posted 01-14-2004 09:25 PM            

Surreal moments serving a mythological president

By Marian Wilkinson, Herald Correspondent in Washington

January 15, 2004: (Sydney Morning Herald) The weekend after September 11, George Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, sat in a leather armchair at Camp David, the presidential retreat, devouring a pile of intelligence documents on al-Qaeda handed out by the CIA boss, George Tenet.

A two-day crisis meeting of Mr Bush's senior advisers had finally wound up. The President had gone to bed.

Across the room, the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was singing hymns, accompanied on the piano by the Christian fundamentalist Attorney-General, John Ashcroft.

Leafing through the CIA documents, Mr O'Neill was astonished to read plans for covert assassinations around the globe designed to remove opponents of the US Government. The plans had virtually no civilian checks and balances.

"What I was thinking is, 'I hope the President really reads this carefully', Mr O'Neill said. "It's kind of his job. You can't forfeit this much responsibility to unelected individuals. But I knew he wouldn't."

Mr O'Neill's account of that famous cabinet meeting is just one of many surreal episodes he recalls from his two-year tenure as Mr Bush's top economic official in The Price of Loyalty, the controversial new book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Ron Suskind. But there are many similar moments in the 328-page book on Mr O'Neill published on Tuesday with the subtitle: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill.

Mr O'Neill's story, backed up by thousands of pages of documents, is the first inside account by a top Bush Administration official to strip away the carefully crafted mythology surrounding Mr Bush as a "can-do" president. It reveals what many long suspected, that Mr Bush is often disengaged from policy debates, lacks intellectual rigour, runs on gut instinct and is heavily influenced by conservative ideological advisers.

Describing the book as "sour grapes", the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has denied that he telephoned Mr O'Neill after hearing about plans for the book in an effort to persuade his former colleague and long-time friend not to do it.

While Mr O'Neill's revelations are dismissed by White House officials as the revenge of a sacked cabinet officer, at least some of his tales and anecdotes have a ring of truth to them. Like the President describing his love of "comfort food" - homemade chicken noodle soup and sandwiches on freshly baked bread. When Mrs O'Neill politely asked what comfort food his mother, Barbara Bush, cooked, George Bush replied bluntly: "You got to be kiddin'. My mother never cooked. The woman had frostbite on her fingers. Everything [was] right out of the freezer."

On the eve of the book's release, Mr O'Neill said he did not believe the White House would punish him "for telling the truth" and he was "too old and too rich" to be threatened. Sure. But after a barrage of attacks from the White House and having become the target of a Treasury investigation into whether he leaked classified documents to Suskind, Mr O'Neill has been backpedalling.

He told NBC's Today program he regretted having described the President as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people". He also agreed with Mr Rumsfeld that Mr Bush's policy from day one that Saddam Hussein should be removed had indeed also been Bill Clinton's policy.

But on whether that policy justified a war, Mr O'Neill insisted that he never saw "concrete evidence" that Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction before the war.

"That also doesn't make a point that we shouldn't have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not making that case," Mr O'Neill said.

"I'm making a really clear case that I know the difference between evidence and what is illusion and assertion and the rest. That's my point."

posted 01-14-2004 10:33 PM            

Greg Thielmann, director of the Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the US State Department.

http://www.news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2402424

New Blow to Blair over Iraq
By James Lyons, Political Correspondent, PA News
1/15/04

Prime Minister Tony Blair was dealt a fresh blow over Iraq today when a second senior Washington insider said intelligence was misrepresented.

Former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has revealed he saw no evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed a chemical and biological arsenal.

George Bush was planning the invasion of Iraq from the moment he became US President, Mr O’Neill said.

His claims have been dismissed as the bitter attack of a sacked man by President Bush’s supporters.

But they were backed today by Greg Thielmann, director of the Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the US State Department until his retirement last year.

Mr Theilmann told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’m afraid I think the American public was seriously misled.”

The US administration “twisted, distorted, simplified” intelligence in a way that led Americans to “seriously misunderstand what the nature of the Iraq threat was”, he said.

“I’m not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a President distorting critical information,” he said.

“For a President to abuse that sacred trust ... is to me a very serious development.” {let's hope EVERYONE else thinks so too!}

Mr Theilmann said he was “not as knowledgeable about the British side of the question”.

But he said: “I am disappointed by some of the statements made by Prime Minister Blair, even though I understand how difficult it is for a close ally of the United States to confront the United States on the use of intelligence information.”

British intelligence was still sticking to claims that Saddam attempted to obtain nuclear material from Niger even though the US now acknowledged that was based on forged documents, Mr Theilmann said.

Mr Blair would not have been working on more evidence than the Bush administration, he told Today.

“It is unlikely that any really important intelligence here would not have been shared,” he said.

“We are talking about intelligence of extraordinary importance, intelligence that can make the difference between war and peace.

posted 01-15-2004 01:41 PM            

We'll keep finding interesting fall out from this book and other witnesses who come out, fer sher!

posted 01-15-2004 01:48 PM            

washingtonpost.com
Kennedy Hits Bush On War

By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A14

President Bush marketed the war on Iraq as a "political product" to influence the 2002 elections and is doing so again this year, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) charged yesterday in a scathing speech accusing Bush of putting politics ahead of national security.

In a speech to the liberal Center for American Progress, Kennedy said the war has increased hatred for the United States abroad, diverted attention from the broader war against terrorism and put the country more "at risk" than it was before.

Kennedy, a leading Democratic liberal who was among the small minority of lawmakers to vote against the congressional authorization for war in 2002, has been criticizing Bush on Iraq for months, but rarely in such a sweeping fashion. He accused the administration of distorting intelligence and pursuing an ideological agenda in building the case for war.

"No president of the United States should employ misguided ideology and distortion of the truth to take the nation to war," he said. "In doing so, the president broke the basic bond of trust between the government and the people. If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America would never have gone to war."

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) denounced the speech, calling it a "hateful attack against the commander in chief." He said Kennedy "insulted the president's patriotism, accused the Republican Party of treason, and resurrected the weak and indecisive foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis."

Kennedy referred approvingly to an assertion by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill in a new book that Bush began planning for war against Iraq shortly after taking office in 2001. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has denied the assertion, but Kennedy indicated he believes it, praising O'Neill's "integrity, intelligence and vision" and saying the book has "now revealed what many of us have long suspected."

Kennedy said "the steamroller of war was moving into high gear" by fall of 2002. "The administration insisted that Congress vote to authorize the war before it adjourned for the November elections. Why? Because the debate in Congress would distract attention from the troubled economy and the troubled effort to capture [al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden. The strategy was to focus on Iraq and do so in a way that would divide the Congress. And it worked."

Now, Kennedy said, "there is little doubt as well that the administration's plan to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people by this summer -- and the pressure to hold elections in Afghanistan at that time -- are intended to build momentum for the November elections in this country." The war, he said, "could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy."

posted 01-15-2004 03:14 PM            

When Paul O’Neill Sounds Like Tip O’Neill
Filed January 14, 2004

Struggling to reconcile the ever-widening gulf between what the Bush administration claims to be true and what is actually true is getting harder by the day. Fortunately, Paul O'Neill has a timely, if disturbing, diagnosis, backed up by some 19,000 pages of lab results: the country is being governed not by the genial figurehead now running toward the center in hopes of re-election but by a band of out and out fanatics.

On the administration's two defining issues, Iraq and taxes, the former Treasury Secretary paints a scathing portrait of a cabal of closed-minded zealots steadfastly refusing to allow anything as piddling as fact, evidence, or truth to get in the way of their unshakable beliefs and forgone conclusions.

According to O'Neill, invading Iraq was a Bush goal before he had even learned where the Oval office supply closet was. It came up just ten days after the inauguration, at the new president’s first National Security Council meeting. "It was all about finding a way to do it," he says. "That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'"

Of course, All the President's Men (and Condi, too!) did just that, gathering a collection of dubious facts, half-truths, quarter-truths, and--the House Specialty--no-truths (what "unpatriotic" people would call lies) to match the desired outcome. A slice of Nigerian yellowcake, anyone?

But hey, why let a little thing like the truth get in the way of a perfectly good war?

The picture of a White House teeming with fanatics gets even clearer with O'Neill's depiction of the Bush brain trust's dogged devotion to cutting taxes for the wealthy.

And, before I go any further, one word of advice to the White House attack dogs now unleashed on O'Neill: If you want to belittle his bona fides, you've got to come up with something better than saying "We didn't listen to him when he was here. Why should we now?" Let's get real. Is there anyone more central to developing economic policy than the Treasury Secretary? To be any more inside, O'Neill would have to have been George Bush's proctologist.

Now, of course, they're painting him out to be a cross between Jerry Garcia, Karl Marx and the disgruntled former employee who just shot up your local post office. Yeah, what an anti-establishment wackjob: Former CEO of Alcoa, and a friend of Don Rumsfeld's since the sixties.

Anyway, whether or not the cabinet choir of the church of tax cuts listened to him, O'Neill certainly listened to them, and now he's doing what this administration makes a fetish of not doing: telling the American people what their government is really up to. To hear O'Neill tell it, the true believers surrounding the president, headed by Karl Rove and O'Neill's one-time patron Dick Cheney, are all devout disciples of the first commandment of Bush Republicans: thou shalt cut taxes for the wealthy, no matter what the cost to the greater good. They have all drunk the supply-side Kool-Aid -- and simply don't care to hear any debate on this subject. Or on any other for that matter. According to O'Neill, "That store is closed". To disagree with the Bush clan is according to their vast, self-serving post 9/11 definition of patriotism, to hate America.

What's more, in classic fanatical fashion, the inner circle in the Oval Office displays an utter intolerance of dissent.

When O'Neill, who had the gall to be concerned about the looming fiscal crisis triggered by the growing budget deficit, argued against a second round of tax cuts, he was quickly put in his place by Cheney. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," growled the Vice President, blithely ignoring the nearly 20 years it took to undo the fiscal damage Reagan's budget-busting had wrought. Besides, added Cheney, sounding less like the most powerful #2 in history than a kid cajoling his parents into giving him ice cream because he has cleaned his plate, "We won the mid-term elections, this is our due." An over-stuffed gift bag for the president’s prosperous donor corps is our due? Is it actually possible to so badly misread what this country--or, indeed, democracy--is about?

It's a measure of how effectively the GOP radicals have framed the political debate, with taxes as the root of all evil, that Paul O’Neill, a bedrock-ribbed establishment Republican, comes across like Tip O’Neill.

Hell, it turns out even President Bush had his doubts about the virtue of following his first round of serve-the-rich tax cuts with a heaping second helping. "Haven't we already given money to rich people?" Bush asks at a 2002 meeting of his economic team. "Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?"

This momentary bout of presidential scruples was quickly cured by Karl Rove. "Stick to principle. Stick to principle. Don't waver," he urged Bush repeatedly. The principle, I suppose, being: "If we wanna win in 2004 we gotta keep our Pioneers and Rangers happy!" Boy Genius, indeed.

The most alarming thing that emerges from O'Neill's revelations is the total lack of leadership on Bush's part. Just as the president was finally outgrowing the long-standing rumors that he was a cheerful pawn in a game he was too dumb to understand, O’Neill applies the paddles to the “Bush as clown” image, turns on the juice, and yells, “Clear!”

At the very moment that Rove and the Bush re-election team are gearing up to sell us the president as the macho, heroic cowboy from Crawford who is going to keep us all safe from terrorists, despots, and Mad Cow meat, here comes his former Treasury Secretary with his devastating assessment of Bush as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people".

posted 01-15-2004 03:48 PM            

EDITORIAL
Selling of a war

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"INTELLIGENCE gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said President Bush in a national address on March 17, 2003.

A majority of Americans believed him. In fact, more than half the public thought that Saddam Hussein not only had close links with al Qaeda terrorist networks, but had a role in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But it was not true. The Bush administration used innuendo and exaggerated evidence to persuade the American people that a pre-emptive war against Iraq was necessary to protect the nation from terrorism.

Now, the use of that distorted evidence is coming back to haunt the Bush administration. Consider:

-- An extensive study by the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented" intelligence assessments to the American people.

-- The U.S. Army's premier academic institution, the War College, issued a scathing report, criticizing the Bush administration for pursuing an "unnecessary" war in Iraq that has left the Army "near the breaking point." Authored by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, the report argued that Iraq was "a war-of- choice distraction from the war of necessity'' against al Qaeda.

-- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, fired by Bush for opposing a second round of tax cuts, now says that shortly after taking office, senior Bush administration officials began to plan for regime change in Iraq. In "The Price of Loyalty," written by former Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer prize-winner Ron Suskind, O'Neill argues that neither Bush nor his senior officials questioned why a war against Iraq was necessary; instead, they discussed how to make it happen.

-- Kenneth Pollack, a former national security official in the Clinton administration and author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," wrote in Atlantic magazine that estimates of Iraq's capabilities to build weapons of mass destruction were hugely exaggerated.

-- Barton Gellman, who interviewed key Iraqi scientists and members of American weapons search teams, reported in the Washington Post that sanctions and arms embargoes had ended Iraq's efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

These recent reports and revelations are clearly unsettling to people who have trusted their president. But they do support the many defense analysts and experts who, before the war, argued that Iraq did not represent an imminent danger to the United States.

We support the Carnegie report's call for an independent commission to investigate the administration's alleged misuse of intelligence evidence. If this really was a "war of choice," the American people have a right to hold their government accountable.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/13/EDG0C47J1D1.DTL

posted 02-09-2004 12:38 AM            

Great find!

WHOA!