EVADING THE TRUTH-Switching Stories

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Registered: 08-21-2004
EVADING THE TRUTH-Switching Stories
39
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 11:38am

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.


 

Donna

"Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the President." -- Theodore Roosevelt.

Donna
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-01-2004
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 9:32pm
Saddam himself was a weapon of mass destruction - ask the thousands of Kurds he massacred, ask the thousands of babies who starved when he siphoned away funds from the oil for food program, ask the women who were raped, ask the men who had their hands cut off/their tongues cut out/were fed into wood chip grinders. Even as these atrocities took place Saddam was bribing UN officials so sanctions would be lifed and he could resume production of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2004
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 10:43pm

Even as these atrocities took place Saddam was bribing UN officials so sanctions would be lifed and he could resume production of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.


I guess you haven't been paying attention to the expert reports saying SH had no capability to resume production of any kind of WMDs.

Donna
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-23-2004
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 11:08pm

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?>

Hello? It is a suggestion of a connection between Iraq and al quaeda, not a suggestion of a connection between Iraq and the specific attack on 9/11. Despite the myriad attempts to obfuscate, most of us know the difference.



Actually, what he said was that Iraq was in the heart of the middle east, and establishing a deomocracy in the heart of the middle east would be establishing a democracy in the middle of the geographic base of terrorism. Hello again? The middle east is the geographic base of terrorism. Another Cheney quote taken out of context and twisted.



You mean the "Bremer" who one day later said his comments had been distorted by the media? Wonder why Dionne didn't even mention that?

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-23-2004
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 11:11pm


Good point-and FDR believed Hitler was developing a nuclear weapon-guess what? He was wrong. Strangely no one's arguing that he should have left Hitler in power anyway.

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-23-2004
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 11:14pm


Who said that was the reason for goign to war? Bringing democracy to the middle east is certainly a benefit of deposing Saddam Hussein, but I've heard no one claim it as a reason for going to war.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Thu, 10-07-2004 - 11:18pm
I believe what you are using is what is known in the business world (something all Republicans pride themselves on understanding) is called "bait and switch." Get people to go to a location with a story they can't resist, then try to sell them the real product you want to sell. Most states have laws against it. Maybe the world should, too.

By the way, was the IRA, one of the premire terrorist groups of the last fifty years, also interested in making the whole world there center of operations? I thought that terrorist were people who used terror tactics to advance their positions. I didn't realize that the IRA were not really terrorist. Hmm. I stand corrected.

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-07-2003
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 12:16am
Umm . . . Hitler was developing a nuclear weapon.
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-23-2004
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 12:35am


Umm...he was trying, but wasn't even close to successful...

http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/uclub.htm

Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall by Jeremy Bernstein

397 pages, 1996, American Institute of Physics

The development of the atomic bomb by the Allies during the Second World War was one of the critical events in human history. The world today would be unimaginable if the Nazis had developed the bomb first and then used it on London.

The fact that history did not follow this dark and horrifying course has been the subject of a great deal of study. Before World War II, German science, especially physics, was preeminent. The Allies knew that Werner Heisenberg, one of the great scientific minds of the twentith century, was the head of the German nuclear effort. During the war, those working on the Manhattan project, many of whom had known Heisenberg and his colleagues before the war, were convinced that they were in a close race with the Germans to develop an atomic bomb. As the Allies advanced on Germany, the Alsos Mission, whose scientific director was Samuel Goudsmit, was sent to Europe to gain information about the progress of the German nuclear efforts. In France, at the University of Strasbourg, Goudsmit was able to examine the papers left behind by one of Heisenberg's colleagues, Carl Friedrich Von Wezsacker. Goudsmit discovered that the Germans had made little progress toward the construction of an atomic bomb. In fact, as it turned out, the Germans had made little progress obtaining a fission chain reaction and they never constructed a working nuclear reactor, which is the first step to producing plutonium for nuclear weapons


Edited 10/8/2004 12:37 am ET ET by liveanew

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-07-2003
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 12:55am
Let's compare Hitler's program and Sadaam's:

1. Hitler had a program in place to create a nuclear bomb.

2. Sadaam had no program in place to create a nuclear bomb.

Hmm . . . Looks like FDR knew a little more about Hitler's program (i.e. he had one), than Bush knew about Sadaam's.

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You just contradicted yourself.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2004
Fri, 10-08-2004 - 2:32am
It is one of the many reasons given for going to war now that the original one we were given has turned out not to be true and to be deception.
Donna

"Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the President." -- Theodore Roosevelt.

Donna