Years ago, I was having a conversation with a jazz pianist who told me, “When I hit a wrong note, I keep hitting it — so the audience will think it’s intentional.” To move away from the wrong note would be a subtle admission of a mistake.
The president, apparently, lives by the same principle. For months, he’s insisted that al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq are one in the same. After some pushback from the blogs, reporters started to take note of the problem and highlight how blatantly wrong Bush is. But instead of subtly shifting his rhetoric to be truthful, the president has started to hit the wrong note more, not less.
President Bush made provocative new assertions Tuesday about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq, using recently declassified information to make his case that the global battle with the terrorism network — and Americans’ safety at home — hinges on keeping U.S. troops there to fight.
Bush’s comments were met with skepticism by some terrorism experts and former U.S. intelligence officials, who said the president exaggerated or even misrepresented the facts in Iraq.
“Met with skepticism” is an exceedingly polite way of saying, “a bunch of people who know what they’re talking about were disappointed to hear Bush lying so blatantly again.”
The president, speaking to about 300 troops at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, said AQI is composed of the same terrorists who were responsible for 9/11. “[D]espite all the evidence, some will tell you that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not really Al Qaeda and not really a threat to America,” the president said. “Well, that’s like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and saying’s he’s probably just there to cash a check.”
I have to admit, I love it when Bush lies when alluding to “the evidence.” It’s much funnier that way.
And what, pray tell, is the evidence to bolster the president’s false assertions? The LA Times reported, “White House officials said Bush used declassified intelligence reports and assessments to make his case, though they would not disclose details of where the information came from.”
No, of course not.
As long as the president is going to go to the trouble of misleading the country about a war, we might as well go to the trouble of documenting his errors.
* Bush said terrorists in Iraq would be committing acts of terror whether there was a war in Iraq or not. True? Not really.
[Experts and former U.S. intelligence officials] noted that the Iraq conflict had undoubtedly attracted Islamic extremists who were trained in Afghanistan and might have fought in other theaters. But some cited an official U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released last year that described Iraq as a “cause celebre” for Islamic radicals worldwide, fanning anger and resentment across the Muslim world and beyond.
“I think what the president is saying is in some sense fundamentally misleading,” said Robert Grenier, former head of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA as well as the agency’s mission manager for the war in Iraq. “If he means to suggest the invasion of Iraq has not created more jihadists bent on killing Americans, and that if Iraq hadn’t been there as a magnet they would have been attracted somewhere else, that’s completely disingenuous.”
* Bush said AQI is a domestic threat to the U.S. True? Not really.
Several experts said prevailing U.S. intelligence was at odds with that assertion as well.
Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University, a veteran counter-terrorism analyst and government consultant, said the vast majority of fighters who are part of Al Qaeda in Iraq are Iraqis who have shown little interest in seeking targets beyond that country’s borders.
* Bush said al Qaeda and AQI are one in the same. True? No.
Some experts and former U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday that the Iraq group had always had its own agenda, as evidenced by a public fallout between Zarqawi and Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman Zawahiri, over Zarqawi’s killing of Shiite Muslims in Iraq. […]
Rand Beers, a former senior Bush and Clinton administration counter-terrorism official, said Bush was exaggerating the connections.
“There is no question that he is oversimplifying what is happening there in Iraq,” Beers said. “He is misrepresenting where the major front of Al Qaeda is, which is in Pakistan.”
* And Bush said AQI is the top threat in Iraq. True? No.
Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International studies says, the U.S. military estimates that al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group thought to number several thousand, accounts for only about 15% of the attacks in Iraq.
Tony Snow said Bush’s speech was part of a new White House “surge of facts.”
Sometimes, the jokes write themselves.