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The Dishonesty Of the President
By Bob Graham
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) is running for president.
July 17, 2003
The administration of George W. Bush is looking more and more like a
bait-and-switch operation. Much like a profiteer who advertises a
too-good-to-be-true deal to lure customers into his store, this White
House is willing to shade and manipulate information to sell its policies
to the American people and our allies around the world.
But that cynical strategy erodes our government's credibility at home and
abroad. It must stop.
To justify a pre-emptive war with Iraq, President George W. Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other
high-level officials selectively used - and may have misused -
intelligence information to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed an
imminent threat to his neighbors, to U.S. interests in the Mideast and
even to Americans here at home.
The most egregious example: The president declared in his 2003 State of
the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for production
of nuclear weapons - when in fact that information had been discredited at
least three months earlier.
The White House continues to claim that Bush's statement was technically
accurate because he attributed it to British intelligence. But that is
disingenuous because the CIA had undertaken a review of the reports from
Niger at the request of Vice President Cheney and had found them bogus -
and the CIA told its British counterpart in September 2002 that it had
"reservations" about the information.
Claims about Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons, and his
ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network, have yet to be verified.
And it appears the administration has stretched some information to
justify those claims. For example, President Bush and others said
high-strength aluminum tubes being shipped to Iraq were to be "used to
enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon." In fact, the International Atomic
Energy Agency said the tubes were not for uranium enrichment but for
conventional weapons.
Last week under questioning from members of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Rumsfeld disclosed that the cost of operations in Iraq are $3.9
billion a month. That is nearly twice the estimate the administration had
given to the public as recently as April.
With such disclosures, it's no wonder that this White House has such a
passion for secrecy. It was little noticed when the president signed an
executive order in March 2003 delaying the release of millions of
classified archival documents that would otherwise have been automatically
declassified after 25 years. That order also gave government bureaucrats
broader authority to keep materials secret.
Such tactics are coming under attack. A federal appeals court ruled on
July 8 that the White House must release records from the energy task
force chaired by Vice President Cheney in 2001 - records kept hidden from
the General Accounting Office and other investigators for nearly two
years.
But the battles continue. Last year, I co-chaired a special joint
House-Senate inquiry that investigated the intelligence failures leading
up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We not only tried to lay out the
facts for the American people; we identified the lessons that we should
have learned and made recommendations for reforms to avert a repeat of
that tragedy.
We filed the classified version of our report on Dec. 20, 2002. It has
taken seven months for the administration to decide what portions of the
report can be made public. I am hopeful that the declassified version will
be released this month. Then Congress can finally begin working on
legislative solutions to the problems we have identified.
But we have lost valuable time to work with first responders to apply our
findings and bolster our homeland security - and, even more seriously,
there is much valuable information in the 800-page report that we will not
be allowed to release.
Why? Because the executive branch controls the classification process, and
this information would embarrass the administration or otherwise not serve
its policy ends. Rather than a free and open debate over policy, analysts
in the intelligence community and other agencies can see that the White
House only wants information that will further its political goals.
Instead of speaking truth to power, the political appointee tells the
powerful what he wants to hear; and the American public cannot assess
accountability or proposals for reform.
Is that what happened when the CIA reviewed a draft of the State of the
Union speech - or crafted its assessment of Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction?
Only an open, honest and independent investigation will determine the
answer to that question.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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