It's official: George W. Bush is a liar

lie: to present false information with the intention of deceiving

The Progressive Zone is full of posts flat out calling president George W. Bush a liar. I regularly correspond with a circle of friends about political matters. As you might expect, I have also referred to Bush as a liar a number of times in those email discussions.

When I do, a friend of mine always responds that it's unfair to call the president a liar. It's not that my friend is a Bush supporter -- he concedes that many inaccuracies have come from the administration. My friend just believes that I cannot be sure that the president's deception was intentional.

Of course, I respond by saying that my friend is just not connecting the dots. There's a mountain of evidence that Bush is a liar. But even I have to concede that all that evidence was circumstantial. There was no smoking gun, so to speak -- until recently.

The Washington Post reports today that the Pentagon sponsored a secret fact-finding mission to Iraq in early 2003. The mission was to investigate two trailers captured by US troops shortly after the invasion of Iraq that Bush claimed were "biological laboratories" and "weapons of mass destruction." The pentagon sent a technical team on this mission to validate that claim so Bush would be vindicated for the war.

The mission yielded a 122-page report that was quickly stamped "secret." The technical team reported conclusively that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Even though they had communicated their unanimous findings to Washington before the aforementioned statement by Bush, the administration continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories for almost a year. This is unequivocally a lie on the part of the president.

That wasn't the first smoking gun. During a discussion on the USA PATRIOT Act in 2004, Bush told America:

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

There's no way this statement can be reconciled with Bush's now infamous NSA espionage program. Of course, Bush now claims he approved of the NSA spying on US citizens without a court order because it protected the American people. He asserts that the NSA only conducts warrantless wiretaps on conversations held by international terrorists. But that still directly contradicts his 2004 statement. Regardless, the latest news out just this month is the real picture of the scope of Bush's espionage program. It turns out that the NSA is doing wholesale spying on communications where both parties are domestically-based Americans.

No matter what contortion of logic you make, there's no way that either of these two statements by Bush could be construed as unintentionally misleading. These are unquestionably bald-faced lies.

The scope of Bush's espionage program

In 2004 during a discusion on the USA PATRIOT Act, president George W. Bush told America:

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

After making that assurance, it must have been incredibly difficult for Bush to have to belie his word and approve the NSA to spy on American citizens. The mitigating factor was that the espionage was also being conducted over foreign terrorists. Therefore, even though he promised to get a court order before doing so, he decided that national security trumped his reputation for honesty. Any American chatting with al Qaeda operatives overseas deserves to be spied on anyway.

That said, Bush would never approve of spying on a phone call or email without a warrant when both parties in the communication are Americans, would he? Who better to ask than Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez. It turns out that Gonzalez was asked about that very issue during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee Friday. His response: "I'm not going to rule it out" that Bush could order warrantless wiretaps on telephone calls occurring solely within the US. Apparently, Gonzalez must have missed Bush's statement referred to above and was simply misinformed.

The best way to get to the bottom of this is to consider the wires that could be tapped. Let's look at the public statement made by former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, last week. He states that at the beginning of 2003, the NSA tapped in to AT&T's Internet backbone. From five different American cities, the NSA began "conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, web surfing or any other data." Based on his technological knowledge of the AT&T network, Klein does not believe that the NSA's spying program is limited to foreign communications.

How can we reconcile this new information with the statement Bush made in 2004? I'm afraid no amount of double-talk, diversion, and spin could possibly explain that away.

Talking out of both sides of the mouth

Everyone surprised by "Scooter" Libby's testimony to the Grand Jury please stand up. Now that everyone is seated, let's discuss the implications of that testimony. Libby claims that "the President specifically had authorized" him to disclose information in the (previously classified) National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to Judith Miller.

When the president authorizes disclosure of information, it is no longer classified. Does that exonerate the president of criminal activity? Perhaps it does on this one matter. However, it does not exonerate the president of extreme hypocrisy. Don't forget Bush's statement in September 2003: "if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."

With this clear stance against leaks from the White House, Bush should be declaring mea culpa and apologizing to the American people. Of course, after five years with this administration, America knows better. Instead, Bush trotted out his official liar, Scott McClellan, to hold a press briefing.

True to form, he diverted blame to those making "irresponsible and unfounded accusations ... against the administration, suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence." McClellan stated that declassifying the NIE "was very much in the public interest." That's right, he's claiming that disclosing sensitive intelligence to the press is the right way to combat public debate about the administration's shaping of intelligence to justify invading Iraq.

Under Bush logic, exposing a sensitive NIE to the press is the right way to respond to certain facets of the public discovering his perpetration of fraud against the American people. Yet, when someone in his administration leaks the existence of NSA espionage of American's phone lines and email that he approved, Bush claims that national security was put at risk, as if al Qaeda operatives would never have otherwise suspected that intelligence agents might be eavesdropping on their communications.

Leaving America exposed

It's well known that president George W. Bush is not much of a learned person. However, this week Bush exposed just how ignorant he is, particularly regarding geography. He clearly doesn't know where America is. Last Thursday, he published the The National Security Strategy. In his letter to his fellow Americans, Bush claimed the purpose of the strategy is "to protect the security of the American people." However, a close look at the strategy reveals that it leaves America entirely unprotected.

In his hunt for America to protect the security of her people, Bush's strategy traverses almost the entire planet. It's no secret that a major part of his strategy to protect the security of the American people is to send most of our security forces to Iraq so he can exhaust hundreds of billions of dollars worth (and the lives of 2600 troops so far) of protective resources on the opposite side of the planet. He also considers Afghanistan a logical outpost to protect Americans. The strategy also mentions Syria and Iran as possible locations to defend America. The list of foreign lands where we need to secure America's safety could go on and on were it to include all those Bush identifies in his strategy.

Ironically, his strategy hardly recognizes the United States. Although a reasonable person would consider the homeland as the best place to defend the American people from attack, Bush's strategy makes no mention of our ports, where millions of containers enter this country unchecked every day. It does not address our borders, where millions of foreigners cross into our country unchecked every year. The strategy does not include aviation, the instrument of the last catastrophic attack against the American people. It does not mention protecting us from terrorist cells now on our own soil, even though one of the most deadly terrorist attacks ever perpetrated inside our borders was executed by natural-born American citizens in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Instead, Bush's strategy to secure the American people is to expend our security resources just about everywhere but America. An objective analysis of the effectiveness of Bush's strategy shows that it has been an abysmal failure in the past. Yet, he continues to pursue it. Someone needs to turn Bush around and tell him that the American people are here in the United States.

American liberties reach a new low

It was a bad day for liberty in the US yesterday. It's hard to think of any other single day in American history during which more liberties were dashed. Sadly, Americans have become so calloused to having their freedom eroded away that hardly a peep was heard. Here are the liberties that were lost Thursday.

The USA PATRIOT Act has been eroding liberties for years now. Fortunately, some of the most controversial sections of the Act had a sunset provision to be retired at the end of 2005 (although Congress agreed to extend it a short time for them to consider whether or not to make those sections permanent instead). To prevent this from happening, Senator Feingold (D - Wis.) proposed amendments to the Act. They included an amendment that would set an expiration of provisions regarding National Security Letters in four years. Sadly, the Senate voted 93 to 3 against Feingold's amendment yesterday. This sets up the provisions most intrusive on our liberties to almost certainly be made permanent by Senate vote in the near future.

The abuses of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are well documented. What is not well documented is how people's freedoms are being robbed there. There are nearly 600 detainees who have been held there for about three years without being accused of a crime, permitted a trial, or allowed legal representation. All this in spite of the fact that they have not been proven to have any connection to terrorism. They will be held there indefinitely and there is no intent for the Bush administration to give them their day in court. Some of them are American citizens.

The U.N. is reporting that the United States is violating the basic human rights of the detainees, including a ban on torture, arbitrary detention, and the right to a fair trial. The U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Anna, said that "Sooner or later there will be a need to close Guantanamo and it will be up to the government to decide and hopefully to do it as soon as possible." True to form, the Bush administration dismisses the report and yesterday refused to close its prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. It proves it has no qualms about perpetuating the eradication of basic liberties in the name of its losing war on terrorism.

The latest news about the abuse of Americans' freedom is the president's program to spy on private phone conversations with American citizens on domestic soil without a warrant. The more news that is released, the more is learned about the lengths to which our basic right to privacy derived from the fourth amendment of the Bill of Rights is violated. Not the slightest deterred, the administration vows to continue this program, even with opponents on both the left and the right. Unfortunately, the Senate has joined the ranks of invertebrates. Yesterday, they voted to stop the hearings into laws broken in the past so they could look at changing the law in the future instead (as if that would somehow make past illegal activity okay).

This sudden rash of freedom-robbing activity yesterday is unprecedented. Even with the slow erosion of liberty under the Bush administration for the past few years, this latest news shows that America's liberties have reached a new low.

Above the law

President George W. Bush has made it very apparent that he considers himself above the law. There are no lack of examples that are now well known by the American people ... at least, those who are not sticking their heads in the sand to avoid cognitive dissonance.

Those who have researched the details of the facts surrounding the gathering of intelligence about WMD in Iraq know that the president actively conducted a campaign of deceit against the American people. He believed that the law did not apply to actions he had to take to get buy-in for the invasion of Iraq. Of course, the president wouldn't have let the American people stop him from deposing Saddam Hussein anyway. The Downing Street Memo showed us that the Iraq War was a foregone conclusion. It is irrefutable evidence that the president had decided before July 23, 2002, that he was going to invade Iraq, even though the US Constitution says he must first get the authorization of congress.

It's not just American law which the president thumbs his nose at. The Geneva Conventions are international treaties that forbid torture. Although the US is party to these laws, its military force and intelligence agencies have been exposed as returning to the use of torture under the command of president Bush.

The latest news which serves as another example of the president acting as if he were above the law is only public because of a leak. The president has ordered the NSA to conduct electronic surveillance of communication with thousands of American citizens without a court order. Although the program, which spies on both telephone calls and email, has been ongoing for the past four years, the president has not requested a subpoena from a FISA court to approve the action to this day. Clearly, the president believes he is not subject to Amendment IV of the Bill of Rights.

However, there is an even more sinister way in which the president thinks he is above the law which few Americans know about. It turns out that during his first term, the president scribed an unprecedented 108 signing statements when executing legislation. Signing statements are addenda written by the president to bills passed by congress. However, the statements give the terms and conditions of the bill which the president desires. In other words, while the legislature thinks he's signing their bill into law, the president is actually writing and executing his own law.

For example, congress recently passed a defense appropriation bill with an amendment that forbids torture. It was the amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain which the president and vice president Dick Cheney vigorously fought to defeat. However, after congress passed the appropriation bill anyway, the president would look bad vetoing it because it would mean not providing funding to the war he started. The president's solution was to add his own signing statement to the bill. The statement, written in convoluted legaleze so the average American would not understand it, said basically that the president is not subject to the bill and would disobey the law as he sees fit.

The president obviously considers himself above the law. Unfortunately, his signing statements demonstrate that he also considers himself the author of the law. Hopefully, the Supreme Court won't support one of his signing statements in the future to establish legal precedence for this impunity.

The hearing no one hears

Congressman John Conyers held a hearing yesterday into president Bush's warrantless domestic spy program. Sadly, not a word about the hearing was heard in the mainstream media. Granted, the hearing was relegated to the basement of the Rayburn building during a congressional recess when you'd think that plenty of hearing rooms would be available. However, that alone should have been provocative enough to get traction in the media because of the manner in which the hearing got its "unofficial" status.

Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, the committee which is obligated to investigate when the executive ignores the law. As such, Conyers appealed to congressman James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the committee, to initiate investigation of Bush's espionage program. Unfortunately, albeit not surprisingly, Sensenbrenner has not scheduled one.

Sensenbrenner is a Republican and, like the rest of his GOP cohort in the House, he protects the president from exposure to anything that brings his administration into question, regardless of what impeachable offenses the president commits. Just as when Sensenbrenner refused to call hearings to investigate whether the president deceived the nation to go to war in Iraq, even after the Downing Street Memo became public, Conyers was denied an official hearing room to conduct his investigations. And just as in those hearings, not a single Republican congressman showed up at yesterday's hearing.

They weren't the only no-shows. Conyers also invited attorney general Alberto Gonzales to the hearing but neither he nor anyone else from the administration attended. You would think that Bush supporters would want to attend the hearing. After all, if the accusations against him were truly spurious, as Bush would have you believe, they would be easy to expose as such. However, the truth is more likely that no Republicans attended because they have no ammunition with which to defend Bush. Consequently, the hearing will likely be dismissed as a partisan affair.

Nonetheless, you can still hear it thanks to C-Span. If you have RealPlayer installed on your PC, you can hear the entirety of yesterday's hearing at (the same URI as in the first hyperlink at the top of this post to the blog):
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/ter/ter012006_spying.rm