Bush administration to task for its Big, Bold, and Brazen Lies. As the history of recent totalitarian regimes demonstrates, systematic deception and lying rots the very fabric of a political society, and if U.S. democracy is to find new life and a vigorous future there must be public commitments to truth and public rejection of the politics of lying.
References
Boehlert, Eric (2005) “AP Dropped the Ball on the Downing Memo,” Salon, June 14, at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/14/ap_memo/index.html.
Brock, David (2004) The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. New York: Crown.
Clarke, Richard A. (2004) Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press.
Conason, Joe (2003) Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.
Corn, David (2003) The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. New York: Crown Publishers.
Cox, William J. (2004) You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth. A Brief on the Bush Presidency. Joshua Tree, Cal.: Progressive Press.
Danner, Mark (2005) “The Secret Way to War.” The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2005 at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18034.
Dean, John (2004) Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
__________ (2006) (2006) Conservatives Without Conscience. New York: Viking.
Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. 2004. The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: Norton.
Franken, Al (2004) Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. New York: Plume.
Hersh, Seymour (2004) Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraíb. New York: HarperCollins.
Kakutani, Michiki (2006) “A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude,” New York Times, September 30, 2006.
Kellner, Douglas (2001) Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
_________________ (2003) From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
_________________ (2005) Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy. Boulder, Col.: Paradigm Press.
Krugman, Paul R. (2001) Fuzzy Math. The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan. New York: Norton.
___________ (2004) The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. New York: Norton.
Miller, Mark Crispin (2004) Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order. New York: Norton.
Ryan, Alan (2005) “Waiting for Gordon Brown,” New York Review of Books, June 23, at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18078.
Suskind, Ron (2004) The Price of Loyalty. George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Wilson, Joseph (2004) The Politics of Truth. Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity. New York: Carroll & Graff.
Woodward, Bob (2004) Plan of Attack. New York: Simon and Schuster.
_________(2006) State of Denial. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Smith, Michael (2005) “The real news in the Downing Street memos,” Los Angeles Times, June 23.
Notes
[i] On the context of the Memo and identity of the British official briefed by the Bush administration, see Danner 2005. The Danner article also contains the first Downing Street Memo, from which I am quoting here.
[ii] The term “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) is highly misleading and deceptive in that the U.S. overwhelmingly possesses the arsenal of nuclear weapons, which are indeed genocidal weapons to destroy masses of people, whereas the chemical and biological weapons allegedly being developed by the Iraqi regime only rarely have destroyed masses of people. There is immense hypocrisy in Bush administration attacks on Iraq’s alleged, albeit non-existent weapons programs, in that the U.S. has done more to develop and spread WMD than any other country and the Bush administration has systematically blocked all global efforts to limit, restrict, and cut back on existing weapons of all sorts (see Kellner 2005).
[iii] On public response in Great Britain to the Hutton inquiry, see Ryan 2005.
[iv] Woodward 2006 provides detailed background into Powell’s briefing and preparation for the UN presentation, his resentment when it was clear he was fed false information, and his being forced out of the Bush administration because of his anger.
[v] Wilson also published a memoir attacking the Bush administration mendacity on Iraq and other policies titled The Politics of Truth (2004).
[vi] A National Intelligence Estimate was leaked and then partly published that showed the Bush administration Iraq policy was recruiting terrorists and threatening U.S. national security; see Mark Mazzetti, “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” New York Times, September 24, 2006. For the released portions of the report, see http://www.npr.org/documents/2006/sep/redacted_nie.pdf.
[vii] For an archive of Goebells work on propaganda, see the German Propaganda web-site at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goebmain.htm.
[viii] On Bushspeak and the Big, Bold, and Brazen Lies that characterize the Bush administration, see Kellner 2005.
[ix] For a detailed analysis of how Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack sheds light on Bush administration Iraq policy in the light of the Downing Street memos, see the multi-part June 2005 series by Bob Somerby archived at http://www.dailyhowler.com/archives-2005.shtml.
[x] See Article 6, Charter of the International Military Tribunal, August 8, 1945, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/NurembergIndictments.html), cited in Dave Edwards, “The Downing Street Memo - Part 1” June 28, 2005 at http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=8182§ionID=15.
[xi] On the road to Iraq and debates over the Bush administration Iraq policy, see Kellner 2005, Chapter Three.
[xii] Cited in Cox 2004: 153. Author and former Justice Department prosecutor William J. Cox lays out in detail the ways that the Bush administration Iraq invasion contravenes several articles of the United Nations Charter and has no legal justification, thus constituting an “illegal use of force” (2004: 153ff). Cox also documents Bush administration “illegal detention of prisoners” (154ff) and how by violating the norms of international law Bush could be subject to impeachment (157ff).
[xiii] For a series of detailed critiques of the mainstream media neglect of the Downing Street Memo, see the commentaries by Bob Somerby archived in http://www.dailyhowler.com/archives-2005.shtml and Eric Boehlert, “AP Dropped the Ball on the Downing Memo,” Salon, June 14, 2005 at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/14/ap_memo/index.html.
[xiv] Michael Smith, “The real news in the Downing Street memos,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2005.
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Tenet Recalled Warning Rice - washingtonpost.com
once again Condi Rice is revealed as a liar, denying she had a meeting warning about imminent al Qaeda attacks but it now appears several people were there, they are talking, there were reports to 9/11 Commission about the meeting, but reports never got into final document. Last night, Keith Olbermann and guests really attacked Rice but CBS did not even mention the story; it is, however, continuing to circulate through newspaper so we'll see if this takes Rice down as it should...
Tenet Recalled Warning Rice - washingtonpost.com
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Monday, October 02, 2006
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Should He Stay? - washingtonpost.com
here's all the reports about the disaster Rumsfeld aka Dr. Strangelove and why he should go or have long gone
Should He Stay? - washingtonpost.com
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Sunday, October 01, 2006
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Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice - washingtonpost.com
Woodward book claims that Condi Rice refused to take seriously Tenet's warnings of imminent al Qaeda attack; she doesn't remember the meeting but doesn't deny it; either she is a total incompent or was there a faction of the Bush-Cheney Gang that wanted to take a big terrorist hit so they could push through their rightwing agenda....
Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice - washingtonpost.com
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Falling on His Sword - washingtonpost.com
Woodward book confirms that Powell was fired and that Rumsfeld-Cheney wing won support of Bush on Iraq, precluding possibility of any diplomatic settlement
Falling on His Sword - washingtonpost.com
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