The Truth Could Be Even Worse Than The Lies

Tags: Olbermann, John Dean, Alberto Gonzales

Liar, liar, pants on fire

Tags: Jon Stewart, Tony Snow, Gonzales, fired Attorneys, Daily Show

White House Blames Matthew Dowd's Criticism Of Bush On "Personal Problems"

It's not that anything he said had validity, the poor man appears to be having a breakdown. That's the general gist of their defence...

Tags: Matthew Dowd, Bush, White House, Press corps

Bush 'certain' that Iran supplied weapons to Shia

Bush continued the blame game regarding Iran yesterday in his first press conference since anonymous briefers laid the blame at Iran's door for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq.

However, since General Pace has made it abundantly clear that he has no intention of playing the Colin Powell role by stating that he cannot with certainty say that the Iranian government are involved, Bush has been forced to modify his stance. Although he claims to be "certain" that the weapons were provided by the al-Quds force, he had to pull back and admit that he could not with certainty say that the shipments had been approved "at the highest levels" in Tehran.

However, he did slip in this little beauty:

"My point is, what's worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and it happening?"

I would argue that the former is worse as that implies complicity and, therefore, blame. I notice that Bush's question attempts to imply that there is no difference between the two positions as the end result is the same.

This is Bush's "damned if they do and damned if they don't" attitude towards Iran, although it's noticeable that he and his neo-con buddies are having far less success selling any possible intervention towards Iran then they had selling their Iraqi invasion four years ago. Bush was forced to say that the idea that his administration was manufacturing intelligence was "preposterous", ignoring the fact that this is precisely what they did to ensure the Iraq invasion four years ago.

Tony Snow's recent press conference bordered on embarrassment as he was forced by repeated questioning to refine his/the government's position vis a vis Iran.

What [Pace] was thinking is, are you trying to lay this at the feet of members of the Supreme Governing Council; are you trying to lay this at the feet of particular individuals? The answer is, no, we don't have the intelligence that makes it that specific.

Now, of course, that is precisely what the secret briefers attempted to claim, that the orders to dispense these weapons came "on orders from the 'highest levels' of the Iranian government."

So Snow's climb-down was quite a large one although, like Bush at his Press conference, I notice that Snow also provided the rejoinder:

MR. SNOW: Again, let me just — here's your rhetorical question: What's more frightening, the notion that they are freelancing or that they're not?

This is simply a variation of Bush's argument that it matters not a jot whether the government are directly involved as they're guilty no matter what.

So the administration is continuing attempts to ratchet up the tensions regarding Iran, whilst simultaneously claiming that any implication that they are looking for war is preposterous.

It was fascinating to watch Snow's press conference because we saw the Washington press core engaging in the kind of questioning that was totally absent before the Iraq war. And it was interesting to note that, under this kind of questioning, Snow's argument basically fell apart.

He was left indulging in the same argument that Bush was left to indulge in. "Does it matter whether or not the Iranian government knew?" As I said at the start of this piece, it matters hugely whether or not the Iranian government knew as, if they knew, then we have complicity and, therefore, guilt. If they didn't, then you have bugger all against them.

The administration is now left arguing that it doesn't matter whether or not the Iranians are guilty as troops are being killed anyway. That's not a very convincing argument and one could almost hear it dying on Bush's lips as he made it.

So there are two things that make this situation different from the build up to the Iraq conflict. Number one is that the Press seem to suddenly have the balls to ask questions that make the administration uncomfortable and number two is that General Pace seems unwilling to play the Colin Powell role of faithful soldier.

Neither of those things on their own may prove enough to hold back Bush and his cohorts from launching missile attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, but together they have certainly made doing so more difficult politically.

It's almost enough to make one wonder, "what would have happened had the press and Powell behaved differently before the Iraq war?"

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tag: Bush, Iraq war, neo-cons, Iran, Ahmadinejad, surge and accelerate

Skeptics Doubt U.S. Evidence on Iran Action in Iraq

One of the most astonishing aspects of the Bush regime's pushing for conflict against Iran is the manner in which it has been conducted, almost as if their false reasoning for war against Iraq did not exist.

This reached it's pinnacle the other day when David Feith, the man who ran The Office of Special Plans had the gall to say that the false evidence that his office produced did not contribute to the build-up for that war.

"This was not an alternative intelligence assessment," he told the Washington Post. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."

One of the inevitable consequences of having been found to have lied is that, in future, people are less likely to take your word at face value. And so it now transpires that the Bush effort to convince people of Iranian involvement in Iraq is being met with profound scepticism.

The response from Congressional and other critics speaks volumes about the current state of American credibility, four years after the intelligence controversy leading up to the Iraq war. To pre-empt accusations that the charges against Iran were politically motivated, the administration rejected the idea of a high-level presentation, relying instead on military and intelligence officers to make its case in a background briefing in Baghdad.

Even so, critics have been quick to voice doubts. Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the White House was more interested in sending a message to Tehran than in backing up serious allegations with proof. And David Kay, who once led the hunt for illicit weapons in Iraq, said the grave situation in Iraq should have taught the Bush administration to put more of a premium on transparency when it comes to intelligence.

“If you want to avoid the perception that you’ve cooked the books, you come out and make the charges publicly,” Mr. Kay said.

Administration officials say their approach was carefully calibrated to focus on concerns that Iran is providing potent weapons used against American troops in Iraq, not to ignite a wider war. “We’re trying to strike the right tone here,” a senior administration official said Monday. “It would have raised the rhetoric to major decibel levels if we had had a briefing in Washington.”

The idea that they had secret briefings rather than an announcement in Washington because they didn't want to raise "the rhetoric to major decibel levels" is simply unbelievable and works on the assumption that the route they chose did not in fact raise "the rhetoric to major decibel levels", which even a perfunctory glance at how this was covered throughout the world shows that it did.

Indeed, it's not even true to say that no briefings have been held in Washington as Tony Snow - in Washington - endorsed every word of the secret briefings.

Asked for direct evidence linking Iran’s leadership to the weapons, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said: “Let me put it this way. There’s not a whole lot of freelancing in the Iranian government, especially when its comes to something like that.”

The White House is yet again making charges for which they provide no substantial proof and, indeed, their conclusions are even disputed by one of their own Generals.

I am pleased that there exists such a healthy amount of cynicism regarding the regime's claims, although I remain unconvinced that this will stop them doing what they want to do in Iran.

These are ideologues who remain convinced that they know best. They neither need nor care for our approval, and our scepticism will not blow them off their course.

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tag: Bush, Iraq, Iran, General Pace, Office of Special Plans, Ahmadinejad

Bush is creeping towards confrontation with Iran

US rhetoric against Iran took a decidedly chilly turn yesterday when secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, said the US was not attempting to "goad" Iran into conflict but stated:

Mr. Gates said that the United States did not intend to engage in hot pursuit of the operatives into Iran.

“We believe that we can interrupt these networks that are providing support, through actions inside the territory of Iraq, that there is no need to attack targets in Iran itself,” Mr. Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I continue to believe what I told you at the confirmation hearing,” he added, referring to last month’s hearings on his nomination, “that any kind of military action inside Iran itself would be a very last resort.”

"A last resort"? So, for the first time, action inside Iran is spoken of as a real possibility. Even if that possibility is couched in "last resort" terms.

This is now beginning to resemble the farce that was played out before the invasion of Iraq, when Bush went through the motions of pretending that no military decision had been taken and that Saddam could have avoided invasion if he only handed over his WMD.

Tony Snow has decided to play the role of Ari Fleischer:

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, warned reporters away from “an urban legend that’s going around” that Mr. Bush was “trying to prepare the way for war” with Iran or Syria.

You will remember that before the Iraq war Fleischer issued similar statements that nothing had yet been decided and that war was not inevitable; statements that were all later proven to be disingenuous at best and outright lies at worst.

Indeed, when asked whether or not he believed the President had the inherent power to attack Iran without authorisation from Congress, Snow became downright evasive.

MATTHEWS: Tony, will the president ask Congress‘ approval before any attack on Iran?

TONY SNOW, WHITE PRESS SECRETARY: You‘re getting way ahead of yourself, Chris. Nobody here is talking about attacks on Iran. . . .

MATTHEWS: Well, he did say we‘re going to disrupt the attacks on our forces, we will interrupt the flow of support from Iran. Does that mean stopping at the Iranian border or going into Iran?

SNOW: Well, again, I think what the president is talking about is the war in Iraq, Chris.

MATTHEWS: So he will seek congressional approval before any action against Iran?

SNOW: You are talking about something we‘re not even discussing...

MATTHEWS: Well, you are, Tony, because—look at this.

I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.”

Isn‘t that about Iran?

SNOW: It‘s about—yes, it is, in part. And what it is, is it‘s saying, “Look, we are going to make sure that anybody who tries to take aggressive action. But when Bill Clinton sent a carrier task force into the South China Sea after the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan, that was not as a prelude to war against North Korea. You know how it works. . . .

MATTHEWS: My concern is we‘re going to see a ginning-up situation whereby we follow in hot pursuit any efforts by the Iranians to interfere with Iraq. We take a couple shots at them, they react. Then we bomb the hell out of them and hit their nuclear installations without any action by Congress. That‘s the scenario I fear, an extra-constitutional war is what I‘m worried about.

SNOW: Well, you‘ve been watching too, too many old movies featuring your old friend Slim Pickens is what you‘re doing now, come on.

MATTHEWS: No, I‘ve been watching the war in Iraq is what I‘ve been watching. As long as you say to me before we leave tonight that the president has to get approval from Congress before making war on Iran.

SNOW: Let me put it this way. The president understands you‘ve got to have public support for whatever you do. The reason we‘re talking to the American public about the high stakes in Iraq and why it is absolutely vital to succeed is you‘ve got to have public support. And the president certainly, whenever he has taken major actions, he has gone before Congress.

You'll notice that at no point here does Snow actually offer any reassurance that the President needs to go to Congress to obtain permission to widen the war into Iran, he rather refers to the way things have been done in the past, hinting that this may be repeated but offering no guarantee that it will.

We must never forget that, although he is boxed into a terrible corner, Bush's way out has always been to expand conflict rather than to contain it. We witnessed this during the conflict between Israel and Lebanon when Bush was pushing for a wider Middle Eastern war involving both Syria and Iran.

Indeed, the neo-cons have never hidden their belief that this campaign was about reordering the entire Middle East with Iraq merely a starting point for wider regional change.

Bush is now obsessed with his legacy, a legacy that - at this particular moment - is a woeful one. What has he to lose from widening the war and passing the responsibility for clearing up his mess on to his successor?

We must never forget that we are dealing with ideologues here.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn't a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they're on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that's what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Bush was offered the chance for a withdrawal whilst claiming victory by the Baker Report and has rejected it.

He is now making threatening noises against Iran whilst his colleagues refuse to admit that he would need Congressional permission to expand the war, rather like the way Bush stated that he didn't "need a permission slip" to invade Iraq.

Indeed, Joe Biden has stated that the Bush administration that it does not have congressional authority to attack Iran.

"That will generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate, I predict to you," Sen. Joseph Biden, D- Del., told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Thursday.

Biden is saying this because he can also see the writing on the wall.

Insane and self destructive it may be, but Bush is creeping towards confrontation with Iran.

As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently pointed out, the administration seems to be following exactly the same script on Iran that it used on Iraq: "The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops."

We've been here before. Now, the fact that the Iraq war is going disastrously would make any sensible person rule out a US attack on a country that could cause it so much harm to the US and it's interests. However, Israel continues to call for a US attack on Iran and threatens to do so itself if the US does not step up to the plate.

Indeed, intelligence services are reporting that such a plan exists and will be implemented in early 2007.

The first two or three months of 2007 represent a dangerous opening for an escalation of war in the Middle East, as George W. Bush will be tempted to "double-down" his gamble in Iraq by joining with Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair to strike at Syria and Iran, intelligence sources say.

President Bush's goal would be to transcend the bloody quagmire bogging down U.S. forces in Iraq by achieving "regime change" in Syria and by destroying nuclear facilities in Iran, two blows intended to weaken Islamic militants in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Both Bush and Blair have nothing left to lose. Both of their legacies are tied up in the quagmire that is Iraq. By expanding the conflict they can claim to be visionaries, seeing dangers that the rest of us are too Chamberlain-like to acknowledge.

It's insanity, but it's better than the legacy they have currently carved for themselves. As Blair put it last night, "to retreat would be a catastrophe".

In other words, "Onward Christian soldiers".

God help us all.

tag: Bush, Iraq war, Blair, War On Terror, Iran, surge and accelerate, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report

White House Disputes Book's Report of Anti-Rumsfeld Moves

I said yesterday that I fully expected the Republican attack dogs to be set on Bob Woodward ahead of the publication of his new book which alleges that Bush ignored warnings over the need to send more troops to Iraq.

The White House now seem to have adopted a strategy of dismissing key parts of the book and dismissing the rest of it as somehow being "old news". It's similar to the way Snow wishes to deal with Clinton's allegations regarding bin Laden. They simply choose "not to engage".

"In a lot of ways, the book is sort of like cotton candy -- it kind of melts on contact," White House spokesman Tony Snow said at a briefing dominated by the topic. "We've read this book before. This tends to repeat what we've seen in a number of other books that have been out this year where people are ventilating old disputes over troop levels." Snow said it was well known that events in Iraq have been difficult and that officials have debated the right approach. "Rather than a state of denial," he said, "it's a state of the obvious."

"State of the obvious". It's a good line, but it doesn't go anywhere near addressing the points raised in Woodward's tome.

One of the most incendiary is the sheer amount of people who wanted Bush to remove Donald Rumsfeld from his post; Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice and even Laura Bush all thought Rummy should go.

The book reports that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. twice suggested that Bush fire Rumsfeld and replace him with former secretary of state James A. Baker III, first after the November 2004 election and again around Thanksgiving 2005. Card had the support of then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, as well as national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and senior White House adviser Michael J. Gerson, according to the book.

Even first lady Laura Bush reportedly told Card that she agreed Rumsfeld had become a liability for her husband, although she noted that the president did not agree. "I don't know why he's not upset with this," she told Card, according to the book. But Vice President Cheney and senior Bush adviser Karl Rove argued against dumping Rumsfeld, and Bush agreed.

Apparently the reason given by Cheney and Rove was that the President might be criticised as the removal of Rumsfeld might imply that the war in Iraq was being fought in the wrong way.

Now, in my naivete, I would have thought that the decision on whether or not the Secretary of Defence should or should not be removed would have something to do with the good of the troops on the ground; it seems extraordinary to me that the decision is made with no consideration of the troops, but rather a lot of consideration on whether or not such a decision would embarrass the President.

It seems "the Decider" decides such important matters based solely on how it reflects on himself.

The other astonishing thing the book reveals is the staggering level of complacency exhibited by Condaleeza Rice.

The book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.

The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.

It is also noteworthy that Rice has never given any details of these supposedly "aggressive" actions and that when she has given concrete examples in the past, they have turned out to be blatant lies.

It is also rather odd that this July 10 meeting is missing from the timeline reported by the 9-11 Commission. Is it because this meeting would shed bad light on to the administration? This certainly appears to be the impression held by J. Cofer Black.

Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."

White House and State Department officials yesterday confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

And it's a sad day when your best defence is "You've never mentioned this before!" which appears to be the tack Sean McCormack is taking regarding Tenet and Black's criticisms.

However, the overall impression of a White House in denial certainly corresponds to every public utterance Bush has made on the subject of Iraq. For the last three years it has been almost impossible to reconcile Bush's Iraq with any of the facts emanating from the ground.

"The president himself is out of touch with reality, is in denial as to what is happening in Iraq," Pelosi said. "That could be the only explanation for why he has withheld the truth to the American people."

I think Nancy is being overly generous in that reading. There are many other reasons for why the President could be withholding the truth. Not least of which is the competence of his entire administration.

The book is released next week.

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Tags: State of denial, Snow, Rice, Rumsfled, Woodward, Bush, Iraq, war on terror