George Bush, Terrorist

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Aug 23, 2009 at 18:30

There was quite a flap this week over Tom Ridge's revelation that terror alerts had (gasp!) been politicized!  Marc Ambinder made a fool of himself and Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald smacked him down.

In part, Glenn wrote:

Just as is still commonly said about opponents of the Iraq War (even though they were right, they were still wrong and unSerious because their motives were bad), Ambinder acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence."  As always:  even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns.

This is fine as far as it goes, but there's a number of larger points that need to be made here:

(1) What the Bush Administration did with these manipulations was itself terrorism.  They terrorized the American people in order to manipulate the political process and coerce a political outcome favorable to themselves in a manner that was inherently destructive to civil peace and the democratic process.

(2) This was only the tip of the iceberg, however. The entire Bush response to 9/11 was a form of terrorism, from start to finish.  They never let off terrorizing the American people, repeatedly scaring them out of their wits, and frightening them into doing things that they would never do if free from threats and coercion.    9/11 was a terrible screw-up on Bush & Cheney's part.  It was nowhere near an existential threat to America. But because it was such a terrible screw up, Bush/Cheney had to vastly inflate al Qaeda's purported prowess. And so they went all in on terrorizing the American people.  The vast majority of the Versailles press went there with them, and that press continues to defend Bush/Cheney to this day, precisely because they are complicit in terrorism against the American people, and the Republic.

However, when it came to going to war with Iraq, the warning signs were even clearer. At the first big sales push for the Iraq War, a joint press conference with Tony Blair, President Bush blatantly lied about a non-existent IAEA report.  As Amy Goodman and David Goodman wrote in 2004:

The White House propaganda blitz was launched on September 7, 2002, at a Camp David press conference. British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood side by side with his co-conspirator, President George W. Bush. Together, they declared that evidence from a report published by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) showed that Iraq was "six months away" from building nuclear weapons.

"I don't know what more evidence we need," crowed Bush.

Actually, any evidence would help-there was no such IAEA report. But at the time, few mainstream American journalists questioned the leaders' outright lies. Instead, the following day, "evidence" popped up in the Sunday New York Times under the twin byline of Michael Gordon and Judith Miller. "More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction," they stated with authority, "Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today."

In a revealing example of how the story amplified administration spin, the authors included the phrase soon to be repeated by President Bush and all his top officials: "The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' [administration officials] argue, may be a mushroom cloud."

Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, knew what to make of this front-page bombshell. "In a disgraceful piece of stenography," he wrote, Gordon and Miller "inflated an administration leak into something resembling imminent Armageddon."

The Bush administration knew just what to do with the story they had fed to Gordon and Miller. The day The Times story ran, Vice President Dick Cheney made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to advance the administration's bogus claims. On NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney declared that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium. It didn't matter that the IAEA refuted the charge both before and after it was made. But Cheney didn't want viewers just to take his word for it. "There's a story in The New York Times this morning," he said smugly. "And I want to attribute The Times."

This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks a lie to The Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling expose, and then the White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of The Times.

"What mattered," wrote MacArthur, "was the unencumbered rollout of a commercial for war."

There were certainly many, many lies that were told that critics on the left could not know about, but this one was right out there in the open, and all that us "Bush-haters" did was notice it, pay attention to it, and say, "If they use such an easily disprovable lie as the centerpiece of their kick-off argument, they simply can't have any sort of solid case, and they definitely should never be given the benefit of the doubt."

That turned out to be the most sane and sober observation anyone could possibly have made.

We weren't just right.  We were clear-eyed and clear-headed.  We were the grown-ups, while the Versailles press was still peeing its pants.

And George W. Bush was the one terrorizing them.

Never forget that: He was the leader of a terrorist regime.  And that's not even counting all the folks he terrorized in other countries.