GEORGE "DUBYA" A PATTERN OF DECEPTION PART 9 

PHANTOM URANIUM PURCHASES

"There ought to be limits
to freedom..."

— George W. Bush,
commenting on the website
www.gwbush.com

QUOTES OF THE YEAR:

"I did the right thing. It's a little early to project the amount of money the Legislature will be dealing with, and as you know I hope I'm not here to deal with it. I'm seeking another office." --Governor George W. Bush, on the effect of his tax cuts on the Texas budget. 7/13/00

"If you asked me, life or death, 'You've got to tell me how big the tax cut is, that George is proposing,' I couldn't tell you. I don't give a damn. Because I'm out of it. I'm out of it." --ex-President Bush, recent NYT interview

"If you don't think it's a gamble to put a man in the White House who believes we should have guns in church, who thinks the Taliban is a rock band, who was such a failure as a businessman that his company was nicknamed "El-Busto," who wants to turn our Social Security system into a Wall Street boiler room, who can't name a single thing he disagrees with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on, who smeared a bona fide hero named John McCain, and whose principle policy proposal is to give America's surplus to the idle rich in the form of a $1.3 trillion tax cut, you're either nuts or a Republican."
... Equal Time co-host Paul Begala, shooting the bull.

The Phantom IRAQ Uranium Purchase

After the IRAQ/Niger uranium hoax was exposed in the State of the Union address, a senior White House official confidentially explained that there was much more to that story.  And now it's coming out. Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the forged Niger tidbit.

The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on our cousins.

What troubles us is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess - and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the sordid affair.

But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spies, recently issued an open letter to President Bush on Monday reflecting the view of many in the intelligence community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The letter called for Cheney's resignation.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says she first learned Of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger during a TV interview, presumably when George Stephanopoulos asked her on "This Week" on June 8 about a news columns describing the trip.

Actually, we have to agree with Rice that the focus on that single sentence in the State of the Union address is a bit obsessive. It was only 16 words, attributed in a way that made it almost accurate, and as any journalist knows, mistakes do get into print.

So the problem is not those 16 words, by themselves, but the larger pattern of abuse of intelligence. The silver lining is that the spies are so upset that they're speaking out.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has had town hall meetings in which everyone was told not to talk to journalists.

One insider complains: "In the most recent meeting, we also were told that, as much as possible, we should avoid caveating' our intelligence assessments.

For get nuance, forget fine distinctions; they only confuse these guys. If that isn't a downright scary dumbing down of our intelligence product, I don't know what is."

intelligence isn't just being dumbed down, but is also being manipulated and it's Continuing. ,

Experts say the recent firefight on the Syrian-Iraq border involved not Saddam Hussein or a familv member, as we were led to believe, but just some Iraqi petroleum smugglers. Moreover, Patrick Lang, a former senior DIA official, says that many in the government believe that incursion was an effort by ideologues to disrupt cooperation between the United States and Syria.

While the scandal ha's so far focused on Iraq, the manipulations appear to be global. For example, one person from the intelligence community recalls an administration hardliner's urging of the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research to state that Cuba has a biological weapons program. The spies refused, and Secretary of State Colin Powell backed them.

Then there's North Korea.

The CIAs assessments on North Korea's nuclear weaponry were suddenly juiced up beginning in December 2001. The alarmist assessments (based on no new evidence) continued until January of this year, when the White House wanted to play down the Korean crisis. Then assessments abruptly restored the less omipous language of the 1990s.

The latest issue of the Naval War College Review describes the ambiguities of the North Korean uranium program and argues that US. officials "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes."

"Is there a parallel with what is now going on, after the fact, in estimates about Iraq?" asked the article's author, Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, in an interview. "I think there may be."'

So that chiding White House official was right: There was more to the picture. But we’re afraid the bigger the picture gets, the more it looks like a pattern of dishonesty.

A PATTERN OF DECEPTION - PART 10

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