Broken Toys - Broken System

[Guest guest]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/073104.html

 

Bush's 'Broken Toys'

by Robert Parry

July 31, 2004

 

The key institutions that are intended to supply the

U.S. government and the American people with accurate

information – the intelligence community and the news

media – have become " broken toys " largely incapable of

fulfilling their responsibilities, a predicament that

has worsened during the Presidency of George W. Bush.

 

There's also still little understanding of the

systemic nature of the problem. The 9/11 Commission,

for instance, proposed creating a new National

Intelligence Director inside the Executive Office of

the President, apparently unaware that the worm of

" politicized " intelligence bore into the CIA when

Ronald Reagan named his campaign director, William J.

Casey, as CIA director in 1981 and put Casey in the

Cabinet. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com " CIA's

DI Disgrace. " ]

 

The other serious problem is that the many U.S. news

outlets have become little more than propaganda

conveyor belts for the Bush administration. Even when

Bush is caught misleading the American people, as he

was in hyping the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass

destruction, the potent conservative news media sees

its job as protecting Bush's flanks, not holding him

accountable.

 

O'Reilly vs. Moore

 

On July 26, the second night of the Democratic

National Convention in Boston, Fox News anchor Bill

O’Reilly brought Michael Moore onto the “O’Reilly

Factor” for a confrontation. O’Reilly challenged the

documentary maker to apologize to Bush for accusing

the President of lying about the pre-war dangers from

Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

 

O’Reilly acknowledged that Bush’s WMD claims had been

false but argued that Bush had made his assertions in

good faith. In other words, Bush was not a liar; he

had simply acted on bum information, so Moore should

apologize.

 

Not surprisingly, Moore refused, noting that more 900

American soldiers had died in Iraq because Bush sent

them into harm’s way for a bogus reason. Moore said

Bush was the one who should apologize to those

soldiers and to the American people. O’Reilly went on

badgering Moore through much of the segment, but

neither media star backed down.

 

What was extraordinary about the encounter, however,

was how it demonstrated the role that the conservative

media apparatus has long played for both George

Bushes.

 

Normally, news organizations don’t rally to the

defense of politicians who have misled the American

people as significantly as George W. Bush had on Iraq

or as George H.W. Bush had on the Iran-Contra and

other scandals of the 1980s. Offending pols are

sometimes allowed to make their own case – explaining

how their false statements weren’t exactly lies – but

rarely would a journalist make the case for them. At

least those were the rules of the game 30 years ago at

the time of Watergate.

 

But the rules changed with the development of the

conservative media-political infrastructure from the

late 1970s to the present. The two George Bushes were

two of its principal beneficiaries.

 

While Democrats and liberals could expect to be

skewered over minor or even imagined contradictions,

Republicans and conservatives would find themselves

surrounded by a phalanx of ideological bodyguards. Not

only would O’Reilly and his fellow conservative media

personalities defend George W. Bush over his false

statements about Iraq, they could be counted on to go

on the offensive against anyone who dared criticize

him. That was true during the run-up to the Iraq War

when they wouldn’t permit a serious debate about the

WMD and other issues – and it was true after the

invasion.

 

When skeptics like former weapons inspector Scott

Ritter doubted Bush’s case or when foreign allies such

as the French asked that U.N. inspectors be given more

time, they were hooted down by the conservative media,

including Fox News, as well as much of the

" mainstream " press.

 

Then, after the invasion with no WMD caches found, Fox

News was back hectoring critics, such as Michael

Moore, who supposedly have voiced their criticism of

Bush a decibel too loud or took it a notch too far.

O’Reilly and other conservative media stars were

enforcing an unwritten rule in recent American

politics: the Bush family always gets the benefit of

the doubt, no matter what the context.

 

Broader Deception

 

But the defense of George W. Bush’s honesty about Iraq

– that he didn’t intentionally mislead the nation to

war – misses the larger context of his presentation of

the Iraq evidence. From the start, Bush engaged in a

pattern of hyping the case for war that consistently

exaggerated or misrepresented the evidence.

 

Bush wasn’t as much presenting the evidence to the

American people so a thorough and thoughtful debate

could be held about going to war; he was making the

case for war, always spinning a more clear-cut story

than the evidence supported, always applying a

worst-case scenario for the facts implicating Iraq

while excluding mitigating evidence.

 

Beyond the WMD issue, Bush repeatedly juxtaposed

references to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, terrorism and

Iraq. Though Bush may never have said explicitly that

Iraq was implicated in the September 11 attacks, the

repetition created the impression of a linkage that

the facts didn’t support. According to polls, that was

exactly the inference drawn by a large majority of

Americans, that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in

the terror attacks. The inference was not an accident.

 

Just months after the invasion, Bush even began

rewriting the history of the Iraq War to make his

actions seem more defensible. According to Bush’s

revised version, Hussein had refused to cooperate with

U.N. demands for weapons inspections, leaving the U.S.

and its “coalition of the willing” no choice but to

invade Iraq in defense of the U.N.’s disarmament

resolutions and to protect the United States from

Iraq’s WMD.

 

On July 14, 2003, seated next to U.N. Secretary

General Kofi Annan, Bush said about Hussein, “we gave

him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he

wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a

reasonable request, we decided to remove him from

power.”

 

Bush reiterated that war-justifying claim on Jan. 27,

2004, when he said, “We went to the United Nations, of

course, and got an overwhelming resolution -- 1441 --

unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must

disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which

obviously meant the world felt he had such programs.

He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he

did not let us in.”

 

This bogus history has not only gulled some

ill-informed American citizens; it apparently has

taken in some of the most erudite members of the

Washington press corps. In an interview at the 2004

Democratic National Convention, ABC News anchor Ted

Koppel showed that he had absorbed the Bush

administration spin point.

 

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein,

whose armies had been defeated once before by the

United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to

lose control over his country if all he had to do was

say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out, I

will show you, give you whatever evidence you want to

have, let you interview whomever you want to

interview,’” Koppel said in an interview with Amy

Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

 

But as anyone with a memory of those historic events

should know, Iraq did let the U.N. weapons inspectors

in and gave them freedom to examine any site they

wished. Iraqi officials, including Hussein, also

declared publicly that they didn’t possess weapons of

mass destruction.

 

The history is clear – or should be – that it was the

Bush administration that forced the U.N. inspectors

out of Iraq so the United States and its coalition

could press ahead with the invasion. Chief U.N.

weapons inspector Hans Blix spelled these facts out in

his book, Disarming Iraq, as well as in repeated

interviews.

 

Instead of Hussein blocking the inspections, Blix

wrote that three days before the invasion, a Bush

administration official demanded that the U.N.

inspectors leave Iraq. " Although the inspection

organization was now operating at full strength and

Iraq seemed determined to give it prompt access

everywhere, the United States appeared as determined

to replace our inspection force with an invasion

army, " Blix wrote in Disarming Iraq.

 

Yet, through repetition the Bush administration’s

favored narrative of the war has sunk in as a faux

reality for Washington journalists, including Koppel,

that Bush bent over backwards to avoid the invasion

and was forced to attack because Hussein’s

intransigence made it look like the dictator was

hiding something.

 

While Koppel’s response to Amy Goodman might be viewed

as a case of Koppel trying to spin the facts himself

to dodge responsibility for his lack of pre-war

skepticism, he clearly had gotten the idea for his

misleading explanation from the Bush administration.

 

Bush stretched the truth again when he used the 9/11

catastrophe as part of his excuse for reneging on a

promise to run balanced budgets. As he began to amass

record federal deficits, Bush claimed that he had

given himself an escape hatch during the 2000

campaign. In speech after speech in the months after

the September 11 attacks, Bush recounted his supposed

caveat from the campaign, that he would keep the

budget balanced except in event of war, recession or

national emergency. Bush then delivered the punch

line: " Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta. "

 

The joking reference to the trifecta – a term for a

horseracing bet on the correct order of finish for

three horses – always got a laugh from his listeners,

although some families of the 9/11 victims found the

joke tasteless. But beyond the question of taste,

Bush's trifecta claim about having set criteria for

going back into deficit spending appears to have been

fabricated. Neither the White House nor independent

researchers could locate any such campaign statement

by Bush, although Al Gore had made a comment similar

to the one Bush was claiming for himself.

 

In his sometimes brazen pattern of deceptions, Bush

apparently senses no danger from being called to

account. After all, he had Fox News and other

conservative news outlets covering his flanks. Indeed,

critics, such as Michael Moore, who have tried to

apply the L-word to Bush’s dissembling are the ones

who are confronted with demands that they apologize,

not that Bush express any regret for misleading the

American people.

 

Glass Houses

 

This built-in protection on questions of stretching

the truth also has let Bush and his allies safely step

out of their glass houses to hurl stones at critics

for supposedly lying.

 

When former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill questioned

Bush’s leadership in Ron Suskind’s The Price of

Loyalty, the White House portrayed O’Neill as a

disgruntled flake who couldn’t be trusted. Later when

White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke

asserted in Against All Enemies that Iraq was a Bush

obsession after he took office while al-Qaeda was not,

senior congressional Republicans and the conservative

news media savaged Clarke’s credibility, even

suggesting that he be charged with perjury.

 

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist went to the Senate

floor on March 26, 2004, to accuse Clarke of leaving

out much of his criticism about Bush in July 2002 when

Clarke gave classified testimony to the House and

Senate intelligence committees. Clarke, then a special

adviser to the President, said he told the truth in

his congressional testimony though he had stressed the

positive as a White House representative. He also

noted that the testimony occurred before the invasion

of Iraq, which solidified Clarke's assessment that

Bush was bungling the war on terror.

 

But in a scathing Senate speech, Frist demanded that

Clarke's sworn Capitol Hill testimony be declassified

and examined for discrepancies from his testimony to

the 9/11 Commission. " Loyalty to any administration

will be no defense if it is found that he has lied to

Congress, " the Tennessee Republican said.

 

The conservatives also tossed the L-word freely at

Senator John Kerry when he emerged as the presumptive

Democratic nominee to challenge Bush.

 

A case in point was Kerry's off-hand remark on March

8, 2004, that he had spoken with foreign “leaders” who

hoped he would defeat Bush. Quickly, the Republican

attack machine began churning out suggestions that

Kerry had lied and might be un-American to boot.

“Kerry’s imaginary friends have British and French

accents,” said Republican National Chairman Ed

Gillespie on March 11, setting out the themes that

Kerry was both delusional and suspect for hanging out

with foreigners.

 

The story switched into high gear when Sun Myung

Moon’s Washington Times blared the results of its

investigation of Kerry’s remarks across the front page

of its March 12 issue. Though it was well known that

many foreign leaders were troubled by Bush's

unilateral foreign policy and favored someone else in

the White House, The Washington Times acted as if

Kerry's claim was so strange that it merited some

major sleuthing.

 

The article asserted that Kerry “cannot back up

foreign ‘endorsements,’” in part because he declined

to identify the leaders whom he had spoken with in

confidence about Bush. Kerry had “made no official

foreign trips since the start of last year,” the

newspaper wrote. Plus, “an extensive review of Mr.

Kerry’s travel schedule domestically revealed only one

opportunity for the presumptive Democratic

presidential nominee to meet with foreign leaders

here,” the article said. [Washington Times, March 12,

2004]

 

The point was obvious: Kerry was a liar. The

possibility that Kerry might have talked to anyone by

phone or used some other means of communication

apparently was not contemplated by Moon’s newspaper.

 

“Mr. Kerry has made other claims during the campaign

and then refused to back them up,” The Washington

Times wrote. Then came the ridicule: “Republicans have

begun calling Mr. Kerry the ‘international man of

mystery,’ and said his statements go even beyond those

of former Vice President Al Gore, who was besieged by

stories that he lied or exaggerated throughout the

2000 presidential campaign.”

 

Soon, Bush was personally suggesting that Kerry was a

liar. “If you’re going to make an accusation in the

course of a campaign, you’ve got to back it up,” Bush

said. Vice President Dick Cheney added even uglier

implications that Kerry may have engaged in acts close

to treason. “We have a right to know what he is saying

to them that makes them so supportive of his

candidacy,” Cheney said.

 

The Washington Times also kept stirring the pot. On

March 16, it quoted Senator John Sununu, a New

Hampshire Republican, as saying “I think there’s a

real question as to whether or not the claim was a

fabrication.”

 

That same day, again implying that Kerry perhaps

suffers from mental illness, Bush’s campaign chief Ken

Mehlman accused the Massachusetts senator of living in

a “parallel universe.” Mehlman then made a preemptive

strike to protect Bush from any Kerry counter-attack

against Bush's lies. Mehlman said Kerry already had

shown a “willingness to try to project onto the

President what are his own weaknesses.” [Washington

Post, March 17, 2004]

 

The Republican allegations against Kerry reverberated

through the TV pundit shows for a week. But the larger

absurdity of the controversy was that Kerry’s comment

about many foreign leaders privately wishing for

Bush’s defeat was certainly true. For instance, the

newly elected Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis

Rodriguez Zapatero had called Bush’s Iraq War a

“disaster” and has said he favored new U.S.

leadership.

 

Timidity

 

Some liberal activists wonder why Democratic leaders

are often so circumspect about what they say. Why,

these activists ask, don’t the Democrats just let it

fly like the Republicans do?

 

Indeed, that’s another factor that favors Republicans

because they can come across as more aggressive and

more confident, while Democrats often end up sounding

more timid and more uncertain. That cautious tone can

turn off much of the Democratic base while leaving

many independent voters questioning whether the

Democrats really know what they stand for. In cases

where Democrats do sound off – as with Howard Dean’s

campaign – they are labeled shrill, crazy or

hate-filled.

 

The Democratic-defensive dynamic, however, is another

consequence of the media-political infrastructure that

Republicans and conservatives have spent three decades

– and billions of dollars – creating. Especially since

Democrats and liberals have failed to match the

investment and the dedication, the Right-Wing Machine

has given Republicans a powerful advantage – and one

that does not seem likely to go away.

 

As long as right-wingers, such as Sun Myung Moon and

Rupert Murdoch, continue to pour vast sums into this

media-political apparatus, the Republicans can expect

to be protected when they make missteps. At the same

time, Democrats can expect to pay a high price even

for an innocuous mistake.

 

The conservative infrastructure also has helped the

Republicans achieve a unity that often has been

lacking on the Democratic side. Conservatives can tune

in Fox News, listen to Rush Limbaugh, pick up The

Washington Times or consult dozens of other

well-financed media outlets to hear the latest

pro-Republican “themes,” often coordinated with the

Republican National Committee or Bush’s White House.

The liberals lack any comparable media apparatus, and

the committed liberal outlets that do exist are almost

always under-funded and often part-time. Only in 2004

have liberals launched a rudimentary – and

under-funded – talk-radio network, called Air America,

to begin competing with the dominant right-wing talk

shows.

 

History Next?

 

Some journalists respond to criticism about their

errors in covering important events of the past

quarter century by suggesting that the historians will

correct any mistakes. " Leave it to the historians " is

a common reply when inaccuracies are pointed out.

 

But there are growing warning signs that history may

become the next “broken toy,” unable to fulfill its

responsibilities either. The week-long hagiography of

Ronald Reagan after his death revealed the same

patterns that have become apparent in U.S.

intelligence analysis and in U.S. journalism.

 

To maintain their mainstream credibility, popular

historians filled the hours of time on television with

uncritical discussions about Reagan’s legacy. Indeed,

rather than the historians supplying a more accurate

account of Reagan’s Presidency, they arguably did a

worse job in telling a straight story than the

journalists had done in the 1980s.

 

The notion that documents will emerge in a timely way

to fill in crucial gaps also may be more wishful

thinking. Immediately after taking office in January

2001, George W. Bush stopped the legally required

release of documents from the presidencies of Ronald

Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

 

Then, after the September 11 terrorist attacks as a

stunned nation rallied around him, Bush issued an even

more sweeping secrecy order. He granted former

Presidents and Vice Presidents or their surviving

family members the right to stop release of historical

records, including those related to “military,

diplomatic or national security secrets.” Bush’s order

stripped the Archivist of the United States of the

power to overrule claims of privilege from former

Presidents and their representatives. [see New York

Times, Jan. 3, 2003]

 

By a twist of history, Bush’s order eventually could

give him control over both his and his father’s

records covering 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era and

however long Bush’s own presidential term lasts,

potentially a 20-year swath of documentary evidence.

Under Bush’s approach, control over those two decades

worth of secrets could eventually be put into the

hands of Bush’s daughters, Jenna and Barbara, a kind

of dynastic control over U.S. history that would

strengthen the hand of Bush apologists even more in

controlling how historians get to understand this era.

 

Much of the change over the past three decades has

come gradually, failing to cause alarm, as with a frog

not recognizing the danger of sitting in water slowly

being brought to a boil. Many of the events may seem

on the surface disconnected, although many of the

central characters have reappeared throughout the

course of the drama and others were understudies of

earlier characters, carrying on their mentors’ tactics

and strategies.

 

But viewed as a panorama of 30 years, a continuity

becomes apparent. What one sees is an evolution of a

political system away from the more freewheeling

democracy of the 1970s toward a more controlled system

in which consensus is managed by rationing information

and in which elections have become largely formalities

for the sanctioning of power rather than a valued

expression of the people’s will.

 

--

 

This article is adapted from Robert Parry’s upcoming

book, Secrets and Privilege: The Rise of the Bush

Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. As a correspondent for

the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, Parry

broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra

scandal.

 

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