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Bush's Mis-State-Ment Of The Union Fiasco

By Arianna Huffington

Poor Karl Rove. He spends close to two years meticulously staging photo
ops and carefully crafting sound bites to create the image of President
Bush as a take-charge, man-the-controls,
land-the-jet-on-the-deck-of-the-aircraft carrier, "Bring 'em on" kind of
leader. But now the latest revelations about the Misstatement of the Union
fiasco are threatening to bring back the old notion of W as a bumbling,
detached figurehead-in-chief.

And it's the president's own people who are painting this unflattering
portrait.

Take George Tenet: While robotically impaling himself on his sword, the
CIA director took great pains to point out that he thought so little of
the Niger/Saddam uranium connection that he and his deputies refused to
bring it up in congressional briefings as far back as fall 2002. It just
didn't meet his standards.

Same with Colin Powell. The Secretary went on at great length about the
intense vetting process -- "four days and three nights" locked up with the
leaders of the CIA, working "until midnight, 1 o'clock every morning,"
going over "every single thing we knew about all of the various issues
with respect to weapons of mass destruction" -- that went into deciding
what information would be used in his United Nations presentation. A
presentation that ultimately did not include the Niger allegation because
it was not, in Powell's words "standing the test of time."

Hmmm, just how hard is that test? Powell's UN speech came a mere eight
days after Bush's State of the Union -- leaving one to wonder what the
expiration date is on patently phony data? About a week after a president
uses it, it turns out.

So here's the picture we're left with: When faced with using explosive but
highly questionable charges in vital presentations leading up to a
possible preemptive war, both Powell and Tenet gave the information they
were handed a thorough going over before ultimately rejecting it. But not
the commander in chief. Apparently, he just took whatever he was handed,
and happily offered it up to the world. He was, therefore, little more
than the guy in the presidential suit, mindlessly speaking the words that
others had debated and polished and twisted and finally agreed he would
say. And then when the uranium hit the fan, our stand-up-guy president
decided that the buck actually stops with George Tenet.

As the Niger controversy -- Yellowcake-gate -- is turning into a political
firestorm, the question should be: What didn't the president know -- and
why didn't he know it? And why does he know less and less every day?

After all, it's becoming clearer by the day that just about everyone else
involved knew that the president was using a bogus charge to alarm the
nation about Saddam's nuclear threat. Whatever the opposite of "top
secret" is, this was it.

The U.S. ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, knew: She had sent
reports to Washington debunking the allegations. Joe Wilson, the envoy
sent to Niger by the CIA, knew: His fact-finding trip quickly confirmed
the ambassador's findings. The CIA knew: The agency tried unsuccessfully
in September 2002 to convince the Brits to take the false charge out of an
intelligence report. The State Department knew: Its Bureau of Intelligence
and Research labeled it "highly dubious." Tenet and Powell knew: They
refused to use it. The president's speechwriters knew: They were told to
remove a reference to the Niger uranium in a speech the president
delivered in Cincinnati on Oct. 7 -- three months before his State of the
Union. And the National Security Council knew: NSC staff played a key role
in the decision to fudge the truth by having the president source the
uranium story to British intelligence.

The bottom line is: This canard had been thoroughly discredited many, many
times over, but the administration fanatics so badly wanted it to be true
they just refused to let it die the death it deserved. The yellowcake lie
was like one of those slasher movie psychos that refuse to stay buried no
matter how many times you smash a hatchet into their skull. It had more
sequels than "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" combined.

Cherry-picking convenient lies about something as important as nuclear war
is bad enough but the administration's attempts to spin the aftershocks
have been even worse. They just don't seem to grasp the concept that when
you're sending American soldiers to die for something the reasons you give
-- all of the reasons -- should be true.

Instead of a sword for Mr. Tenet, somebody should get this bunch a copy of
"All the President's Men." The slow drip, drip, drip of incremental
revelations and long-overdue admissions is not the way to stem a brewing
scandal.

Condoleezza Rice has been the worst offender. Now that we know that Tenet
personally warned Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, not to use the yellowcake
claim back in October, and the role NSC staffers played in manipulating
the State of the Union, Rice's widely publicized claim, made little over a
month ago, that at the time of the State of the Union, "maybe someone knew
down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that
there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery" has been
revealed for what it is: A bald-face lie.

And even now as the truth comes flooding out, Rice continues to play fast
and loose with the facts -- and stand by her man. "The statement that he
made," she said on Sunday, speaking of the president, "was indeed
accurate. The British government did say that."

Joining the still-don't-get-it unit were Don "Haldeman" Rumsfeld, who
termed the president's speech "technically correct," and Ari "Ehrlichman"
Fleischer who offered up this classic bit of spinsanity: "What we have
said is it should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.
People cannot conclude that the information was necessarily false."

Watergate gave us the non-denial denial. Yellowcake-gate is giving us the
non-admission admission.

And that's not the only parallel. In July 1973, at the height of the
Watergate hearings, Richard Nixon announced: "What we were elected to do,
we are going to do, and let others wallow in Watergate." George Bush seems
to be taking the same head-in-the-sand approach, letting it be known that,
with Tenet taking responsibility for the Niger snafu, he considers the
matter closed. "The president has moved on," said Fleischer over the
weekend. "And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on as well."
Let others wallow in Yellowcake-gate, right, Ari? But wishing doesn't make
it so, either for phantom uranium transfers or the evaporation of
skepticism.

In the spirit of Tricky Dick, let me make myself perfectly clear: I'm not
saying that Yellowcake-gate is the equivalent of Watergate. I'm saying
it's potentially much, much worse.

At its core, Watergate was all about trying to make sure that Nixon won an
election. Yellowcake-gate is much more than a dirty trick played on the
American public. It's about the Bush administration's pattern of deception
as it pushed and shoved this country into a preemptive war -- from the
much-advertised but nonexistent links between Iraq and al-Qaeda to the
sexing-up of Saddam's WMD.

No one died as a result of Watergate, but more than 200 American soldiers
have been killed and thousand more wounded to rid the world of an imminent
threat that wasn't. To say nothing of the countless Iraqis who have lost
their lives. And those numbers will only rise as we find ourselves stuck
in a situation Gen. Tommy Franks predicts will continue for at least
another four years.

With the events of the last week, George Bush has come across as very
presidential indeed. Like his Dad, he's been out of the loop; like Clinton
he's become a world class word weasel; and like Nixon he's shown a massive
propensity for secrecy and dissembling. Not exactly the role models Karl
Rove had in mind.

President Clinton was impeached for seven words he should never have
uttered: "I never had sex with that woman." What price will President Bush
have to pay for his sixteen-word scam?

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Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate
Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America." For information
on the book, visit www.PigsAtTheTrough.com

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