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The Spin is Not Holding
10/04/2003 @ 11:09pm
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The spin is not holding. Facing two controversies--the Wilson leak and the still-MIA WMDs--the White House has been tossing out explanations and rhetoric that cannot withstand scrutiny. ...

...Perhaps Bush needed a good chuckle after reading--or being briefed on--the testimony that chief weapons hunter David Kay was presenting that day to Congress. In an interim report, Kay had noted that his Iraq Survey Group had found evidence of "WMD-related program activities," but no stocks of unconventional weapons. Kay also had an interesting observation about the prewar intelligence on Iraq's WMDs: "Our understanding of the status of Iraq's WMD program was always bounded by large uncertainties and had to be heavily caveated."

Wait a minute. That was not what Bush and his compadres had said prior to the war. Flash back to Bush's get-out-of-town speech on March 17, two days before he launched the war. He maintained, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal" weapons of mass destruction. Yet Kay was saying there had been "large uncertainties" in the intelligence. How does that square with Bush's no-doubt claim? It doesn't. ...

...Reality check: Bush had said that the main reason to go to war was because Hussein possessed "massive" stockpiles of unconventional weapons and at any moment could hand them off to al Qaeda (with whom Bush claimed Hussein was "dealing"--even though the evidence on that point was and continues to be, at best, sketchy). Now Bush is asserting that Hussein was a threat that could only be countered with invasion and occupations because he had weapons research programs that indeed violated United Nations resolutions but that had not produced any weapons. That's a much different argument. Bush, Cheney, McClellan, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and others continue to deny they overstated (or misrepresented) the case for war. But the evidence is incontrovertible, and it keeps on piling up.

So all they have is spin. Bush changes the terms. McClellan, Rumsfeld, Rice insist that before the war everybody knew that Iraq had WMDs. Everybody, that is, except the folks putting together the intelligence assessments chockfull of uncertainties. When it comes to the Wilson affair, the White House ducks and covers, claiming it had no reason to react to the original anonymous-source leak, even though its officials (at the least) considered the leak solid enough to talk up to other reporters. And instead of confronting the ugly (and perhaps criminal) implications of the leak, the White House's allies in Washington lash out at Wilson, in a vicious blame-the-victim offensive, while Mister Change-the-Tone has nothing to say publicly about this. What if Wilson is a Democratic partisan? That does not excuse what was done to his wife.

Leaking and lying--these are not actions easy to explain away. Drip, drip, drip--that's the sound often associated with Washington scandals. But now it may also be the sound of the truth catching up to the propagandists and perps of the Bush White House.