WTF Is It Now?!?

Iraq answers do not add up
From an Editorial in the SF Gate:

THE WHITE HOUSE has told us "to move on" and forget that the president used questionable evidence to persuade Congress that Iraq's nuclear weapons program represented an imminent threat to our national security.

But the country is not going to move on, despite the president's insistence that the matter "is closed." Shifting strategies at damage control, moreover, have only elevated the significance of many unanswered questions.

Now, Bush's closest advisers need to tell us exactly what they knew about this evidence. It was Dick Cheney's question about the Iraqi-Niger connection, after all, that sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in February 2002 to find out if the uranium story was true. When Wilson returned, he reported his negative findings to Cheney's office. Despite this information, Cheney repeatedly asserted in August 2002 that Saddam Hussein "had resumed his effort to acquire nuclear weapons." What role, if any, did the vice president play in discussions concerning the president's speech? [W]hat role, if any, did Rice play in vetting the president's speech?


Deceit runs deep
From an Editorial in USA Today:

''It is 16 words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue.'' That's Condoleezza Rice's official assessment of the scandal over White House deception regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

It's 16 words. It was an intelligence failure. There were problems in vetting the information. But the claims were ''technically accurate.'' And we liberated the people of Iraq.

That's the mantra of the Bush administration, to be repeated in the media until everyone gets bored and moves on. It's untrue on all counts.

There was no intelligence failure. Since the fall, there have been warnings that the pressure the Bush administration was putting on intelligence agencies had brought ''cooked information'' into official speeches.

There were more than 16 words. The Niger claims were just part of a much larger pattern of lies, half-truths and misrepresentations that the administration used to justify its pre-planned war.


Revisionist Iraq history from White House
From a Palm Beach Post Editorial:

It wasn't only 16 words in the State of the Union address. Iraq's nuclear threat sounded whenever President Bush, his spokesman Ari Fleischer, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or national security adviser Condoleezza Rice beat the war drum….

No matter what they say now, administration officials sold Congress and the public on the proposition that Hussein was frighteningly close to having nuclear weapons that would threaten the Middle East and the United States. The question was, "Why war now?" and the answer was, "Nukes any minute." Americans died for that proposition and still are dying. It's no "little flaw."


Press Pass - Journalists should stop giving Bush a free ride
By Robert Kuttner:

I'm glad that the press is finally making an issue of President Bush's knowing use of a faked intelligence report on Iraq's supposed nuclear weapons program. But most of the press keeps missing the larger story. Deception has become the hallmark of this president.

Last week when Tenet agreed to take the fall for Bush's use of a long-discredited intelligence report, the maneuver stank to high heaven. But the press initially played the story with a straight face. On Friday, Bush declared that his speech ''was cleared by the intelligence services.'' Tenet, in a minuet that was obviously rehearsed and orchestrated, then issued a statement taking responsibility and expressing regret. Then, on Saturday, the president magnanimously expressed his full confidence in Tenet.

An innocent reader might have been forgiven for concluding that this ''error'' was the CIA's lapse. In fact, the CIA was well aware that the Niger uranium story had been fabricated. The reference to the report in the Bush speech was the work of the war hawks at the Pentagon and the White House, not the CIA. Indeed, intelligence experts were so upset about this reference that the text was the subject of word by word negotiation.

In the end, Bush's actual text, disingenuously, attributed the report to British intelligence.

But Bush gets a free pass time after time. The press holds back partly because of America's vulnerability to terrorism, which Bush's handlers exploit shamelessly. The administration is also very effective at pressuring and isolating reporters who criticize Bush, so working reporters bend over backwards to play fair. And the administration benefits from a stage-managed right-wing media machine that has no counterpart on the liberal left.

The press has even stopped making a fuss over the fact that this president has all but stopped holding press conferences. In his Africa trip, Bush intervened to limit questions, even as his African presidential hosts were indicating that press questions were welcome.

Investigations of administration deceptions about how many jobs the tax cuts will create or the actual effects on children of high-stakes testing combined with funding cuts or the saga of how the Pentagon tried to take over the CIA -- these are not opinions. They are what journalism is all about.