The Bush White House sternly and piously denounced leaks of classified and sensitive information even as the president and his aides were assiduously and selectively leaking secrets that would help make their case.
By DALE McFEATTERS
The Bush White House sternly and piously denounced leaks of classified and sensitive information even as the president and his aides were assiduously and selectively leaking secrets that would help make their case.
Inside the Beltway, this kind of two-facedness is well within the standards of acceptable hypocrisy, but it may be a shock to the system of some of the president’s more ardent supporters who took the White House’s mock outrage at face value.
The probe that culminated in the perjury-and-obstruction trial of “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Cheney, originally set out to determine who leaked the identity of a CIA agent married to a Bush administration critic. The answer, now that the case has come to trial, appears to be: Who didn’t?
The source of the leak to columnist Robert Novak was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, by any definition a senior Bush administration official. Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s first White House spokesman, is expected to testify that he discussed the identity of the agent, Valerie Plame, with reporters.
And Cheney’s staff drew up plans leaking the name and debated to whom to give the leak — The New York Times or The Washington Post, both regularly denounced by the White House for printing leaks, Time or Newsweek, maybe NBC?
The president himself, it seems, was involved in leaking selected parts of a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate, supposedly one of the government’s most closely guarded documents. With a straight face, the White House explained that the president wasn’t leaking; he was declassifying.
Cheney’s former communications director, Cathie Martin, testified she got in hot water with a top Bush aide who thought she was the source of a leak the White House was trying to blame the CIA for giving the president inaccurate information. Indeed, the White House was leaking to shift the blame to the CIA, but apparently it wasn’t Martin who was doing the leaking. The actual leaker’s name has yet to come to light.
The next time grim-faced Bush aides appear on TV to denounce the press for printing a leaked story, consider: You may be looking at the leaker.
22 thoughts on “Bush’s bald-faced hypocrisy on leaks”
Amen, Keith….terrific!
And the same to the less than useless House and Senate and their laughable non-binding resolutions. They are wholly owned by the same hellhouds that own Bush himself.
IMPEACH NOW and CUT OFF WAR FUNDS NOW.
That will never happen. Never.
We live in a fascist state that would make Mussolini himself proud. Get used to it.
GOD DAMN THEM
GOD FUCKING DAMN THEIR SOULS TO AN EVERLASTING BURNING HELL
Keith said: “You’ve told us that Iran is actually trying to develop nuclear weapons and that it would eventually become a de-stabilizing threat to its neighbors.”
I am ANGRY at the Bush Regime and I am ANGRY at the press.
Someone in the Bush Regime obviously leaked the fact that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. On the surface it would seem to be a vindictive attempt to discredit in some way Joseph Wilson’s outing their lies regarding “yellowcake… from Africa…”.
But was that REALLY the reason? The PRESS, our vaunted FREE PRESS, which is anything BUT, constantly harps on the surface issues. But what they almost always neglect to tell us is that Plame headed up a super secret spy network whose reason for existence was to find out if and where nuclear weapons may exist in the Middle East, including IRAN. He cover included a false front corporation which also provided cover for her agents in IRAN and elsewhere. When her cover was blown it is most probable that a number of agents, probably Iranian citizens among others, lost their lives. And of course the operation ended, terminating forever any chance to really know whether Iran, and others, may have been pursuing construction of nuclear weapons.
So why does the press constantly push the Plame/Wilson case in our faces WITHOUT mentioning the terrible urgency of that within which she was involved? Who are they protecting? What is really happening behind the scenes?
Was the Bush Regime really acting in a childish snit trying to discredit Joseph Wilson? OR did they want to make dead certain that NO ONE could really know if Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons so that for their own deeper nefarious purposes could claim as they are today that they “KNOW” that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons? We might have had a better chance to really know had they not blown Plame’s cover. What is the real reason they are bound and determined to go to war with Iran? Is it over OIL? GOLD? WHAT? WHO is really behind all of this?
A nuclear war is coming and it might have been prevented had the Plame network been allowed to continue its function.
BUSH, CHENEY, RUMSFELD, WOLFOWITZ, ASHCROFT, GONZALEZ, RICE and MORE are ALL guilty of TREASON!
And because the press is PROTECTING THEM we will never know why. But one thing is certain, because of the BUSH REGIME we are closer than ever to the HELL-DAMNED MUSHROOM CLOUD over our country.
ANGRY. I AM SUPREMELY, OUTRAGEOUSLY, INSANELY ANGRY at what has happened to our country. These people are TRAITORS. TRAITORS whose only purpose is to line their pockets with GOLD and to RULE THE WORLD THROUGH FEAR.
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hello Keith,
Absolutely brilliant. I know/agree with everything you said. I cried, when those farm workers given by war-lords in Afganistan got paid money to say they were working for Bin laden were shipped to Gitmo…the youngest was 14 the oldest almost 100….tortured, to make it look good for all these years. Can anyone imagine, the suffering they have endurded for these lies/this hoax on the American people. Someone, I swear to God, needs to pay for these atrocoties done to fellow human beings, who did nothing, I repeat nothing to us. Bush stated last week as did his parrot Hillary ” We need to get the enemy before they come and hurt us again”.
When in the hell did Iraq or their people ever hurt us?
God/the Great Spirit is watching this final act…I think,feel most of you will survive the insanity of Bush, because you seek truth & honesty, and fair treatment of ALL HUMAN BEINGS, BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL OUR BROTHERS!
Who cares if you are Christain, a Jew, an Arab,a Hindu, a Muslim. I remember Gandhi’s words, sort of what I just posted.
I guess I can only say “soften your hearts, for there is much to do and little time left.
That message was given
to me and several western Indian elders, in 1993, 14 years ago! But we made time, we made religion to control the massess. It fits doesn’t it.
Thank you Sandy, thank you Keith and of course thank you Ray. You all have hearts & souls,who still care about all of the rest of humanity who ( unbeknownst to Bush) caring people with no agenda are not corrupted by the media,& all lies he spews from a forked tongue.
If any of you would like to hear about Indian prophecy. I did a tape for OU….it is http://www.oub.org..conversations from Studio B,or 1340am, at 12:30pm this Sunday.
HellO Kent too, your comments are brilliant, keep up the good work for all of us.
Jennifer/Wisdomkeeper
[…] Bush’s bald-faced hypocrisy on leaks […]
Good call Kieth. here,here
Ray
Hypocrisy Rules!!
(Just ask the Dumya!)
Well said, Keith. As usual, your comments are right on target. It’s just too bad that our Prevaricator-in-Chief is shielded from reading such analyses of reality, the better to preserve his little fantasy world.
Mr. President, the American people have never liked being lied to. And since you have become our President, you have been telling some whoppers. Here’s just a few more from the growing list:
Right after 9/11 you told us that our forces would be hunting for Bin Laden until he and his ilk were “brought to justice”. However, soon thereafter, you removed most of the troops that were looking for him. You have since allowed his trail to go “stone cold”.
Then, you told us that we needed to invade Iraq, a sovereign nation, because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was somehow a “grave” threat to our “national security”. You even gave bogus “evidence” of the existence of those weapons to one of our nation’s most honored and credible military leaders of the modern era…General Colin Powell…and then marched him off in front of the United Nations to repeat your lies about your justification for invading Iraq. To date, and nearly four years later, no weapons of mass destruction have ever been found. It was all lies.
And, once you and your armed forces had clearly toppled Hussein’s government, you then strutted across the deck of that aircraft carrier in your flight suit and cowboy hat and arrogantly informed us all that our “mission” in Iraq had been “accomplished”. It’s now almost four years later and, after sending over 3000 of our young men and women to die while maiming tens of thousands more (not to mention killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in your “war of liberation” there), you and your handlers are sending even MORE men and women (ON TOP OF the hundred and fifty thousand or so that you’ve been keeping in the region ever since that mission was supposedly “accomplished”!) to once more fight and die in Iraq. You keep calling it the “war in Iraq”. It is no longer anything of the sort. It is nation building, pure and simple. More lies.
What’s more, because of your lies, none of us can be exactly sure how many of our sons and daughters have actually been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s because you have insured that nobody outside the US Government ever gets to see (or count) the flag-draped coffins as they return to the United States. You say this is to “protect and honor their families”. Yet you, as our esteemed Commander in Chief, directed your military minions to ship those same remains back to their families as ordinary airfreight in the military equivalent of a “plain brown wrapper”. This action was only stopped when the media FINALLY exposed this procedure for all to see.
That is, other countries, like Canada, routinely and compassionately offer families the option of repatriating the remains of THEIR brave war dead with full military honors on national television. Most families there proudly elect to do so. Yet, you directed the families of OUR brave fallen veterans to secretly stop by and collect their fallen loved ones from the dark and dingy cargo terminals of local airports. Full military honors at these “collections” are not routinely offered and were only provided AFTER the family initiated such requests. Even then, such honors were provided only after the family endured massively bureaucratic runarounds However, this approach suited you and your warmongering goons just fine because what’s out of sight from the public (and the media) is also out of mind. Lies on top of lies.
You’ve categorically denied that prisoners from your “war on terror” were being tortured. But then we were shown pictures from those prisons that clearly proved, once again, that you were lying to us. Next, you got long-standing international laws and agreements to which our country is signatory (such as the Geneva Conventions) and which expressly prohibit such torture radically altered. You told us this is to “protect our troops”, which is yet another lie because such changes actually INCREASE the likelihood our own troops will be tortured in future conflicts. What you haven’t told us, however, is that such changes do, in fact, very nicely help protect you and your goon squads’ rearward facing anatomies from prosecution for war crimes. Lies, lies and more lies.
And, in your feeble attempts to get around other provisions of US law and the Geneva Convention, you’ve even lied about what you label those prisoners from your “war on terror”. You call them “detainees” rather than “prisoners of war”, and you’ve kept them locked up and out of sight. This keeps you from also having to treat them in a humane way under US law. Lies, lies and more lies.
What’s more, with the notable exception of the gulag you DID admit to running down at Guantanamo Bay, you categorically denied keeping some of those prisoners locked up in foreign jails. However, under continuing pressure from the courts, you have admitted that, well, er…yes… you HAVE been keeping some of those prisoners locked up elsewhere, too. Lies, lies and more lies.
You and your cronies have labeled the Government of Iran as a “threat” to world peace because they now wish to start producing electricity from nuclear materials, something that dozens of other counties around the world (like the US, France, Japan, Germany and Canada) do on a regular basis. You’ve told us that Iran is actually trying to develop nuclear weapons and that it would eventually become a de-stabilizing threat to its neighbors. Unfortunately, you’ve conveniently failed to also mention that Government of Israel already has HUNDREDS of nuclear weapons stockpiled in the region (provided by the United States no less!) and that they’ve been pointing many of them straight at Iran…for decades. Mr. President, that’s called “lying by omission”.
What’s more, rather than admitting that it is YOUR Administration’s imperialistic policies that have stirred up all this madness in the Middle East, you’ve apparently convinced yourself that, somehow, your own citizens and the media are at fault because we are now refusing to believe your lies, and are starting to speak out in ever larger numbers in public against you and your obvious lack of veracity.
Mr President, during your time in office, you’ve uttered so many lies, on top of lies on top of yet more lies to the point that Americans now have no choice but to believe that your lying is pathological. And they are growing more and more ashamed because it is now clear beyond a shadow of doubt that they have a pathological liar as their President.
What’s more, Mr. President, thanks largely to you and your lies, our once proud nation has now become a country that projects everything that it is not, and condemns everything that it is.
John, you are more than correct in your statement. We have no business trying to force our Pseudo-democracy onto any other country. It’s all propaganda. Our country is NOT the richest, nor the best in the world, nor the most high tech, nor just. We’ve been fed a huge pig in a poke for many a year, and the bulk of the American people have gulped it all down as if it’s ambrosia. It’s going to turn into a Very bitter pill, and I suspect that time is not far off, unfortunately. 🙁
Excuse me, Mr. Hanks, but your statement is an insult to those of us who came from the lower middle class, yet have values far above anything it would occur to Bush to display. Be careful who you look down upon. Your feeling of class superiority is made you look as if your britches are lowered.
If this system is not able to handle corruption in intself; it has no business being exported into the rest of the world at gunpoint.
Comments are closed.