Bush's Credibility Canyon - WSJ's Al Hunt [View All]

[question everything]

April 1, 2004

POLITICS & PEOPLE
By ALBERT R. HUNT

(snip)

What non-Bush partisan believes the administration's current contention that counterterrorism was a big priority prior to 9/11? Or that the White House straightforwardly evaluated intelligence before going to war in Iraq? Or that the administration didn't deceive Congress on the true cost of a Medicare bill in order to ensure the measure's passage?

(snip)

OK, leave aside Mr. Clarke's testimony, and simply try to explain reaction to the U.S.S. Cole, a destroyer that was attacked, while docked in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, and 17 Americans were killed by terrorists. It wasn't until the closing weeks of the Clinton administration that the FBI and CIA were willing to definitively say it was the work of al Qaeda -- although Dick Clarke knew it was instantly -- causing President Clinton to hold off any actions. But the al Qaeda tie was established by the time the new administration took office, supposedly determined to end the Clinton vacillation on such matters. Yet for eight months they not only did nothing, but the record suggests they didn't even seriously consider retaliation.

(snip)

Will Mr. Ashcroft admit the indifference he displayed to terrorism in the months before 9/11? In mid-2001, he listed seven priorities; fighting terrorism was not one of them. He rejected the FBI's request for an additional $58 million for counterterrorism and reduced anti-terrorism grants to states and localities.

(snip)

Now the president says he doesn't like to read newspapers, but it'd be good to make an exception and look at last Sunday's Los Angeles Times front page. He'd find a brilliantly reported story that these much-ballyhooed mobile units were based on a discredited Iraqi defector with the appropriate code name of Curveball. His story was totally bogus, the former Bush weapons inspector David Kay told the Times, as Curveball "was an out-and-out fabricator."

On the domestic front, the greatest deception was what almost certainly was a White House-engineered plot to prevent the Medicare actuary from giving Congress honest estimates of the cost of a prescription drug bill; if he had, enough conservative Republicans might have bolted and defeated the measure, which the president wanted for his reelection purposes. "If unreliable numbers were given to Congress in order to pass the bill, that's real and serious deception," declares former GOP Sen. Rudman.

(snip)

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108079363879771359,00.html