The Pinocchio presidency
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/16/wilson_iraq/
Joe Wilson (yes, that Joe Wilson) takes issue with BushCo’s blatant lying.
...No more will we stand idly by while the president hides from the 9/11 commission. We will learn what he knew and when he knew it. We have already learned that it was the Bush White House that gave the orders to fly Osama bin Laden’s family and a suspected al-Qaida go-between out of the country in the days after 9/11 even as Americans were grounded.
No more will we stand idly by while the administration manipulates intelligence, like the Niger uranium fraud, or worse yet, uses manufactured intelligence from discredited sources to circumvent the necessary channels of government, forcing lies instead of facts to become the basis on which policy decisions are made. And we will not accept attempts to scapegoat the intelligence services when it is abundantly clear that the main problem is the perversion of the system by a few at the top, not the system itself. We will not accept the lies by Bush and his pack of surrogates that John Kerry is not committed to proper intelligence, when in fact it is this administration that has politicized and deranged intelligence to an unprecedented degree.
No more will we stand idly by while the administration blatantly lies about the reasons it went to war with Iraq, or about the costs of the occupation. This was not a war about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, or even about the liberation of Iraq and the overthrow of a brutal tyrant. This was a war about “changing the dynamics” in the Middle East, as neoconservative William Kristol stated in a recent debate with me in Odessa, Texas. But we did not debate a “change the dynamics” war. That was not the reason Bush gave to our Congress when it voted on a war resolution. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, guardsmen, reservists, and their families deserve the truth from their government. As taxpayers, we deserve to know why $150 billion has been spent to put Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted bank embezzler, back in Baghdad—and why the Pentagon keeps financing his operations with U.S. dollars after he has openly boasted to having provided a stream of false information to government officials. We also deserve to know why Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, so badly miscalculated what we would be required to spend on the reconstruction of Iraq when he told Ted Koppel on ABC’s “Nightline” that our expenditures would not exceed $1.7 billion, total. Now we know the cost will run to hundreds of billions.
No more will we stand idly by while the Bush campaign lies about John Kerry’s record on defense and national security. The criticism of his vote to shut down the B-2 bomber program came about as the result of recommendations by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and President George H.W. Bush. It is outrageous for the Bush-Cheney campaign to take that vote out of context, as it is outrageous to suggest that a unanimously adopted congressional resolution to return monies hidden away in the National Reconnaissance Office to the taxpayer is to be weak on national security…