BUSH ADMINISTRATION TIPPING TOWARD HIGH CRIMES-TERROR & DECEPTION

[Guest guest]

Tipping Toward High Crimes

Terror and Deception as Affairs of State

Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks, February 16, 2006

 

 

 

http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/Archives/CN021606.htm

 

That terrorist bomb plot against Los Angeles' Library Tower turns out

to be as bogus as a Hollywood movie plot that never made it past the

storyboard. David Ignatius in the Feb. 15 Washington Post: " Bush

spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs

to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed

knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush's account, saying that

the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian

operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an

aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast. When I

asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush's

comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence. " When

were we going to see that corrective splattered on the front pages,

the way Bush's original story was earlier this month? Not in this

universe—not with media willing to be stenographers to presidential

deceptions first, truth seekers and investigators last. That's where

the fetish of objectivity cuffs with the fraud of propaganda, a link

the Bush administration nurtures and exploits to the point of glee:

Bush's contempt for the press is based on disrespect, the press being

best of show disrespecting itself.

 

Newspapers would be justly criticized for running a damning story

under a banner headline on the front page one day then retracting it

with a minuscule correction on an inside page the next. There's no

way the effects of the original story could be reversed by the

correction. Words alone don't matter. Context, intent, calibration:

those things matter. That's how the Bush administration has been

successfully manipulating policy, public and wars for the last five

years—by calibrating its manipulative Big Statements for maximum

effect on the front page, knowing that when the truth comes out, if

it does, the lie will have done its work. The truth is relegated to

corrections with shadowy admissions on inside pages months or years

down the line. Bush is less to blame in this if you assume that his

administration will use whatever cynical, dishonest ploy it can to

advance its agenda. This one does, consistently. The problem has

mostly been the press playing along—doing exactly what it would be

ashamed to do itself, when it errs and misleads, but on behalf of the

administration.

 

There are obvious examples. The administration lied about the

reliability of the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,

relying almost entirely on two Iraqi dissidents who'd been coached to

say in in typically Sheheradesque Arabic exaggerations what was

imaginatively translated into Starngelove briefings to titillate

Bush's ears and stand in as the " irrefutable documentation " of

Saddam's weapons program passed on to gullible senators and

congressmen. The administration lied on al-Qaida's connections to

Saddam. Big, bold lies based entirely on Mohammed Atta's rumored trip

to Prague, a trip that has been proved to be a fiction worthy of a

Kafka subplot many times over. In either case few people asked

questions until it was too late. When the deceptions were confirmed,

the war was past its point of no return, for a good many thousand

American soldiers and Iraqis too, of course. The corrections ran as

mea culpas on Op-Ed pages and cover-you-butt analyses on inside

pages, though die-hard shootists like Dick Cheney and his night

gallery at the Wall Street Journal editorial board still maintain

that the al-Qaeda-Hussein connection was real, and probably have

dreams about WMDs buried somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

 

Same story on the Medicare prescription drug plan: The administration

lied about its cost when it claimed it wouldn't go past $400 billion.

A matter of days after Congress approved it, the press revealed that

the cost would actually exceed $550 billion, and that the Medicare

actuary in charge of putting the numbers together had his job

threatened by the Bush administration when he, in turn, had

threatened to reveal the true numbers (the question remains: why

didn't he do so before the congressional vote?). Same story about the

plot to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, that nutty " revelation " John

Ashcroft's Justice Department had no qualms revealing early in the so-

called war on terror. This, remember, is the story of the Ohio truck

driver who plotted to take a blow torch to the Brooklyn Bridge's

steel cables. He realized long before he gathered up his wares that

the idea was as harebrained as its execution (who couldn't spot a

blow torch anywhere on the Brooklyn Bridge, any time of day or night,

just as any sixth grader could tell you that the redundancy of steel

cables is one of the wonders of the bridge.) The guy ended up in

prison anyway, because the administration needs something, anything,

to show for its imaginary war.

 

Unless it was a subplot to " Independence Day, " the plot to bomb the

Library Tower couldn't stand up to scrutiny for very long. Not when

even the kids in that class Bush read My Pet Goat to five years ago,

now that they're approaching middle school, are old enough to be

asking the sort of 2+2 questions that would add up to 5 in their

president's reckoning. But facts don't dictate credibility. The man

standing behind the seal of the president of the United States (or

the pet goat) does. That was the lesson Bush learned early. The

seal's credibility is soaked in a couple of centuries of history.

Plenty of capital there. He's been splurging on it (the parallel with

his splurge at the Treasury's expense is irresistible), and the press

has been letting him splurge, because it's still an essentially

trusting institution. It has to be. You couldn't entirely blame the

media. We're talking about the president of the United States, and

the impulse to see a lie behind every presidential statement amounts

to faithlessness in the very system the press, and we, depend on.

Vietnam and Watergate were devastating enough. We neither have the

courage nor the strength to face similar consequences yet again. We

assume with every lie that it's the last of them, or couch the lies

as " overstatements, " " exaggerations, " " erring on the side of

caution. " Bush smirks. The system's integrity crumbles a little more.

The reckoning becomes that much more dire, when it comes.

 

I used to think that talk of impeachment was so much extremism by the

party out of power. But what do you do when lying has become so

pathological in a presidential administration—lying on matters of

state, of war, of trillion-dollar consequences, not on matters of

sperm on dresses and idiotic blow jobs in stately antechambers—that

even the press has adopted a method of enabling the lying? The press

and by extension the public are like the spouse of a drunkard just

making do with the latest bout of rage and beating by rationalizing

it until calm returns. What do you do when the hemorrhaging

credibility of the presidency may itself, worse than global warming,

reach a tipping point? And what is that tipping point in a world

where the United States has no one to hold it accountable but its own

sense of survival? Waiting for the next election almost three years

down the line seems like the democratic option. But it's increasingly

looking like a craven surrender to the cynics, to those who'd claim

that rocking the boat that much isn't worth the price, or that the

little dictator's lies so far haven't risen to such a level as to

warrant what, in the United States, amounts to a coup—a deliberate,

legal, magnificently institutional coup, that impeachment clause, but

a coup nonetheless. Let's see if the centrists, the moderates, the

civility burghers will still be claiming in 2008 that it was just as

well to wait him out.

 

 

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Pierre Tristam is an editorial writer and columnist at the Daytona

Beach, Fla., News-Journal, and editor of Candide's Notebooks. Reach

him at ptristam.