By: Seymour M. Hersh  

Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal - a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.

By: Bob Herbert  

While our "What, me worry?" President is having a great time with his high approval ratings and his Top Gun fantasies, the economy remains in the tank. And the finances of state and local governments are sinking tragically into ever deeper and ever more unforgiving waters.

Two forms of help from the federal government are needed. One is direct assistance to local governments to help alleviate the disastrous budget shortfalls. The other is an economic stimulus program that really works, that boosts the economy and creates jobs through investments in some of the nation's real needs, rather than simply transferring trainloads of money to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts.

Mr. Bush has no interest in such remedies. Easing the economic struggles of poor and working families in America is not part of his agenda.

By: Gene Lyons  

Evidently, Bush will run as a one-man reunion of the Village People, the dreadful disco act. Having previously costumed himself as a Businessman (his ventures mostly failed), and Owner of the Texas Rangers (he had a 1% share), he's added Cowboy and Fighter Pilot to his repertoire. In reality, his Texas ranch was acquired in 1999; Bush's time in the saddle is limited to golf carts.

The Fighter Jock pose has more substance, as Bush did learn to fly F-102's during his foreshortened service in the Texas Air National Guard's renowned "Champagne Brigade" 30 years ago. The White House seemed to hint that the President himself would perform the landing aboard the Abraham Lincoln hundreds of miles at sea - far beyond helicopter range, Ari Fleischer assured the press.

That would have been a reckless stunt. Formally grounded for failure to take a required medical exam soon after completing his pilot's training, Bush hasn't flown a military aircraft since. As you'd think Junior's handlers wouldn't want to remind anybody, the Boston Globe pretty conclusively proved in May 2000 that Bush went AWOL for more than a year during 1972-73 - arranging a transfer from the Texas to the Alabama Air National Guard, but never showing up for duty.

By: Joe Conason  

According to the Washington Post, a newspaper that fervently supported the war, the Pentagon utterly failed to secure Iraq's nuclear facilities at Kut and al Tuwaitha. The result has been wholesale looting, with unknown losses of such potentially dangerous radioactive materials as cesium, cobalt, and partially enriched uranium. So far, Special Forces detachments have found at least two nuclear caches that were "plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen".

Now Mr. Rumsfeld might regard this as yet another stupid question, but wasn't the purpose of this invasion to secure and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction? The biological and chemical weapons that the Defense Secretary and the President warned us were in Saddam Hussein's possession have not been found so far. Teams of soldiers and technicians are scouring the countryside in vain, turning up barrels of pesticides and empty tractor-trailers. Looters have recently been seen running in and out of the Iraqi nuclear facilities, and they represent a deadly serious problem. Although the radioactive materials at those sites were useless to construct an atomic bomb, they would be more than adequate for a so-called dirty bomb. In theory, such a primitive weapon could be detonated in a major American city, spreading deadly isotopes over dozens of blocks.

"So we're hanging out... The Bushes [Jenna and Barbara] were underage drinking at my house. When I checked outside, one of the Secret Service guys asked me if they'd be spending the night. I said no. And then I go upstairs to see another friend and I can smell the green wafting out under his door. I open the door, and there he is smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah."

- actor Ashton Kutcher, in an interview with Rolling Stone (May 29^th issue)

By: James C. Moore  

Rove fancies himself an expert in both policy and politics because he sees no distinction between the two. This matters for a number of reasons. There is always a time during any President's administration when what is best for the future of the country diverges from what best serves that President's political future. If Rove is standing with George W. Bush at that moment, he will push the President in the direction of reelection rather than the country's best interests.

The United States is best served when political calculations are not a part of the White House's most important decisions. Rove's calculus is always a formula for winning the next election. He was less concerned about the bombing of Iraqi civilians or the bullets flying at our own troops, according to people who have worked for him for years, than he was about what these acts would do to the results of the electoral college, or how they influence voters in swing states like Florida.

There needs to be something sacred about our Presidents' decisions to send our children into combat. The Karl Roves of the world ought to not even be in the room, much less asked for advice.

By: Bill Chickering  

Take all of this - the unending lie, the attitude of a bully taunting little kids while his rich daddy stands behind him, and the gun you'll put to the head of anyone who crosses you.

Then wrap it all in the American flag.

Wear that flag on your lapel. Make sure it's waving close by whenever you stand at another microphone and lie straight faced to a room full of people who believe they can trust you.

Always make sure that the flag is the message. Don't give people time to think about the nation you're leading to chaos and economic collapse.

"President Bush's address to the American people announcing combat victory in Iraq deserved to be marked with solemnity, not extravagance; with gratitude to God, not self-congratulatory gestures. American blood has been shed on foreign soil in defense of the President's policies. This is not some made-for-TV backdrop for a campaign commercial. This is real life, and real lives have been lost. To me, it is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the President to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech. I do not begrudge his salute to America's warriors aboard the carrier Lincoln, for they have performed bravely and skillfully, as have their countrymen still in Iraq, but I do question the motives of a deskbound President who assumes the garb of a warrior for the purposes of a speech. As I watched the President's speech, before the great banner proclaiming 'Mission Accomplished', I could not help but be reminded of the tobacco barns of my youth, which served as country road advertising backdrops for the slogans of chewing tobacco purveyors. I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw."

- Sen. Robert C. Byrd, on the Senate floor, May 6, 2003

By: Mike McArdle  

Bush is a man of few gifts in an appealing package. He is exactly the type of person that Nixon so despised, a son of Eastern old money who was handed the things that Nixon had to work so hard for. Never studied, never worked hard, and yet was never far from wealth or political power.

But it is Bush more than anyone else who's benefited from the political image-making that Nixon used in the 1968 campaign. Nowhere was this more evident than during last week's appearance on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

The military personnel on their way back to the U.S. were used as a prop for a publicly financed political photo-op - Bush landing on the carrier deck in a fighter plane dressed as a pilot. Of course Bush's real military record was nothing short of disgraceful. He used his father's influence to avoid Vietnam and obtain a spot in the Texas Air National Guard, from which he went AWOL for over a year.

By: Nicholas D. Kristof  

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's WMD, "they were encouraged to think it over again".

"In this administration, the pressure to get product 'right' is coming out of OSD [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]", Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome", he said.

"The intelligence that our officials was given regarding WMD was either defective or manipulated", Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another Senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated."

"Bush was a deserter from his unit during the Vietnam War. He doesn't know what it means to support the troops."

- Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine and ex chief weapons inspector for the U.N. in Iraq

By: Eric Zorn  

The "Bush AWOL?" story appeared in this newspaper and was based on good reporting and still-unanswered questions. It faded away - a scant 14 mentions in the database for all of 2001 and 2002 due to the age of the allegations, the lack of any new developments, and the urgency of current events.

Last week, though, the President all but wore a "Kick Me!" sticker on the back of his flight suit when he decided to land on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot's seat of an S-3B Viking jet.

Imagine the derisive merriment in the columns and on the chat shows if former President Bill Clinton revived the skirt-chasing issue by touring a sorority house or if Gore delivered a lecture to the engineers at Netscape Communications Corp. Think of the snickering and the sardonic rehash of history.

"Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."

- Harry S. Truman

By: Leo McKinney  

When he assumed my country's highest executive office - a post to which he was not actually elected - in January of 2001, Bush inherited the largest federal budget surplus in history (estimated at $US5.6 trillion over ten years) and a healthy economy. Two years later, the U.S. economy is in shambles, the surplus all but gone. The workforce has lost more than 2 million jobs. The federal government is running record annual budget deficits.

Is Bush entirely responsible? Maybe, maybe not. But a $US1.3 trillion tax cut aimed almost entirely at the very wealthy, a cut so ill-advised it was questioned even by many supply-side economists, certainly did not help.

If only it ended there. The worst damage Bush has done to America - and this is saying something - has been on the international stage, where his shirking of simple diplomacy in favour of rabid militarism has left much of the world looking over its shoulder at the United States, proclaiming it (quite justifiably) a rogue nation and a threat to global stability.

Editorial from:  

The administration bill would require all plants to conduct a "vulnerability" assessment and prepare plans for reducing the likelihood of a terrorist attack and minimizing the damage should one occur. That's a useful first step. But the bill muddies the question of accountability. It does not, for example, require even the most dangerous plants to submit their plans to the Department of Homeland Security for review. The administration says it doesn't have the resources. But without such reviews, the public can never be sure whether company plans meet federal standards.

By: Michael Kinsley  

Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend - that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and bestselling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion-dollar gambling habit - has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, and children lit bonfires of "The Book of Virtues", "More Virtuous Virtues", "Who Cheesed My Virtue?", "Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs", etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all.

Even as an innocent hobby, playing the slots is about as far as you can get from the image Bennett paints of his notion of the Good Life. Surely even a high roller can't "cycle through" $8 million so quickly that family, church, and community don't suffer. There are preachers who can preach an ideal they don't themselves meet and even use their own weaknesses as part of the lesson. Bennett has not been such a preacher. He is smug, disdainful, intolerant. He gambled on bluster - and lost.

By: Paul Krugman  

Some background: the Constitution declares the President Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces to make it clear that civilians, not the military, hold ultimate authority. That's why American Presidents traditionally make a point of avoiding military affectations. Dwight Eisenhower was a victorious general and John Kennedy a genuine war hero, but while in office neither wore anything that resembled military garb.

Given that history, George Bush's Top Gun act aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln - c'mon, guys, it wasn't about honoring the troops, it was about showing the President in a flight suit - was as scary as it was funny.

But U.S. television coverage ranged from respectful to gushing. Nobody pointed out that Mr. Bush was breaking an important tradition. And nobody seemed bothered that Mr. Bush, who appears to have skipped more than a year of the National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam, is now emphasizing his flying experience. (Spare me the hate mail. An exhaustive study by the Boston Globe found no evidence that Mr. Bush fulfilled any of his duties during that missing year. And since Mr. Bush has chosen to play up his National Guard career, this can't be shrugged off as old news.)

Today, I fear my own government more than I do terrorists.

By: Jill Nelson  

These days, a sense of apprehension and foreboding lurks in the back of my head and the pit of my stomach. It's a gut-wrenching reminder that something very bad has happened and is about to happen anew. It is an anticipation of the next insult and injury in an America that has been defined under the Bush administration by a profound meanness of spirit.

The evidence of this overwhelming meanness of spirit is everywhere, abroad and at home. Even the administration's efforts to justify the war in Iraq as one of liberation and declare victory cannot mask the human costs to American troops and their families. How many thousands of Iraqis are dead? Where are the ridiculously named "weapons of mass destruction" that Bush used to justify this invasion? Witness the looting of priceless antiquities, kitsch, and cash from Iraqi museums and Saddam Hussein's palaces and homes, allowed and participated in not only by Iraqis but members of the American armed forces and their "embedfellows", the media.

Yet to question this war and its aftermath is characterized as at worst treason and at best anti-American cynicism...

By: Rich Procter  

Enough is enough. First we had to stare in horror as Bush and the Mayberry Machiavellis stymied the 9-11 investigation, covered up their shocking lack of 'due diligence,' hijacked the tragedy for partisan political purposes, and then used it to gin up a public relations "war" based on bellicose assertions, faked evidence and endlessly repeated lies.

Then we winced in agony as Bush, the man who left his post in time of war (even when that post was 7,000 miles from actual combat) starred in a nauseating, taxpayer-financed Top Gun Disinfo-mercial, "thumbs-upping" the crowd, acting like he himself was a "wind in the hair, lead in the pencil" fighter pilot, rather than a passenger.

Now comes the news that Rove and the audacious campaign '04 team are going to pull off their most cynical maneuver yet - possibly the most cynical ploy in American political history.

They have decided to push back the date of the Republican National Convention in New York City to the first week of September...

Editorial from:  

From the beginning, President Bush has been far more interested in exploiting the public lands for commercial purposes than in protecting their environmental values. On matters ranging from snowmobiles in Yellowstone to roadless areas in the national forests, his administration has tried steadily to chip away at safeguards put in place by the Clinton administration - largely in an effort to help the oil, gas, timber, and mining industries, and often in cavalier disregard for environmental reviews mandated by law. Now comes another devastating blow: The revelation that his Department of the Interior is no longer interested in recommending any of the millions of acres under its jurisdiction for permanent wilderness protection.

The new policy has still not caused much of a stir. Like most of the bad environmental news emanating from this administration, it emerged from the shadows late on a Friday evening. There was no formal announcement - just a few letters to interested senators from Gale Norton describing a legal settlement she had reached earlier that day with the state of Utah. But a close reading of that deal showed it to be a blockbuster - a fundamental reinterpretation of environmental law, and a reversal of four decades of federal wilderness policy.

By: William Rivers Pitt  

It has been oft-reported that Bush witnessed the attacks of 9/11 and came to believe that God Himself, and not Scalia and the rest, put him into the Presidency for the sole purpose of pursuing this war against terrorism. It has likewise been oft-reported that Bush is an evangelical Christian of the vigorous Billy Graham stripe. We have witnessed the failure of every rationalization for making war on Iraq - the WMD's, the terrorist connections - and are left now with the rhetorical argument that we did the whole thing to 'save' the Iraqi people. Ergo, Bush positioned himself on the deck of that aircraft carrier as a savior.

We are talking about a man who wears masks for the sake of political opportunism, and to survive moments when he has to address himself in the bathroom mirror. Does this newest mask have George W. Bush taking on the mantle of Jesus Christ, Savior and Redeemer?

Here is a man so steeped in self-denial that he can shunt aside his own shameful history in order to pretend he is on the same moral level as the soldiers he abandoned when his time of service came due. Here is a man intent upon making war on as much of the Muslim world as he can put his hands around, while wrapping around himself the image and prophesies of Jesus Christ. What is next? Will we see George W. Bush standing before the American people saying "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing"?

George W. Bush, master of denial. George W. Bush, wearer of masks. George W. Bush, soldier for Christ.

George W. Bush, Christ Himself?

From:  

High-way-to-the-DANGERZONE! Goin'-right-in-to-the-DANGERZONE! Yes, Dubya tops the list this week for spending lots of taxpayer money on a photo-op, wasting the time of thousands of sailors who were just trying to get home, and pretending that he did something other than tequila slammers and kegstands during Vietnam. Meanwhile Rick Santorum (3) returns to the list as the fallout from his homophobic comments fails to dissipate, Bill Frist (4) and Bill Bennett (5) are giant hypocrites, and Bill O'Reilly (7) is losing ground in the fight for the braindead right. Yup, we've gotta lotta Bills this week. Bringing up the rear are Jay Garner (8) who has quite simply gone mad, and Chris Matthews (10) who wins the DU Brown Nose Award for the umpteenth time. Enjoy.

By: Marcy Gordon  

Some of the big companies caught up in accounting scandals are now asking the government to refund some of their federal taxes, saying they overpaid based on the artificially inflated profits they reported.

Now-bankrupt Enron, which paid only $63 million in taxes between 1996 and 2001, is seeking tax credits, while Qwest is believed likely to seek a refund.

"We are not commenting other than to confirm we are in discussions with the IRS", Enron spokeswoman Karen Denne said. "I'm not going to comment on the content of those discussions."

Congratulations. We've just won the wrong war.

By: William Saletan  

Remember Saddam's weapons of mass destruction - the ones whose concealment justified the invasion of Iraq? A week ago, the Washington Post reported that 38 days after entering Iraq, the United States had "yet to find weapons of mass destruction at any of the locations that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cited in his key presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February". We hadn't even "produced Iraqi scientists with evidence about them". The only thing Bush said we had learned from interrogating Saddam's scientists was that "perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some".

What about Saddam's links to terror? Bush repeated Thursday that the Iraq war had "removed an ally of al-Qaida". Really? According to the Post, U.S. officials "have not turned up anything to support Powell's claim to the Security Council that 'nearly two dozen' al Qaeda terrorists lived in and operated from Baghdad". A Los Angeles Times investigation of the al-Qaida affiliate touted by Powell found "no strong evidence of connections to Baghdad" and concluded that the group lacked "the capability to muster a serious threat beyond its mountain borders". Saddam didn't even "control the region where the [group's] camps were located".

What does Bush have to say about the absence of evidence on these two points? "This much is certain", he observed in his victory address. "No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more."

Well, that's true. No terrorist network will get weapons from Pat Moynihan, either. That doesn't make his death essential to the war on terror.

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