One Step Closer to
the Big Enchilada
By FRANK RICH, Op-Ed
Columnist, NYTimes on the Web, October 30, 2005
TO believe that the Bush-Cheney
scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the
Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were
nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two
years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a
federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took
"responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the
indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months,
America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading
edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's
attorney general, John Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."
In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look like a
narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name contains the DNA of
the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of
the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson
affair is hardly the end of the story. That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr.
Libby is known, would allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in
punishing a man who challenged the administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just
one very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately,
mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.
After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective the
administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very recently.
Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two separate official
investigations into the failure of prewar intelligence. With great fanfare
and to great acclaim, both found that our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s
was dead wrong. But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly
thorough inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate
lingo, "the big enchilada."
The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by Laurence
Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a "sharp critique" by
Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no
mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their semicovert propaganda
operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that
dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under
secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the
Pentagon supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the
nation.
The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate Intelligence
Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the release of its initial
findings in July 2004, the committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts,
promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the
public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn't, and
no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr.
Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with "crucial
documents," including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin
Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to the U.N. on the eve of
war.
Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has prompted the revelation of
much of what these previous investigations left out. But even so, the
trigger for the Wilson affair -- the administration's fierce effort to protect
its hype of Saddam's uranium -- is only one piece of the larger puzzle of post-
and pre-9/11 White House subterfuge. We're a long way from putting
together the full history of a self-described "war presidency" that bungled the
war in Iraq and, in doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic
terrorism as well.
There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost
willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter
ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was
revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles,
large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu
Ghraib and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command?
Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even
after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of
bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat
Tillman's parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire,
and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV
before then?
These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to
get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices
obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and
outright lies.
Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts. Long
before he played semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge of Joseph
Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial matters of national
security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his
new assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide
review of U.S. "consequence management" in the event of a terrorist attack.
As we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from Barton
Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.
That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's unreliable pronouncements about the
war, from his early prediction that American troops would be "greeted as
liberators" in Iraq to this summer's declaration that the insurgency was in its
"last throes." Even before he began inflating Saddam's nuclear
capabilities, he went on "Meet the Press" in December 2001 to peddle the notion
that "it's been pretty well confirmed" that there was a direct pre-9/11 link
between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link
was disproved later, Gloria Borger, interviewing the vice president on CNBC,
confronted him about his earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three times that
he had never said it had been "pretty well confirmed." When a man thinks
he can get away with denying his own words even though there are millions of
witnesses and a video record, he clearly believes he can get away with murder.
Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His own false claims about Iraq's
W.M.D.'s ("We found the weapons of mass destruction," he said in May 2003) are,
if anything, exceeded by his repeated boasts of capturing various bin Laden and
Zarqawi deputies and beating back Al Qaeda. His speech this month
announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots is typical; as USA Today reported last
week, at least 6 of the 10 on the president's list "involved preliminary ideas
about potential attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried
out." In June, Mr. Bush stood beside his attorney general, Alberto
Gonzales, and similarly claimed that "federal terrorism investigations have
resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half" of
those had been convicted. A Washington Post investigation found that only
39 of those convictions had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed
to, say, immigration violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by the
combined number of convictions in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.
The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as the hyping of
Saddam's uranium: in both cases, national security scares are trumpeted to
advance the White House's political goals. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC
recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a political downturn for the
administration," from revelations of ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings to fresh
news of detainee abuses, is "followed by a 'terror event' -- a change in alert
status, an arrest, a warning." To switch the national subject from the
fallout of the televised testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley in
2002, John Ashcroft went so far as to broadcast a frantic announcement, via
satellite from Russia, that the government had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist
plot" to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the
arrest of a single suspect, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan --
an arrest that had taken place a month earlier.
For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White House's
infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon administration, as David Gergen
put it on MSNBC on Friday morning. But Watergate's dirty tricks were
mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to crush the political competition at any
cost. That's a powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this
administration has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war. Back
on July 6, 2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr.
Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his
column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that "weapons of mass destruction or
uranium from Niger" were "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the
people." That's what Nixon administration defenders first said about the
"third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.
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