I’ll give Dick Cheney some credit — he’s very slick. When he speaks, he comes across as confident and informed. Whereas Bush appears clumsy and confused, Cheney speaks with authority and conviction.
The problem is, however, very little of what Cheney has to say is true.
The White House has begun its full-fledged defense of the administration’s planning for, and execution of, war in Iraq. Dick Cheney was Tim Russert’s sole guest on Meet the Press yesterday, and most of their discussion focused on Iraq. It was Cheney’s first time answering media questions in six months.
Unfortunately, Cheney repeatedly (and brazenly) made claims he had to have known were untrue. Let me just highlight a few of the most disturbing ones.
Cheney was asked, for example, if Iraq was involved with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Instead of the right answer, which would have been “No,” Cheney said, “We don’t know.”
“With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there,” Cheney said. “The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. No one in U.S. intelligence circles believes that this meeting took place. The FBI has evidence that Atta was in the United States (in Florida) at the time of the alleged meeting. The CIA has looked at this claim, and believes it to be bogus. Even the Czechs, who originally raised the claim, no longer believe it to be reliable. Cheney surely knows this, but apparently has no qualms in repeating the discredited claim to further confuse the public about the non-existent evidence tying Saddam Hussein to 9/11.
Asked about Hussein’s supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Cheney wouldn’t back down. Noting that we knew about the WMD “program” before the war, Cheney said, “[W]e know he had 500 tons of uranium.”
What Cheney failed to mention — I’m sure it just slipped his mind — is that the uranium found in Iraq before the invasion was low-grade and unusable in a nuclear weapon. It’s a pretty important detail to leave out, but again, the truth would make for less persuasive propaganda.
Cheney added, “We had intelligence reporting before the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack.”
Again, Cheney deliberately offers spin as fact so as to mislead. While he insisted these labs that could wreak WMD havoc, the U.S. has believed for over a month that the trailers we’ve found had nothing to do with WMD. Since finding the labs, the U.S. State Department, British intelligence officials, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency have all concluded that these trailers couldn’t have been used for manufacturing or delivering biological weapons, as Cheney suggested.
Of course, Cheney’s deceptions weren’t limited to foreign policy. When asked about the administration’s record-high budget deficits, Cheney repeated an oft-repeated lie.
“The fact of the matter is, we’ve always made exceptions for recession, national emergency, time of war,” Cheney said. Bush has said the same thing on numerous occasions.
The truth, however, is that neither Bush nor Cheney ever made any of those exceptions when promising to keep a balanced budget. Bush repeated the claim for months even after it had been debunked and now Cheney is doing the same thing. They have no shame.
On a similar note, Cheney deflected criticism that the administration’s reckless tax cuts for the wealthy made the deficit so outrageously high. “Tax cuts accounted for only about 25 percent of the deficit,” Cheney said. Bush has repeated the same claim in several recent speeches.
They’re both wrong. As Spinsanity explained last week, “According to the recent mid-session review issued in July by [the Office of Management and Budget], the total cost in fiscal 2003 of tax cuts passed in 2001, 2002 and 2003 is $177 billion. The total deficit: $455 billion. That means tax cuts account for 39 percent of the deficit. Bush couldn’t have been referring to the five-year deficit project by OMB either, as the tax cuts equal 63 percent of the cumulative $1.9 trillion deficit from 2003-2008.
Lastly, if I had to pick the most ridiculous of all of Cheney’s remarks, it’d be, “I am a deficit hawk. So is the president.”