The Dog Ate Bush's Accountability (7/13/03)
by Dean Hartwell
We finally have an answer about misleading information President Bush gave the public about the supposed need to invade Iraq: it was all the Central Intelligence Agency’s fault. Yet, the president says he has “confidence in George Tenet,” the director of Central Intelligence.
In his State of the Union Address in January, President Bush asserted that British government had said that Iraq had attempted to buy nuclear materials from Niger. Six months later, the Bush Administration admitted it had been wrong about the nuclear materials claim. Then Bush said that the speech had been “cleared by the intelligence services,” which Tenet acknowledged.
This explanation sounds like the schoolboy’s excuse that the “dog ate my homework.” Should we, the public, buy it?
Assuming that the CIA failed to verify the assertion about Niger, it enabled the President to mislead the public about the war. The idea that Iraq had been trying to buy nuclear materials made it sound like it presented an imminent threat to other nations.
Lives of United States soldiers continue to be lost to this very day. Without the misleading information, perhaps more members of Congress would have stood up and convinced the President not to go to war. Or, had the falsity of the information been identified sooner, perhaps even some of Bush’s advisors would have counseled against war.
Also, it begs another question: what else has the President mislead us about? It casts further doubt upon Bush’s claim that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, for example. For months now, he has stated that we will find those weapons, but nothing has turned up.
We should not wait for the Bush Administration to admit to another mistake before we demand accountability. We should not wait for the Republican Congress, which hammered President Clinton with countless investigations but who have remained relatively quiet over the Iraqi matter. And we clearly cannot wait for opinion polls to measure any level of outrage by the public.
Instead, we should decide personally whether we can accept another four years of this sort of presidential ineptitude. We need to look for a president who will demand accurate intelligence from the CIA and other agencies and fire directors who do not deliver it. In the world of politics, we must act upon the belief that truth matters.