ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE BIG ENCHILADA

[Guest guest]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/103005X.shtml

 

One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada

By Frank Rich

The New York Times

Sunday 30 October 2005

 

To believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us

anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals

peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the

Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years

after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted

by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year

after Nixon took " responsibility " for the scandal, sacrificed his two

top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet

members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the

original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically

related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney

general, John Mitchell, would name " the White House horrors. "

 

In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what

may look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's

name contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road

map to the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution

of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of

the story. That " Cheney's Cheney, " as Mr. Libby is known, would

allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man

who challenged the administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one

very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more

accurately, mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war

in Iraq.

 

After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how

effective the administration's cover-up of that con job had been

until very recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation,

there were two separate official investigations into the failure of

prewar intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both

found that our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong.

But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough

inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in

Watergate lingo, " the big enchilada. "

 

The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led

by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release

as a " sharp critique " by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of

Dick Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove

or their semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group,

or WHIG) created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it

mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for

policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied

the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.

 

The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate

Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the

release of its initial findings in July 2004, the committee's

Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to

determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive

after the presidential election. It still hasn't, and no wonder:

Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney

and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with " crucial

documents, " including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of

Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. " evidence " to the

U.N. on the eve of war.

 

Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has prompted the

revelation of much of what these previous investigations left out.

But even so, the trigger for the Wilson affair - the administration's

fierce effort to protect its hype of Saddam's uranium - is only one

piece of the larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White House

subterfuge. We're a long way from putting together the full history

of a self-described " war presidency " that bungled the war in Iraq

and, in doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic

terrorism as well.

 

There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the

catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the

occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly

Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its

bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small.

Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and

Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command?

Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government

contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal

inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud?

Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that

their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the

fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?

 

These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be

easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's,

practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality

built on spin and outright lies.

 

Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black

arts. Long before he played semantics on " Meet the Press " with his

knowledge of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly

fictionalized crucial matters of national security. As far back as

May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his new assignment,

announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide review of

U.S. " consequence management " in the event of a terrorist attack. As

we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from

Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.

 

That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's unreliable

pronouncements about the war, from his early prediction that American

troops would be " greeted as liberators " in Iraq to this summer's

declaration that the insurgency was in its " last throes. " Even before

he began inflating Saddam's nuclear capabilities, he went on " Meet

the Press " in December 2001 to peddle the notion that " it's been

pretty well confirmed " that there was a direct pre-9/11 link between

Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link was

disproved later, Gloria Borger, interviewing the vice president on

CNBC, confronted him about his earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her

three times that he had never said it had been " pretty well

confirmed. " When a man thinks he can get away with denying his own

words even though there are millions of witnesses and a video record,

he clearly believes he can get away with murder.

 

Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His own false claims about

Iraq's W.M.D.'s ( " We found the weapons of mass destruction, " he said

in May 2003) are, if anything, exceeded by his repeated boasts of

capturing various bin Laden and Zarqawi deputies and beating back Al

Qaeda. His speech this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots

is typical; as USA Today reported last week, at least 6 of the 10 on

the president's list " involved preliminary ideas about potential

attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out. "

In June, Mr. Bush stood beside his attorney general, Alberto

Gonzales, and similarly claimed that " federal terrorism

investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400

suspects " and that " more than half " of those had been convicted. A

Washington Post investigation found that only 39 of those convictions

had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed to, say,

immigration violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by the

combined number of convictions in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay

scandals.

 

The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as

the hyping of Saddam's uranium: in both cases, national security

scares are trumpeted to advance the White House's political goals.

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC recently compiled 13 " coincidences " in

which " a political downturn for the administration, " from revelations

of ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings to fresh news of detainee abuses,

is " followed by a 'terror event' - a change in alert status, an

arrest, a warning. " To switch the national subject from the fallout

of the televised testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley

in 2002, John Ashcroft went so far as to broadcast a frantic

announcement, via satellite from Russia, that the government

had " disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot " to explode a dirty bomb.

What he was actually referring to was the arrest of a single suspect,

Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan - an arrest that

had taken place a month earlier.

 

For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush

White House's infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon

administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning.

But Watergate's dirty tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless

desire to crush the political competition at any cost. That's a

powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this administration

has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6,

2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr.

Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to

write his column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that " weapons of

mass destruction or uranium from Niger " were " little elitist issues

that don't bother most of the people. " That's what Nixon

administration defenders first said about the " third-rate burglary "

at Watergate, too.