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Taking Responsibility |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
(No verified email address) |
31 Jul 2003
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Everyone, it seems, is expected to shoulder some of the burden of responsibility for the President's words, except for Bush himself. |
"I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course. Absolutely," declared President Bush during Wednesday's news conference. And yet weeks of debate and discussion have gone into parsing a mere sixteen words from Bush's State of the Union speech in which he falsely claimed to have knowledge that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium in Niger.
Rather than taking responsibility for his words, Bush and his advisors have done everything to avoid taking responsibility. They have attempted to justify the inclusion of the Niger claim which they knew was dubious by attributing it to Tony Blair's government. CIA director George Tenet stepped forward to accept the blame for Bush's words and was rewarded by Bush declaring his confidence in Tenet. The purpose behind this game of musical chairs, of course, is to muddy the waters so that no one has to take responsibility for the president's false remarks. Harry Truman had a plaque on his desk that read, 'The buck stops here.' If Bush had a plaque on his desk, it would say, 'The buck stops with Blair, or Tenet, or Condoleeza Rice but I forgive them all.'
In addition to treating responsibility for the president's words like a hot potato, his public relations advisors have tried to pretend that expecting him to tell the truth about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction is petty quibbling over details. The subtle spin behind all this talk about a mere sixteen words is the insinuation that everyone is making a mountain out of a molehill. Why make such a big deal, they are saying, over a single sentence in which the president may have misspoken.
The reality is that the Bush administration's phony claims about Iraq go well beyond those mere sixteen words in the State of the Union address. In our book, 'Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq', we include a full chapter of false statements and deliberate distortions by Bush and his top officials. With respect to weapons of mass destruction alone, those falsehoods included the following:
* On September 7, 2002, Bush cited a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency which he said proved that the Iraqis were on the brink of developing nuclear weapons. "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied, finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic, the IAEA, that they were six months away from developing a weapon," he said. "I don't know what more evidence we need." Actually, no such report existed. The IAEA did issue a report in 1998, around the time weapons inspectors were denied access to Iraq, but what it said was, "Based on all credible information to date, the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." Responding to the Bush speech, IAEA chief spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said, "There's never been a report like that issued from this agency."
* In his September 12, 2002 address to the United Nations, Bush spoke ominously of Iraq's "continued appetite" for nuclear bombs, pointing to the regime's purchase of thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes, which he said were "used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." In fact, the IAEA said in a January 2003 assessment, the size of the tubes made them ill-suited for uranium enrichment, but they were identical to tubes that Iraq had used previously to make conventional artillery rockets. Nevertheless, Colin Powell repeated the aluminum-tubes charge in his speech to the UN on February 5, 2003.
* In an October 7, 2002 speech to the nation, Bush warned that Iraq has a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used "for missions targeting the United States." Actually, the aircraft lacked the range to reach the United States.
* In the same speech, Bush also stated that in 1998, "information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue." Bush's statement implied that this information was current as of 1998. In fact, the nuclear defector to whom he referred was Khidhir Hamza, who had actually retired from Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and fled the country in 1995. Bush also neglected to note that Hussein Kamal, whose earlier defection and debriefing by UNSCOM investigators served as the basis for part of the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi weapons, told investigators during that he regarded Hamza as a 'professional liar.'
* Hussein Kamal Saddam Hussein's son-in-law who was later murdered by the Iraqi regime as punishment for his defection from Iraq was also cited repeatedly by the Bush administration to bolster its case that inspections were not working that Iraq's weapons programs were continuing. Actually, Kamal had told UNSCOM interrogators during his debriefing that "after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them. Nothing remained. All weapons biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." Kamal also told his debriefers that UN inspection teams were 'very effective in Iraq.'
This list merely enumerates some of the lies and distortions related to the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi weapons. If space permitted, we could provide an even longer list of falsehoods with which the Bush administration made the rest of its case for war, such as its attempt to insinuate that Iraq was in cahoots with Al Qaeda or its promises that the Iraqi people would welcome American troops as liberators.
Bush claims to 'take responsibility' for his words, but taking responsibility means facing the consequences, and thus far the Bush administration has suffered no consequences whatsoever. The people who have experienced the consequences of Bush's many deceptions are the U.S. soldiers who remain targets of daily attack inside Iraq, the Iraqi people themselves, and of course the American taxpayers who are footing the bill for it all. Everyone, it seems, is expected to shoulder some of the burden of responsibility for the President's words, except for Bush himself.
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are the authors of 'Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq', published this month by Tarcher/Penguin |
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Holding Bush Accountable |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
31 Jul 2003
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The pResident is a slippery little devil. He mentioned several times yesterday how concerned he was about unemployment and engaged in extensive historical revisionism about the nature of his tax cuts, portraying them as job creation programs. As job programs, the Bush tax cuts are a massive failure, with more than 3 million jobs lost on Bush's watch. Let's hold him responsible for that, too, in the next election, since the mass media seems unable to do so. |
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Bush And Iraq: The Distortions Keep On Coming |
by Stephen Zunes
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
01 Aug 2003
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"And I analyzed a thorough body of intelligence -- good, solid, sound intelligence -- that led me to come to the conclusion that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
"We gave the world a chance to do it. Twelve times the United Nations Security Council passed resolutions in recognition of the threat that he posed. And the difference was, is that some were not willing to act on those resolutions. We were -- along with a lot of other countries -- because he posed a threat."
--President George W. Bush, July 30, 2003
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the intelligence cited by President Bush regarding Iraqi military capabilities in the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was in fact neither good, nor solid, nor sound and that the Iraqi regime – while, like a number of Middle East governments, undeniably repressive – was not actually a serious threat to the United States or any other country.
Perhaps of even greater significance, however, is that the president’s statements during his Wednesday press conference grossly distorted the role of the United Nations and the international community.
First of all, there was nothing in those twelve resolutions that implied that the Iraqi government had to be overthrown. While warning Iraq of “serious consequences” for noncompliance, the resolutions simply demanded that the Iraqi government needed to rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction, delivery systems, and related programs, and to have its disarmament verified by UN inspectors.
Second, the United Nations was already acting on alleged Iraqi noncompliance with these resolutions by targeting Iraq with the most rigorous international military and economic sanctions and the most invasive inspections regime in world history.
Third, UN Security Council resolution 1441, the most important resolution dealing with Iraq in recent years, declared that only the weapons inspectors -- not UN member states -- had the authority to report Iraqi violations. The inspectors did not report any violations of serious consequence. Furthermore, the resolution stated that the Security Council "remains seized of the matter," meaning that it alone had the authority to approve the use of force. The 1990 Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq applied only to the enforcement of previous resolutions calling for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait (which were fully met by the end of February 1991), nothing more. The United Nations never authorized the use of force to enforce any subsequent resolutions. According to the UN Charter, of which the United States is a signatory and is therefore bound by its provisions, UN resolutions cannot be enforced militarily without the explicit authorization of the UN Security Council.
Fourth, the centerpiece of U.S. accusations that Iraq was violating these resolutions was the Bush Administration's claims that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction, delivery systems and development programs that it was hiding from UN inspectors. So far, however, the United States has failed to show any evidence that Iraq actually has had any of the proscribed materials or development programs since the mid-1990s. Once the Iraqi government allowed UN inspectors to return in the fall of 2002, one could make the case that Iraq was no longer in violation of these resolutions.
Finally, it is important to remember that there are over ninety UN Security Council resolutions currently being violated by countries other than Iraq, most of which receive U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support, raising serious questions regarding the Bush Administration's actual commitment to the enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions.
The distortions do not end here. At the same press conference, in response to the failure of UN inspectors and subsequent U.S. occupation forces to find evidence of an ongoing WMD program, President Bush stated that “I'm confident that our search will yield that which I strongly believe, that Saddam had a weapons program. I want to remind you, he actually used his weapons program on his own people at one point in time, which is pretty tangible evidence.”
No one, however, questions that Iraq had active biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs during the 1980s, the period when Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq. The UN Security Council demanded an end to such programs in 1991 under resolution 687 and most evidence suggests that these programs were indeed eliminated by the mid-1990s. Ironically, the United States quietly supported Saddam Hussein's regime during this earlier period when the regime actually was developing weapons of mass destruction and invaded Iraq after these programs were apparently no longer in existence.
President Bush concluded by stating “I’m confident history will prove the decision we made to be the right decision.” That may only be possible however, if he continues to distort history and a compliant news media allows him to get away with it.
Stephen Zunes is an associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He serves as Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project , where this article first appeared, and is the author of 'Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.'
http://www.fpif.org |
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