Once again the Bush administration is struggling to answer mounting questions about its misrepresentation of intelligence leading up to the war with Iraq. And once again the administration’s answers defy credibility.
Amid growing evidence that members of the White House staff deliberately blew the cover of a CIA agent in an act of sheer vindictiveness, Bush now claims that he wants nothing more than to get to the bottom of this betrayal. But if that’s true, why has it taken this long for the president to act? In the two-and-a-half months since this story first broke, it has received play in virtually all manner of media. Yet the president showed no interest in finding out who on his staff had committed this treachery until the story re-emerged this week, when it was widely reported that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate.
Similar inconsistencies marked the administration’s response to the discovery that Bush’s claim that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from an African nation, which he made in his State of the Union address, was false. The official line was that the president was unaware of the intelligence community’s doubts about this allegation. Yet the same claim had been deleted from at least one of Bush’s earlier speeches, and Colin Powell wisely chose to omit it from his U.N. presentation less than one week after the State of the Union address.
Any president worthy of the office would have noticed these glaring inconsistencies, investigated them and tried to correct the misimpression that his false statement had created among the public. But not this president. As the most recent scandal makes clear, Bush favors a different approach – lay low and hope the storm will pass, and if it doesn’t, tap dance for all you’re worth.
Edmonds
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