Common Dreams copies Sheryl McCarthy at Long Island Newsday
George W. Bush is a big fat liar.
There, someone had to say it.
In the midst of the controversy over how a dubious claim about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium got into the president's State of the Union speech, why hasn't the president been called on the carpet?
What should be clear by now is that the Bush administration used its intelligence on Iraq selectively, promoted only the bits and pieces that fit its argument, and ignored the rest. According to a New York Times article that appeared last week, this intelligence consisted of no more than scraps and fragments, some of them dating as far back as the first Gulf War, which were then patched together with assumptions that were made after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Now that this smoke-and-mirrors scenario has been revealed, we're still tiptoeing around the obvious. We ask polite questions like whether we were "misled"; if the intelligence data were "hyped"; were the government's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons "exaggerated"; and did they put a little extra "spin" on what they knew. We avoid the "L" word altogether.
Americans find it hard to accept that their leaders can't be trusted about something as serious as war. Forget the many presidential lies of the past: Harry Truman about the necessity to bomb Hiroshima; John F. Kennedy about the missile gap with the Russians; Lyndon Johnson on the Gulf of Tonkin; Ronald Reagan about the reasons for invading Grenada. Patriotism and the need to feel united in wartime cause us to give presidents a wide berth, even when later revelations show they deceived us.
No one is saying the obvious: that when you take the country to war based on sparse and unreliable evidence that's disputed by your own experts, a war in which thousands of people died and more are being killed daily in its aftermath, that's the moral equivalent of lying.
Say you heard it here.
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