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Column: Whispers of a Watergate for Bush
August 11, 2008
The response in the US to startling new allegations that the White House directed the forgery of evidence to support its case for the war in Iraq has been surprisingly muted so far. The charges may be false, of course, but if they are seriously examined and turn out to be true, this is – or ought to be – a Watergate-sized scandal.
Ron Suskind is a heavyweight: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and the author of a well-regarded book on the administration’s security policies, The One Per Cent Doctrine. His new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, which was published last week, contains the extraordinary new charge. It says that late in 2003 the White House ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to forge a memo dated July 2001 from Tahir Jalil Habbush, Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief, to Saddam himself, affirming that Mohammed Atta, the September 11 2001 bomber, had contacts with the regime and that Iraq had an ongoing weapons of mass destruction programme.
The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.
Yes the charge is grave and shocking, but unsurprising. Bush and Blair administrations are (were) deeply neocons, meaning the faith in their ideas of (re)shaping the world needs no truth or evidence: forging the evidence is a mean for final victory, which is their “truth”.
Posted by: Nicola Marinelli | August 11th, 2008 at 11:14 am | Report this commentSometimes the lack of evidence is an evidence in itself for them!
This breed of thinkers are experiencing a brutal awakening, for anything they expected is going the other way: the US way has already peaked and is losing momentum under many aspects, i.e military, economically and ideologically.
Thank you, Clive Crook, for bringing this buried story to light. If anything, it shows how much America has changed since Watergate.
At that time, there was some semblance of an independent press, a real opposition party and a less political Supreme Court. When the Pentagon papers were published (over the desperate opposition of President Nixon, who was ordered by the Supreme Court to release them), everyone in America realized that continuing the Vietnam war was based on a lie.
When the Nixon tapes were released, also after a Supreme Court battle, Nixon was forced to resign, after making his famous (and inaccurate) statement: “I am not a crook”.
In contrast, at the time of the Iraq invasion, the media and leaders in both parties went along with the lie that Saddam was an immediate threat to the US. Then after the invasion, everyone went along with the “groupthink” that the administration had been misled by faulty intelligence, another lie.
Now, the consensus is that the US must keep a presence in Iraq indefinitely for the sake of the Iraqi people, the great majority of whom (not to mention their government, chosen in the free elections that the US took so much credit for) want the Americans out.
In Nixon’s time, people like Daniel Ellsberg, who told the truth about the White House lies and deception, were widely respected and listened to despite White House attempts to discredit him (and to burglarize his office). Today, Scott McClellan, formerly one of President Bush’s most loyal henchmen, who faithfully parroted whatever lie du jour the White House put on the menu, has now been shunted aside by the public as some kind of a disgruntled crank for revealing how he was repeatedly misled by his bosses in the administration.
With far too few exceptions, the government and media have turned into a monolith, a kind of Orwellian “Minitruth”, led by seasoned prevaricators within the administration such as Condoleezza Rice (Madam “Mushroom Cloud”) and its all but official propaganda organ, Fox News, Bush/Cheney’s Pravda or Volkischer Beobachter.
There are very, very few honorable exceptions: Paul Krugman of the New York Times is one. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann is another. Now, Clive Crook has joined the ranks of those who are not afraid to shine a spotlight on the administration’s lies. Welcome to the club.
Posted by: algasema | August 11th, 2008 at 11:50 am | Report this commentSadly, America’s apathy continues unabated.
Posted by: rockfish | August 11th, 2008 at 2:44 pm | Report this commentGive us (or at least promise us) cheap gas and low taxes, and we don’t much care what the government does.
A few thousand dead Americans in New York provokes outrage (for a few months at least).
Three times as many dead Americans in Iraq? “Hey, isn’t the season premier of Gossip Girl on tonight?”
I am glad to see Bush’s thuggish excesses documented.
But the truth is: don’t we all already understand that a whole series of illegal efforts went into Bush’s pointless invasion of Iraq?
The specific ones matter less than the entire series of events which culminated in breaking international law and custom, ignoring international treaties and agreements, and killing more than half a million people.
What we’ve seen so clearly in this experience is how little Americans care about the fate of others so long as America’s own way of life continues happily along.
If the flag-draped coffins aren’t being shipped home on an industrial scale, as was the case with Vietnam, Americans simply do not care whether the Pentagon is killing a hundred thousand or a million abroad.
Even with Vietnam, Americans’ concerns were about the 60,000 Americans who died, not the 3,000,000 they slaughtered.
Posted by: JOHN CHUCKMAN, TORONTO | August 11th, 2008 at 3:29 pm | Report this commentJohn McCain has just given a speech condemning Russian aggression against Georgia. Today’s score (so far) - McCain 1, Obama 0. True enough, the US election will not turn on what happens in South Ossetia, which most of us in America had never heard of until a few days ago.
But how many opportunities to speak out can Obama miss and still hope to win the election? He should not be letting McCain beat him to the punch when a war breaks out, especially with Obama’s need to bolster his foreign policy credentials.
And why isn’t Obama pursuing the issue of the Bush administration’s lies more vigorously? True, the surf’s up in Hawaii, but Clive Crook can’t be expected to do all the heavy lifting on this issue by himself.
At this rate. we will have four more years of government by deception, secrecy and civil liberties abuses, courtesy of President McBush.
Posted by: algasema | August 11th, 2008 at 3:55 pm | Report this commentI agree with you, Clive, that Congress should move forward to investigate the apparent faking of such an important document, etc. But I am not holding my breath.
Is it possible that the supposed scrambling of the information from Habbush, by which it went back to the British as being true, was actually just more plausible deniablity getting inserted into the proceedings?
I remember Watergate very well, and in fact watched Dick Nixon climb the steps into the helicopter on his final departure from the White House after he resigned.
There is no question but that George Tenet knew there was no posibility whatever that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, and that he knew this long before George W. Bush gave his State of the Union address in 2003 setting up the invasion. Because Tenet knew it, Dick Cheney also knew it. French intelligence had thoroughly investigated the matter more than once.
In my view, the invasion was pushed ahead to prevent it becoming too widely known that there was no basis for the attack. Loss of deniability was the paramount concern.
Posted by: James Canning | August 11th, 2008 at 6:17 pm | Report this commentIt’s amazingly sad to see President Bush going along with all the neocons around him nonsense,even when he will get the blame in the history books and his legacy in the dumpster, and this new chapter , the “fake 2001 letters” , is another nail in the known deadly fact that there were multiple warnings to the White House during 2001 of an attack by AlQaeda to buildings in the USA and with planes hitting tall buildings , including the August 2001 memo in the PDB ( President’s Daily Briefing) and that Richard Clarke warned again and again and they all pretended in D.C. that it was just more elevator music…so Bush will get the blame again…… just like today , when he should be asking first and foremost , as a smart fair and honest USA leader, what do the people of SOUTH OSSETIA and ABKHAZIA want ? , he should be asking why these ethnic russians and christians want to be independent from Georgia since the early 90’s ? ,why are they not getting the right to choose motherland in free elections and why is Georgia not letting these 2 break away regions be free ? , because a leader in America, who let a muslim Kosovo break free from Serbia, why would he not ask what these people want ? all in all, president Bush is making a huge mistake to please the neocons , and later History will blame only him, what a shame ! …..and Europa ? is Europa even going to ask what the South Ossetia and Abkhazia people want ? don’t these people have the right to choose a motherland ? are they forced to be the unwanted child in Georgia ? why ? …how can we talk about Democracy and, at least here in the USA , no one in the media is asking what these Ossetian and Abkhazia people want ? ….and it seems that only S. Obama and Governor Richardson are pointing out that the top foreign affairs adviser to S. McCain , Randy Scheuneman and his firm Orion Strategies LLC, have been since at least 2005 lobbying for Georgia and with others in close by countries to make ” oil and security’ deals , if you know what i mean, and we still don’t know any of the details of the deal, what do they got for what services ? , if they were involved in the weapons sales ? , how much ? , from whom ? , for what ? , etc., etc., we don’t know anything and the Media in the USA totally silence, why? what’s going on ? , these 2 issues plus the Anthrax “boondongle” , where no one in the ” Weapons Microbiology World ” believes one word of the Justice Dpt. case results , are going to later be on President Bush’s Legacy , and why is he still listening to the neocons ? doesn’t he get the picture ?
Posted by: blogger | August 11th, 2008 at 8:57 pm | Report this commentGive me a break! This story is nothing but alleges and alligations. This is the left trying to stir something up to help out in the up and coming elections.
Posted by: steven | August 12th, 2008 at 1:40 pm | Report this comment“This is the left trying to stir up something to help out in the up and coming [sic] elections”.
Like some more Bush/Cheney administration lies?
Posted by: algasema | August 12th, 2008 at 2:26 pm | Report this commentWhy is it “stirring something up” to seek the truth about apparent eggregious criminal activity?
Posted by: James Canning | August 12th, 2008 at 6:48 pm | Report this commentThose who wanted to block the Watergate investigations always called it a small-time burglary or some such.
The term used by Nixon’s people as part of the effort to downplay Watergate was “third rate burglary”, to be precise.
Posted by: algasema | August 12th, 2008 at 7:53 pm | Report this commentMs. Marinelli’s comment is illuminating, simply demonstrating the Left’s utter inability to see the foolishness of its position. “Sometimes the lack of evidence is an evidence in itself” — that is the never-ending mantra comig from the Bush/Cheney-haters, yet that is exactly what they
Posted by: Laszlo Straka | August 12th, 2008 at 8:12 pm | Report this commentsubscribe to whenever it fits their purpose. It is
pitiful to see Clive Crook fall for this nonsense (buried by Mr. Suskind at the end of his book — included on whose orders, one wonders!). Probably the boring tome needed some spicing up — presto, let there be this kind of unsubstantiated allegation by unnamed CIA insiders, and we have a bestseller in the making. How is that for “truth” Ms. Marinelli and Mr. Crook?