EVADING THE TRUTH-Switching Stories
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Switching Stories<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
By E. J. <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Dionne Jr.
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A39
When you spend so much time torturing the truth, it's hard to keep your story straight -- or even remember what you just said.
The most remarkable moment in Tuesday's debate between Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards came when Cheney issued a blanket denial of the obvious.
Edwards, who proved both his value and his loyalty to Democratic nominee John Kerry, declared that "there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th. Period. The 9/11 Commission has said that's true. Colin Powell has said it's true. But the vice president keeps suggesting that there is."
What Cheney said next was, literally, incredible: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
This is the same Cheney who, just minutes before, in the very same debate, had defended the attack on Iraq by declaring flatly that Saddam Hussein "had an established relationship with al Qaeda." Hello? If that is not a "suggestion" of a connection, what is?
Well, this: On Sept. 14, 2003, Cheney said Iraq was at the heart of "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
If the Cheney-Edwards debate made nothing else clear, it is that the central issue in this presidential election is becoming the administration's lack of credibility and its tendency to say whatever is convenient to make whatever case it is trying to make.
Day by day, we learn more and more about how the administration led the nation into war by distorting intelligence and twisting facts. A president who once condemned a mentality that declared "if it feels good, do it" has now embraced a related principle: "If it sounds good, say it."
On Sunday the New York Times published an extensive report showing that in its public statements before the war, the administration "repeatedly failed to fully disclose" divisions in the intelligence community over the alleged nuclear threat posed by Iraq.
In September 2002, Cheney declared that high-strength aluminum tubes that Saddam Hussein had imported, allegedly to build uranium centrifuges, constituted "irrefutable evidence" that he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. It turned out, the Times reported, that "the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons." The evidence, in other words, was not "irrefutable."
But nothing -- even our knowledge that Iraq did not have those weapons of mass destruction -- stops Cheney from making the same scary case now that he was making before the war. "The effort that we've mounted with respect to Iraq focused specifically on the possibility that this was the most likely nexus between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," he said during the debate. "The biggest threat we face today is the possibility of terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon or a biological agent into one of our own cities and threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."
Note the double use of the word possibility and that other phrase, most likely. Quite a contrast to the "irrefutable" certainties the administration was peddling before the war. But we're supposed to ignore the fudge words. The words "nuclear weapon" and
"biological agent" are supposed to frighten us into voting for Bush-Cheney -- just as we were frightened into war.
But the administration's lack of trustworthiness is making it ever harder for the president and vice president to shroud their failures behind alarming rhetoric.
Cheney's soliloquy about nukes and bioweapons came in response to a question from moderator Gwen Ifill about former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer's statement on Monday that the United States did not have enough troops on the ground to prevent "an atmosphere of lawlessness" from taking hold in Iraq. A Post story quoted an earlier Bremer speech in which he said that "the single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation.
Not a single word of Cheney's answer was responsive to Ifill's question. He couldn't defend the administration's strategy. He didn't even mention the word "Bremer."
The political take on the debate will see Cheney as a more skillful, more informed debater than Bush, and Edwards as Cheney's equal. But the substantive point is more important: The administration's story is falling apart. Bush and Cheney mercilessly attack their opponents and promote a climate of fear because they are finding it increasingly difficult to defend the choices they made and the words they have spoken.
"Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the President." -- Theodore Roosevelt.

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Declaring that Iraq was
Have you been listening to the reports coming out in the last couple of days? NO WMD and no capability of making them for the last 12 years. Where have you been? And the administration had every reason to know this:
"On Sunday the New York Times published an extensive report showing that in its public statements before the war, the administration "repeatedly failed to fully disclose" divisions in the intelligence community over the alleged nuclear threat posed by Iraq. "
"Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the President." -- Theodore Roosevelt.
Report: No WMD stockpiles in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Iraq<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
CIA: Saddam intended to make arms if sanctions ended
Thursday, October 7, 2004 Posted: 10:50 AM EDT (1450 GMT)
Duelfer, testifying at a Senate hearing on the report, said his account attempts to describe Iraq's weapons programs "not in isolation but in the context of the aims and objectives of the regime that created and used them."
"I also have insisted that the report include as much basic data as reasonable and that it be unclassified, since the tragedy that has been Iraq has exacted such a huge cost for so many for so long," Duelfer said.
The report was released nearly two years ago to the day that President Bush strode onto a stage in Cincinnati and told the audience that Saddam Hussein's Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" and "is seeking nuclear weapons."
"The danger is already significant and it only grows worse with time," Bush said in the speech delivered October 7, 2002. "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
Speaking on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, Bush maintained Wednesday that the war was the right thing to do and that Iraq stood out as a place where terrorists might get weapons of mass destruction.
"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks, and in the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take," Bush said.
But Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, seized on the report as political ammunition against the Bush administration.
"Despite the efforts to focus on Saddam's desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either weapon stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war," Rockefeller said in a press release.
"The report does further document Saddam's attempts to deceive the world and get out from under the sanctions, but the fact remains, the sanctions combined with inspections were working and Saddam was restrained."
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Iraq WMD report enters political fray<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Iraq WMD report enters political fray
On eve of debate, Republicans, Democrats use conclusions
Thursday, October 7, 2004 Posted: 5:02 PM EDT (2102 GMT)
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