Cheney's history needs a revise
Tim Rutten
Regarding Media
November 26, 2005
IF the debate over the war in Iraq now raging across our front pages and airwaves proves nothing else, it already has demonstrated that this administration believes the people's attention span can be measured in nanoseconds and that memory has the shelf life of fresh bread.
Take, for example, this week's astonishingly revelatory public statements by Vice President Dick Cheney and Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence:Monday, Cheney told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that anyone who suggested that President Bush or anyone in his administration had made the case for invading Iraq by distorting or exaggerating prewar intelligence on Saddam Hussein's purported possession of biological or nuclear weapons was guilty of historical "revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety."
According to the vice president, "any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false" and the product of a "self-defeating pessimism."
Really.
Just 24 hours earlier, The Times' Bob Drogin and John Goetz had described in vivid and convincing detail how the administration exaggerated and recklessly misused intelligence concerning Hussein's alleged manufacture of biological weapons that was provided by the now notorious Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball." (Who says spooks don't have a sense of humor?) As Drogin and Goetz reported, Curveball's handlers in Germany, where he sought political asylum, repeatedly warned their American counterparts that their informant was an unreliable — possibly unstable — fabricator. Still, both Bush and then Secretary of State Colin L. Powell incorporated his fantasies into their arguments for war. Conscientious CIA agents who had tried to blow the whistle on a deceit the administration found deliciously convenient were dispatched to windowless offices without telephones.
Cheney's reasons for ignoring these facts — and for hanging the politically charged "revisionist" epithet around the necks of those who refuse to go along — are pretty clear. A wide spectrum of public opinion surveys now shows that more than half the American people already believe that the war in Iraq is a mistake and that the president misled them to justify the invasion. The vice president and his allies within the administration were the war's most forceful advocates, and a recent Newsweek poll found that just 29% of Americans think Cheney is either honest or ethical... http://tinyurl.com/ahas4
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Tim Rutten
Regarding Media
November 26, 2005
IF the debate over the war in Iraq now raging across our front pages and airwaves proves nothing else, it already has demonstrated that this administration believes the people's attention span can be measured in nanoseconds and that memory has the shelf life of fresh bread.
Take, for example, this week's astonishingly revelatory public statements by Vice President Dick Cheney and Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence:Monday, Cheney told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that anyone who suggested that President Bush or anyone in his administration had made the case for invading Iraq by distorting or exaggerating prewar intelligence on Saddam Hussein's purported possession of biological or nuclear weapons was guilty of historical "revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety."
According to the vice president, "any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false" and the product of a "self-defeating pessimism."
Really.
Just 24 hours earlier, The Times' Bob Drogin and John Goetz had described in vivid and convincing detail how the administration exaggerated and recklessly misused intelligence concerning Hussein's alleged manufacture of biological weapons that was provided by the now notorious Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball." (Who says spooks don't have a sense of humor?) As Drogin and Goetz reported, Curveball's handlers in Germany, where he sought political asylum, repeatedly warned their American counterparts that their informant was an unreliable — possibly unstable — fabricator. Still, both Bush and then Secretary of State Colin L. Powell incorporated his fantasies into their arguments for war. Conscientious CIA agents who had tried to blow the whistle on a deceit the administration found deliciously convenient were dispatched to windowless offices without telephones.
Cheney's reasons for ignoring these facts — and for hanging the politically charged "revisionist" epithet around the necks of those who refuse to go along — are pretty clear. A wide spectrum of public opinion surveys now shows that more than half the American people already believe that the war in Iraq is a mistake and that the president misled them to justify the invasion. The vice president and his allies within the administration were the war's most forceful advocates, and a recent Newsweek poll found that just 29% of Americans think Cheney is either honest or ethical... http://tinyurl.com/ahas4
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posted by Dan at 12:09 PM
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