[NYTr] Bush contempt for the public -- TIME TO IMPEACH

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by MichaelP

[Bush doesn't give a damn for the truth, -- does what it decides to do- 
Like PT Barnum takes us all for suckers. Flimflam is the name of the
game.

His agents try not to let the true facts out, but when they get out
they count for precisely nothing.

Face Bush with his own lies and he denies knowledge. Face his political 
opponents with his lies and the true facts and they deny having the
power to rein Bush in. -MP]


The Guardian - Dec 8, 2007
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_boyle/2007/12/spin_lies_and_contempt.html

Spin, lies and contempt -- 

Beyond the politics of the National  Intelligence Estimate on Iran lie
some uncomfortable questions about the Bush administration

by Michael Boyle

By all accounts, the release of the new National Intelligence Estimate 
(<http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf>) on Iran's 
nuclear capability this week dealt a stunning blow to the Bush 
administration's case against Iran. After several years of claiming
that Iran was engaged in an inexorable march towards developing a
nuclear weapon, the NIE revealed that Iran halted its nuclear weapons
programme in autumn 2003, in response to a combination of internal
cost-benefit calculations and international pressure. As many critics
have noted, this means that in its time in office the Bush
administration has twice beat the war drums regarding emerging WMD
threats in the Middle East, and twice it has been proven wrong.

The Bush administration took its characteristic posture in response to 
this announcement: it downplayed the actual facts and put its spin on
the bad news. After the release of the report, Bush insisted on Iran's 
capability to be a threat, called on the Iranian government to "come 
clean"  about its nuclear programme, and declared that the report
"doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the threat that Iran
poses to the world". Given that on October 17, President Bush warned
that a failure to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon would
lead to world war III, this is a worrying statement. This statement is
even more controversial in light of the fact that it now appears this
new intelligence emerged in August 2007.
See:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/the-ticking-lie-scenario_b_75703.html
How could President Bush continue to threaten Iran in September and
October if the evidence was mounting that international pressure had
worked and that Iran had at least ceased its immediate development of a
nuclear weapon?

The White House's answer is a hedge, but not a convincing one. The
White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters that Michael
McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had informed
President Bush in August that new information - likely to be intercepts
of conversations between military officers, as the New York Times
reported today ( See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/world/middleeast/06intel.html )
had come to light and would delay the production of this intelligence
estimate.  But Perino insists that President Bush was not told exactly
what the new information was, so by implication he was not directly
misleading the American public with his statements on Iran in the
autumn. President Bush adopted this defence in his press conference,
insisting that he got word of the NIE findings only last week and not
in the briefing held in August.

To be fair, it is likely that McConnell was cautious in offering new 
intelligence to the president, especially after the debacle of the 
intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence 
community was so badly burned by that affair that it will probably 
exercise an excess of caution before providing the president with a
firm judgment of any new finding. But given the stakes involved in this
issue, it is hard to believe that McConnell - a Republican appointee -
did not even hint in the August briefing that the new intelligence
might suggest the possible suspension of the Iranian nuclear programme.

Predictably, the Democrats' reaction to this spin was swift and severe. 
Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking member on the Senate foreign
relations committee, dismissed the notion that Bush was only informed
that new intelligence had come to light but was not told what it was.
"If that's true," Biden said
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/04/bush.iran/?iref=mpstoryview
 "he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and
he's one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American
history." After seven years of the Bush administration, both of these
seem like incontestable points. But Biden and the Democrats have
nevertheless every right to insist that President Bush and
Vice-President Cheney provide a full accounting of what they were told
in the August briefing regarding the Iranian nuclear programme.

Beyond the politics, some uncomfortable questions remain: if the Bush 
administration got word in August, why did the president and 
vice-president continue to issue dire warnings and threats - and incur 
needless diplomatic and political costs - if they knew that there were 
serious doubts about the progress of the Iranian nuclear programme? Why 
was the Bush administration again so willing to scare the wits out of
the American people on the basis of shaky evidence? What strategic gain
could be achieved by threatening Iran in the fall, only to deliver the
Iranian government a propaganda victory once the NIE was released?

Such behaviour is so illogical that it raises questions about what 
President Bush thought he was doing in raising the prospect of a third 
world war. At the very least, it suggests that the Bush administration
was ambivalent to the truth around Iran's nuclear programme. President
Bush has said that news of Iran's suspension of the programme does not
change his view of the magnitude of the threat because - as the NIE
states - it remains nuclear capable and could restart a programme
quickly.  But if turning an imminent threat into a latent one does not
diminish his perception of the threat, what will? In President Bush's
mind, we are still facing a gathering storm in the Middle East, and
history will judge us on whether we saw the "impending danger" emerging
in 2007. President Bush is not concerned with the hard facts about the
nuclear programme; his gut conviction guides his policy, even if that
conviction pushes him (and the rest of us) straight off a cliff.

But beyond his basic allergy to the truth, what the spin surrounding
the NIE reveals is the extent to which President Bush holds the
American people in contempt. Throughout his time in office, President
Bush has simplified his arguments for the American people, claimed
exclusive rights over private (but worrisome) knowledge and treated
Americans like errant children who must be kept from the truth. He
scares, cajoles and threatens them, secure in his own mind that he is
doing it for their own good, but he does not treat them like adults who
can make a reasonable judgment about serious issues or about the
behaviour of their government.  Only a public report - described by
some as a rebellion by the intelligence community - stands in the way
of his fear-mongering.

Underlying Bush's reckless behaviour this fall is the belief that the 
American people are not sufficiently informed to penalise him when
engages in spin and half-truths.

Throughout his time in office, President Bush has counted on the fact
that he can say X but mean Y without ever having to pay a political
price.

But when it comes to threatening world war III, we can no longer let
him get away with this spin, contempt and deception. President Bush may
want to protect America - though he has a strange way of doing so - but
he certainly does not believe in offering due respect to the American
people. It is time that we made him pay a political price for this lack
of respect, and it is time that we expect better of the American
president.