Secrecy, Spin & Lies

Scheduling the announcement of the Libby Indictment on Friday has led to a cornucopia of news articles and blogs on the meaning and impact of the criminal investigation on the Bush Administration. You could have spent the week-end reading various versions of the Plame Leak scandal, dissecting its meaning from one end of the political spectrum to another. For me, bloggers firedoglake and TalkLeft provide the perfect detailed combination of news review and gossip to sate my need to stay up to date on the latest.

In the press, two articles, the NYTimes' Frank Rich, One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada (found at Truthout), and Dick Polman, the Political Analyst for the Inquirer, in Libby prosecution puts justification for war on trial, provide the in-depth review of the situation.

Rich leads with a comparison to Watergate:

"To believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took 'responsibility' for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name 'the White House horrors.'"

Rich notes issues related to the Plame Leak and other pre-War intelligence failures and cover-ups that are just surfacing. He adds:

"There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?"

"These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and outright lies."

Polman comes at it from a different angle. As he put it:

"The Bush administration's rationale for war is now officially on trial. . . . This case is about the credibility of the war architects who pushed to invade Iraq while assailing dissenters who questioned the evidence."

Polman highlights the will to war by Cheney and Libby that began during the first Bush presidency until the war became the reality, along with the push to punish any who dared to stand in the way.

Each article exposes the Administration's devotion to secrecy, spin and lies, and the adverse consequences from that which are unfolding on a daily basis, which is ultimately the story that needs to be told.