Robert Parry: Washington Post's Enduring Bush Cover-up

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Robert Parry: Washington Post's Enduring Bush Cover-up

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WPost's Enduring Bush Cover-up

By Robert Parry
June 10, 2008

In a kind of Watergate in reverse, the Washington Post has rallied once again to defend George W. Bush�s honesty, with the paper�s editorial-page editor swatting away the latest swarm of evidence showing how the President took the nation to war in Iraq via a series of lies.
Much as the rival Washington Star in the 1970s let itself be used by Richard Nixon to muddy the Watergate waters � obscuring the mounting evidence of his guilt � now Washington Post editor Fred Hiatt and the newspaper�s hierarchy have lent themselves to the task of covering up Bush�s deceptions about the Iraq War.

This pattern started with the Post�s full-throated endorsement of the false pre-war intelligence on Iraq, continued with its ugly attacks on early war critics like former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and has carried over to Hiatt�s latest attempt to discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee�s critical findings on Bush�s deceptions.
In his June 9 op-ed, entitled ��Bush Lied?� If Only It Were That Simple,� Hiatt seeks to separate Bush�s pre-war statements about Iraq � both its alleged WMD stockpiles and Saddam Hussein�s supposed ties to Islamic terrorists � from the historical context: the war fever that Bush created and exploited.

Hiatt argues that it�s unfair to say Bush lied when there was some intelligence buttressing his public case. In other words, Hiatt advances the argument, long used by Bush apologists, that the President was deceived by the faulty information just like so many others, both Republican and Democrat.
Hiatt notes that Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee which issued the June 5 report critical of Bush�s use of the intelligence, also bought into the false WMD claims in fall 2002.

Hiatt writes: �The phony �Bush lied� story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.�
But Hiatt�s selective history ignores the real story of how the Iraq War was sold, a case in which all the participants shared in propagating the falsehoods while still benefiting from enough ambiguity so they could point the finger at others.

It was like a modern-day execution with the task divvied up into interlocking parts � strapping down the prisoner, inserting the IV, preparing the chemicals, and releasing them. That way, each participant can deny full responsibility if it turns out that the prisoner was innocent and the death was wrongful.

In much the same way, by saying Bush didn�t lie � he was just deceived by erroneous intelligence � Hiatt advances the argument that no one is really at fault.

All Are Guilty

Yet, in the case of the bloody invasion of Iraq � committed under false pretenses and leading to the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis � the truth is that all the participants are guilty.

The sequence of responsibility went like this:

--Bush and his neoconservative allies long had lusted for a decisive war against Iraq, plotting such an event from Bush�s very first days in office;

--The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan created a supportive political environment for a wider war;

--The neocon-backed Iraqi National Congress flooded the CIA with wave after wave of fabricated intelligence from supposed Iraqi defectors;

--Neocons in the Pentagon and at the White House created their own ad hoc entities to collect and promote this bogus information;

--CIA analysts, whose commitment to objectivity had been eroding under political pressure since the 1980s, understood that resistance to the false tales was hopeless and likely a career killer;

--By summer 2002, CIA Director George Tenet and other intelligence bureaucrats were making sure the finished analytical products fit with the political desires of the White House (or as the Downing Street Memo revealed, the U.S. intelligence was being �fixed� around the policy);

--By fall 2002, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials were hyping the alarmist intelligence, stripping the CIA reports of even the fig-leaf caveats that the analysts had tried to put on;

--The administration worked hand-in-glove with neocon allies in the Washington press corps, including reporters at the New York Times and editorialists at the Washington Post, such as Hiatt, Charles Krauthammer and David Ignatius;

--The few voices of dissent � in government and in the media � were shouted down and ridiculed along with long-time U.S. allies in France and Germany;

--Even the administration�s more moderate voices, the likes of Secretary of State Colin Powell, were recruited into the propaganda operation, helping to further marginalize and silence the remaining skeptics;

--By the eve of war, Bush was the master of America�s political domain, with most Washington politicians in his thrall and the U.S. press corps reduced to the role of excited cheerleaders applauding the shock-and-awe bombing.

.....

Though this daisy chain of activists and enablers shared responsibility for the Iraq invasion, that doesn�t wash the blood off the hands of the various participants, including Hiatt and other pro-war propagandists. Nor does it mean that Bush is NOT a liar.

In fact, the overwhelming evidence is that Bush is a willful (if not pathological) liar, in that he repeatedly misrepresented evidence that he personally knew to be true.

.....

If the Washington Post were still the newspaper it was in the 1970s, it would be building on this body of evidence to make the case that Bush not only lied to the public but committed serious crimes that harmed U.S. national security.

Instead Hiatt and the Post�s editorial pages continue to cover up for a President who has abused his powers and misled the American people � a rear-guard protective role that once was assigned to the now-defunct Washington Star.