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Truth is, this gang keeps lying

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published September 17, 2006

Listening to the Bush administration these days reminds me of those delusional daily briefings by Iraq's former minister of information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. You remember the guy. He's the one who, at the start of the Iraq war, stood before the international press corps and described events in a way completely at odds with what was unfolding. For his epic truth-bending, he was dubbed Comical Ali.

Our absurdist funnymen are the president and the VP. For them, truth is considered something to run circles around, and they both have a knack for keeping a straight face while spouting doozies.

Though, for a moment last month, I thought President Bush was finally being forthright. He actually declared at a news conference that Iraq had "nothing" to do with the attacks of 9/11.

But the prevaricator-in-chief just couldn't let that simple truth be. During the same briefing he had to pitch that Saddam Hussein "had relations with Zarqawi," meaning a connection to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian al-Qaida operative who was in Iraq before the U.S. invasion.

Just as Bush did in 2002, when he said, "Iraq trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," and in 2004, when he said, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush in 2006 is trying to make Iraq out to be part of the war on terrorism. Too bad for him that it isn't, or at least wasn't until we started things.

Bush knew full well when he uttered that feint at the Aug. 21 news conference that Hussein had no ties to al-Qaida and thought of Zarqawi and other Islamic extremists as a potential threat. Hussein didn't harbor or assist Zarqawi, he tried to capture him.

This information was just publicly disclosed in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, but the CIA had come to these conclusions last fall and they were undoubtedly known by Bush.

Then we have Vice President Cheney's performance last week on Meet the Press, where he asserted that despite the death, destruction and destabilization we have helped cause in Iraq - oh, and no WMDs - he'd do it all again. For most of us, hindsight is 20/20. For Cheney it's sunglasses time.

Cheney also mentioned Zarqawi, implying that al-Qaida and Hussein were in league.

Hey guys, we all know the truth about Zarqawi. You're going to have to pocket that lie for a while.

Cheney bolstered his posture that Hussein posed a continuing threat to the United States by pointing to the report of Charles Duelfer, who headed up a group looking for WMDs after our invasion in 2003. Cheney said that while Duelfer found no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, he found that Hussein "has the capability" to build such systems again.

The truth check here was done by David Corn, who wrote in TheNation.Com, that Duelfer's report in fact said that Hussein's WMD capability "was essentially destroyed in 1991."

But for pure mendacity, nothing can top the stunning falsehoods Bush is putting forward to justify the need for the "alternative set of procedures" used by the CIA in interrogating terror suspects. He wants Congress to essentially codify torture for use against intransigent high-value prisoners - a step that would irreversibly alter our national character.

Bush used al-Qaida member Abu Zubaydah as an example of the successful use of abusive tactics, saying the prisoner disclosed that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was often known by the alias Mukhtar and "this was a vital piece of intelligence that helped our intelligence community pursue K.S.M."

But as the New York Times reported, according to the Sept. 11 commission, the CIA knew about this alias months before Zubaydah was captured in the spring of 2002.

Bush also crowed about how Zubaydah had identified Ramzi bin al-Shibh as one of the 9/11 plotters. Yet again, the New York Times found evidence that the government already knew of bin al-Shibh's role in the attacks. He had been named as part of the federal indictment against Zacarias Moussaoui in December 2001.

What Bush conveniently left out was that after Zubaydah was water-boarded, threatened with death, deprived of sleep, bombarded with loud music and bright lights and denied medications, he started to speak of all sorts of terror plots on American soil, according to Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine. And we wasted thousands of man-hours dispatching panicked law enforcement personnel to the numerous targets. Nice job.

Lies about war, lies about torture, lies about lies, I swear, I'd laugh if I wasn't too busy crying.

[Last modified September 16, 2006, 20:48:00]