Lying for Bush
Bill Curry
HuffingtonPost
On September 11 George Bush contrived with Democratic assistance to send David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker to tell Congress how the Iraq war is going.
Bush wanted the date not because he thought it would be, in Lincoln's words, an altogether fitting and proper way to honor the fallen, but because he thought it a clever way to reinforce a lie he has been caught in many times -- that his war was an answer to that attack.
While Petraeus and Crocker pitched Congress, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used a Pentagon memorial service to peddle the same line: we avenge the innocent by waging war in a country unconnected to their tragedy. It's all in keeping with a long held administration belief that it is unpatriotic for anyone else to politicize 9/11.
Petraeus, Crocker and Pace took a page from Karl Rove's White House Iraq Group playbook: Craft sentences that imply more than they say. Deliver them with conviction. When found out, reveal the artful parsing that proves you never said what everyone heard.
It always worked better than it should. We believed Saddam was behind 9/11; that he had weapons of mass destruction; that his oil would pay for Bush's war; that Iraq wanted to be just like us; that the mission was accomplished, resistance in its last throes.
To make it work Bush counts on us not to read any more than he does. Petraeus and Crocker's tales of progress contradicted the published findings of military and intelligence professionals across the administration and in Congress:
A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, a report of the consensus views of all intelligence agencies, said flatly that the Iraq War undermines the war on terror. It warned that the worst threat we now face is from "dispersed, self radicalizing" terror cells that are almost impossible to engage, let alone defeat, in pitched battles.
(Continued here.)
HuffingtonPost
On September 11 George Bush contrived with Democratic assistance to send David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker to tell Congress how the Iraq war is going.
Bush wanted the date not because he thought it would be, in Lincoln's words, an altogether fitting and proper way to honor the fallen, but because he thought it a clever way to reinforce a lie he has been caught in many times -- that his war was an answer to that attack.
While Petraeus and Crocker pitched Congress, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used a Pentagon memorial service to peddle the same line: we avenge the innocent by waging war in a country unconnected to their tragedy. It's all in keeping with a long held administration belief that it is unpatriotic for anyone else to politicize 9/11.
Petraeus, Crocker and Pace took a page from Karl Rove's White House Iraq Group playbook: Craft sentences that imply more than they say. Deliver them with conviction. When found out, reveal the artful parsing that proves you never said what everyone heard.
It always worked better than it should. We believed Saddam was behind 9/11; that he had weapons of mass destruction; that his oil would pay for Bush's war; that Iraq wanted to be just like us; that the mission was accomplished, resistance in its last throes.
To make it work Bush counts on us not to read any more than he does. Petraeus and Crocker's tales of progress contradicted the published findings of military and intelligence professionals across the administration and in Congress:
A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, a report of the consensus views of all intelligence agencies, said flatly that the Iraq War undermines the war on terror. It warned that the worst threat we now face is from "dispersed, self radicalizing" terror cells that are almost impossible to engage, let alone defeat, in pitched battles.
(Continued here.)
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