Nothing Left To Lie About
With BushCo reaming the nation on just about every possible front, is implosion imminent?
by Mark Morford

And the lies, the flagrant GOP bitch slappings of the American public, the maniacal jabs straight in eye of truth with the icepick of utter BS, have just reached some sort of critical mass, some sort of saturation point of absurdity and pain and ridiculousness and you just have to stand up and applaud.

Really. It's almost as if you should cheer the invidiousness, it is so spectacular, unprecedented, the tower of lies reaching the point where you, Jaded and Benumbed American Citizen, are forced to either recoil and ignore and deny, succumb and scream and laugh, or, like Bush himself, just sort of stand there, wide eyed, dumfounded, blinking hard, looking more blank and confused than ever, as the unified BushCo front begins to gloriously unravel.
[...]

The list goes on. This list is nearly endless. The list is growing and expanding and now threatens to split and explode and spread like some sort of giant viscous blob and invade small towns and kill plants and induce women to slap their hands to their faces and scream while it slowly steamrolls innocent children as they innocently stand there in the street playing innocent Frisbee, innocently.
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Beating around the Bush
Under fire for the CIA's handling of intelligence on Iraq, the agency's chief passes the buck back to the White House, writes Julian Borger

Pity poor George Tenet. The director of the central intelligence agency, source of much of the scepticism about the administration's overblown case against Saddam Hussein, is the designated fall guy for the whole fiasco.

He must feel like he has been gang-mugged. After weeks of speculation and finger-pointing, the rest of the administration finally agreed a damage-limitation strategy - and the strategy was "blame Tenet".
[...]

That document is worth deconstructing. The opening paragraph does exactly what Tenet was asked by the White House. It confirmed that the CIA approved the State of the Union address, and that he, Tenet, was responsible for the process. Most importantly, the 16 words citing a British intelligence report that Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa "should never have been included in the text written for the president".

However, Tenet then goes further, much further, explaining "For perspective, a little history is in order". And, he might have added, some settling of accounts.

The next 900 words provide a thinly coded description of how the CIA's arm was twisted into giving the White House what it wanted. Tenet points out that the CIA had strong reservations about intelligence suggesting Iraq was in the market for yellow-cake uranium from Africa in general and from Niger in particular.
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CIA: Assessment of Syria's WMD exaggerated

In a new dispute over interpreting intelligence data, the CIA and other agencies objected vigorously to a Bush administration assessment of the threat of Syria's weapons of mass destruction that was to be presented Tuesday on Capitol Hill.

After the objections, the planned testimony by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, a leading administration hawk, was delayed until September.

U.S. officials told Knight Ridder that Bolton was prepared to tell members of a House of Representatives International Relations subcommittee that Syria's development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons had progressed to such a point that they posed a threat to stability in the region.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies said that assessment was exaggerated.
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  thanks to BookNotes

It doesn't appear that the CIA is going to be a fall guy again.

It's hard to fight for a liar

HEMMER: You're soon to be the wife of a member of the U.S. military. It comes with the territory in many ways. What have you thought about how difficult this might be going forward in the future with him, knowing that the U.S. military's engaged in so many different hotspots around the world?

HAMILTON: We have actually, since this deployment began, we have decided that we will no longer be in the army.

HEMMER: Oh, he's getting out after this tour of duty in Iraq? How do feel about that?

HAMILTON: Yes, yes. He can't stand for it.

HEMMER: Why is that?

HAMILTON: I support him 100 percent.

HEMMER: Why do you say he can't stand it?

HAMILTON: It's hard on the families, it's hard on the soldiers, and it's especially hard to know that you put your faith and trust into a president, and they continue to lie to you, they break promises, and it's hard to fight for somebody like that.
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