If Bush Is Lying, He's Not the First

U.S. Foreign Policy Forum

The sign on the White House these days might well read "Welcome to Credibility Gap."

Sooner or later, every modern administration has fallen into this unwelcome gulch, a disaster that happens when the gap between the government's words and the known facts becomes discernible to the voters. The phrase "credibility gap" came into use during the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, but deception as an instrument of national policy began long before that. Misleading official statements, "spin" and, at times, outright lies are an all-too-familiar part of the White House landscape. Government lying has become as American as apple pie.

For President Bush, the problem centers on the furor over whether he misled the nation and the world by asserting that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. Since the twin allegations were the primary premise for going to war against Saddam Hussein's regime, pressure has been building on the White House to prove its claims. The CIA is busily reviewing intelligence gathered before the war. Congressional leaders are skirmishing about what kind of inquiry to pursue. The Republicans so far have resisted the Democrats' call for public hearings into whether the intelligence on Iraq was faulty or whether it was deliberately warped to fit policy, opting instead for a closed-door format. The investigations may also look into the rival intelligence unit that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld formed in the Pentagon last year, which some analysts claim was set up to find the evidence that the hawks among the policymakers wanted to hear.

Of course, weapons of mass destruction may yet be uncovered in Iraq. But in Poland last month, President Bush startled observers by saying on Polish TV: "We've found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories . . . . And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

Bush was referring to two mobile units that the CIA had concluded were designed to manufacture biological substances. But by artfully joining the "manufacturing devices or banned weapons" in one sentence, his comments nicely fuzzed up what he meant by saying, "We found them."

The casual, almost breezy nature of the president's statement in Poland seemed strangely out of step with the intensity of the hunt underway in Iraq. For weeks, military units had been searching, without success, for weapons of mass destruction. Officials on the scene had warned that it could take months to uncover the evidence, and some privately had expressed surprise about their failure to turn up any hard evidence.

This past week, as questions persisted about the missing weapons, there appeared to be a subtle shift in the administration's statements. Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, indicated that Bush had relied on the director of intelligence, George Tenet, and the information produced by his predecessors. Then the president himself said that Iraq had a weapons "program," which some might construe as different than saying that Iraq actually had weapons.

As it prepared for war, however, the administration made a number of dramatic pronouncements about Iraq's capabilities. As early as Oct. 7, 2002, Bush had declared in a nationally televised speech that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

On Feb. 8, Bush said in his weekly radio address: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." No such weapons were used against American troops during the fighting.

On March 17, when Bush said Saddam had 48 hours to leave town, the president said in another speech to the nation that "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. The regime has already used weapons of mass destruction . . . ."

Similar statements were made by other administration officials in the run up to the war. On Jan. 7, at a Pentagon news briefing, Rumsfeld said, "There's no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons." Pressed by a reporter, Rumsfeld made clear that he was not basing his assertion on the fact that Iraqis had used chemical weapons in the past.

Two days later, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there." On March 16, Vice President Cheney had even more frightening news. On NBC's "Meet the Press," he said: "We believe he [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

On March 30, on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," Rumsfeld, referring to "weapons of mass destruction," said flatly: "We know where they are."

The administration might have been citing the best intelligence it had at the time. But it's hardly surprising that questions are now being raised about the truthfulness of these statements. Nor is it the first time that the Bush administration has run into difficulty in this area. Last year, it was disclosed that the Pentagon had created a propaganda arm to plant false news stories in the foreign press. It was called by an Orwellian title -- the Office of Strategic Influence -- but the unit was soon axed in the wake of a public outcry.

For the modern presidency, the U-2 affair in 1960 was the watershed event that marked the start of a long train of fibs, lies and artful dodging. When CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down inside Soviet territory, the State Department denied that there had been any deliberate attempt to violate Soviet air space. It was a bald-faced lie, and when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev produced the live pilot, President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to admit the spy flight. The truth came as a shock to most Americans -- Eisenhower was a revered father figure and war hero.

During the Kennedy administration, Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, gave a speech defending the government's "right, if necessary, to lie . . ." He did add, "when it is going up into a nuclear war," but even qualified, it was an unprecedented display of candor that caused a firestorm. Sylvester's mistake was to say out loud what many officials thought. And the Kennedy administration did lie in 1961 during the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba, falsely insisting that the United States was not behind the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.

Lyndon Johnson claimed that his great-great-grandfather had died at the Alamo, which was total fiction. The joke that went around Washington during the LBJ years had someone asking, "How can you tell when Lyndon is lying?" The answer: "When his lips move." That was perhaps unkind and certainly untrue. But it was under Johnson that a credibility gap turned into a political Death Valley for Oval Office occupants.

Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing Johnson to use force in southeast Asia, because Johnson assured Congress and the public that American destroyers had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the gulf on Aug. 4, 1964. It wasn't true.

What Johnson did not say when he addressed the nation just before midnight that day was that 10 hours earlier, the Pentagon had received a cable from the commander of the Maddox, one of two destroyers supposedly attacked, warning that reports of "torpedoes fired appear doubtful," the work of an "overeager sonarman." Nor did the public know that half an hour before the president went on the air, the Pentagon was still frantically cabling for confirmation of an attack.

Nine years later, more than 58,000 Americans had died in Vietnam, including 47,000 on the battlefield, and more than 303,000 were wounded. Only much later did a divided nation learn the truth about the incident in the gulf. ". . . we concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all," Johnson says to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara on one of the LBJ audio tapes edited by historian Michael Beschloss. "Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish," Johnson is quoted as saying by Stanley Karnow in "Vietnam: A History." Public mistrust of Johnson, especially over the Vietnam war, led to his decision not to run for reelection in 1968.

Richard Nixon, as a result of the Watergate scandal, was the first president to resign because of his lies. The temptation of chief executives to cover up political embarrassment by invoking national security was never better illustrated than during that saga. In one exchange, captured on Nixon's taped conversations, Nixon and two aides, John Dean and H.R. Haldeman, are scrambling to come up with an explanation for the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press. The illegal break-in was the work of the White House "plumbers," a secret group created to plug such leaks:

Dean: You might put it on a national security grounds basis.

Haldeman: It absolutely was.

Nixon: National security. We had to get information for national security grounds . . . the whole thing was national security.

Dean: I think we could get by on that.

Governments lie for a variety of reasons. The United States emerged from World War II as a superpower. As a result, a vast national security bureaucracy was created, including the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. The CIA ran hundreds of covert operations, and cover stories were prepared to explain them in case of exposure. The test was not truth, but whether a cover story would withstand scrutiny and be accepted as "plausible denial." Many of the now-celebrated government fabrications -- from the Gary Powers U-2 flight, to the Bay of Pigs, to the Iran-contra affair -- fall into this category.

Of course, political leaders also lie to try to save themselves from personal embarrassment. Bill Clinton insisted he never had sex with "that woman," a deceit that led to his impeachment and tarnished his presidency, even if it will help to sell large numbers of books for his wife. (And for him as well, when he will no doubt rehash the Monica Lewinsky affair in his own memoir due out next year.)

Sometimes the falsehoods are designed to protect a military operation. On the eve of President Reagan's invasion of Grenada in October 1983, White House spokesman Larry Speakes called a network report of the invasion "preposterous." The next day, U.S. forces landed on the Caribbean island.

Deception in battle -- to mask the site of the Normandy invasion in World War II, for example -- is defensible. Official, institutional lying as an ongoing instrument of foreign policy cannot be justified.

Six years ago, the CIA admitted that the Air Force lied for years about flights of high-altitude spy planes during the Cold War. The secrecy about the flights and bogus official explanations -- the Air Force said people were seeing "ice crystals" -- gave rise to the belief by some citizens that the government was covering up the existence of UFOs.

And that is the problem. Official lies erode the public's confidence in its leaders and inspire conspiracy theories. Public trust between the government and the electorate is the bedrock of a democracy that ultimately rests on the informed consent of the governed. Ethics professor Sissela Bok has written of "the presumption against lying" that forms the basis of trust, without which "institutions collapse." Official lying destroys that bond.

There is an alternative to government lying. It is to tell the truth. Or, if need be, to remain silent.

Source: W. Post

If Bush lied , then according to this article, wasn't it based off of someone elses lie??

Transcript: President Clinton explains Iraq strike
CLINTON: Good evening.

Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.

Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world.

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons.

I want to explain why I have decided, with the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, to use force in Iraq; why we have acted now; and what we aim to accomplish.

Six weeks ago, Saddam Hussein announced that he would no longer cooperate with the United Nations weapons inspectors called UNSCOM. They are highly professional experts from dozens of countries. Their job is to oversee the elimination of Iraq's capability to retain, create and use weapons of mass destruction, and to verify that Iraq does not attempt to rebuild that capability.

The inspectors undertook this mission first 7.5 years ago at the end of the Gulf War when Iraq agreed to declare and destroy its arsenal as a condition of the ceasefire.

The international community had good reason to set this requirement. Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: He has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. Unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops during a decade-long war. Not only against soldiers, but against civilians, firing Scud missiles at the citizens of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iran. And not only against a foreign enemy, but even against his own people, gassing Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq.

The international community had little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

The United States has patiently worked to preserve UNSCOM as Iraq has sought to avoid its obligation to cooperate with the inspectors. On occasion, we've had to threaten military force, and Saddam has backed down.

Faced with Saddam's latest act of defiance in late October, we built intensive diplomatic pressure on Iraq backed by overwhelming military force in the region. The UN Security Council voted 15 to zero to condemn Saddam's actions and to demand that he immediately come into compliance.

Eight Arab nations -- Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman -- warned that Iraq alone would bear responsibility for the consequences of defying the UN.

When Saddam still failed to comply, we prepared to act militarily. It was only then at the last possible moment that Iraq backed down. It pledged to the UN that it had made, and I quote, a clear and unconditional decision to resume cooperation with the weapons inspectors.

I decided then to call off the attack with our airplanes already in the air because Saddam had given in to our demands. I concluded then that the right thing to do was to use restraint and give Saddam one last chance to prove his willingness to cooperate.

I made it very clear at that time what unconditional cooperation meant, based on existing UN resolutions and Iraq's own commitments. And along with Prime Minister Blair of Great Britain, I made it equally clear that if Saddam failed to cooperate fully, we would be prepared to act without delay, diplomacy or warning.

Now over the past three weeks, the UN weapons inspectors have carried out their plan for testing Iraq's cooperation. The testing period ended this weekend, and last night, UNSCOM's chairman, Richard Butler, reported the results to UN Secretary-General Annan.

The conclusions are stark, sobering and profoundly disturbing.

In four out of the five categories set forth, Iraq has failed to cooperate. Indeed, it actually has placed new restrictions on the inspectors. Here are some of the particulars.

Iraq repeatedly blocked UNSCOM from inspecting suspect sites. For example, it shut off access to the headquarters of its ruling party and said it will deny access to the party's other offices, even though UN resolutions make no exception for them and UNSCOM has inspected them in the past.

Iraq repeatedly restricted UNSCOM's ability to obtain necessary evidence. For example, Iraq obstructed UNSCOM's effort to photograph bombs related to its chemical weapons program.

It tried to stop an UNSCOM biological weapons team from videotaping a site and photocopying documents and prevented Iraqi personnel from answering UNSCOM's questions.

Prior to the inspection of another site, Iraq actually emptied out the building, removing not just documents but even the furniture and the equipment.

Iraq has failed to turn over virtually all the documents requested by the inspectors. Indeed, we know that Iraq ordered the destruction of weapons-related documents in anticipation of an UNSCOM inspection.

So Iraq has abused its final chance.

As the UNSCOM reports concludes, and again I quote, "Iraq's conduct ensured that no progress was able to be made in the fields of disarmament.

"In light of this experience, and in the absence of full cooperation by Iraq, it must regrettably be recorded again that the commission is not able to conduct the work mandated to it by the Security Council with respect to Iraq's prohibited weapons program."

In short, the inspectors are saying that even if they could stay in Iraq, their work would be a sham.

Saddam's deception has defeated their effectiveness. Instead of the inspectors disarming Saddam, Saddam has disarmed the inspectors.

This situation presents a clear and present danger to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere. The international community gave Saddam one last chance to resume cooperation with the weapons inspectors. Saddam has failed to seize the chance.

And so we had to act and act now.

Let me explain why.

First, without a strong inspection system, Iraq would be free to retain and begin to rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in months, not years.

Second, if Saddam can crippled the weapons inspection system and get away with it, he would conclude that the international community -- led by the United States -- has simply lost its will. He will surmise that he has free rein to rebuild his arsenal of destruction, and someday -- make no mistake -- he will use it again as he has in the past.

Third, in halting our air strikes in November, I gave Saddam a chance, not a license. If we turn our backs on his defiance, the credibility of U.S. power as a check against Saddam will be destroyed. We will not only have allowed Saddam to shatter the inspection system that controls his weapons of mass destruction program; we also will have fatally undercut the fear of force that stops Saddam from acting to gain domination in the region.

That is why, on the unanimous recommendation of my national security team -- including the vice president, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the secretary of state and the national security adviser -- I have ordered a strong, sustained series of air strikes against Iraq.

They are designed to degrade Saddam's capacity to develop and deliver weapons of mass destruction, and to degrade his ability to threaten his neighbors.

At the same time, we are delivering a powerful message to Saddam. If you act recklessly, you will pay a heavy price. We acted today because, in the judgment of my military advisers, a swift response would provide the most surprise and the least opportunity for Saddam to prepare.

If we had delayed for even a matter of days from Chairman Butler's report, we would have given Saddam more time to disperse his forces and protect his weapons.

Also, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins this weekend. For us to initiate military action during Ramadan would be profoundly offensive to the Muslim world and, therefore, would damage our relations with Arab countries and the progress we have made in the Middle East.

That is something we wanted very much to avoid without giving Iraq's a month's head start to prepare for potential action against it.

Finally, our allies, including Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, concurred that now is the time to strike. I hope Saddam will come into cooperation with the inspection system now and comply with the relevant UN Security Council resolutions. But we have to be prepared that he will not, and we must deal with the very real danger he poses.

So we will pursue a long-term strategy to contain Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and work toward the day when Iraq has a government worthy of its people.

First, we must be prepared to use force again if Saddam takes threatening actions, such as trying to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction or their delivery systems, threatening his neighbors, challenging allied aircraft over Iraq or moving against his own Kurdish citizens.

The credible threat to use force, and when necessary, the actual use of force, is the surest way to contain Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, curtail his aggression and prevent another Gulf War.

Second, so long as Iraq remains out of compliance, we will work with the international community to maintain and enforce economic sanctions. Sanctions have cost Saddam more than $120 billion -- resources that would have been used to rebuild his military. The sanctions system allows Iraq to sell oil for food, for medicine, for other humanitarian supplies for the Iraqi people.

We have no quarrel with them. But without the sanctions, we would see the oil-for-food program become oil-for-tanks, resulting in a greater threat to Iraq's neighbors and less food for its people.

The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world.

The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government -- a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people. Bringing change in Baghdad will take time and effort. We will strengthen our engagement with the full range of Iraqi opposition forces and work with them effectively and prudently.

The decision to use force is never cost-free. Whenever American forces are placed in harm's way, we risk the loss of life. And while our strikes are focused on Iraq's military capabilities, there will be unintended Iraqi casualties.

Indeed, in the past, Saddam has intentionally placed Iraqi civilians in harm's way in a cynical bid to sway international opinion.

We must be prepared for these realities. At the same time, Saddam should have absolutely no doubt if he lashes out at his neighbors, we will respond forcefully.

Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors. He will make war on his own people.

And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.

Because we're acting today, it is less likely that we will face these dangers in the future.

Let me close by addressing one other issue. Saddam Hussein and the other enemies of peace may have thought that the serious debate currently before the House of Representatives would distract Americans or weaken our resolve to face him down.

But once more, the United States has proven that although we are never eager to use force, when we must act in America's vital interests, we will do so.

In the century we're leaving, America has often made the difference between chaos and community, fear and hope. Now, in the new century, we'll have a remarkable opportunity to shape a future more peaceful than the past, but only if we stand strong against the enemies of peace.

Tonight, the United States is doing just that. May God bless and protect the brave men and women who are carrying out this vital mission and their families. And may God bless America.