I know I should like him, but I have to admit that I usually don’t. Robert Scheer is the most liberal newspaper columnist at any major U.S. daily, but I consistently find his columns in the LA Times predictable, overly-dependent on rumors, and hesitant to break with ideological orthodoxy.
Today, however, Scheer is on to something.
In his LA Times column, Scheer has noticed a disturbing trend, which he accurately calls a “cynical ploy,” in which administration officials will make outrageous claims to advance their political agenda, get caught when those statements are proven false, and then conclude that they simply “misspoke.”
Scheer came up with some solid examples.
Deputy Defense Secretary and uber-hawk Paul Wolfowitz told ABC last week of alleged (and highly dubious) connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“We know [Iraq] had a great deal to do with terrorism in general and with Al Qaeda in particular and we know a great many of bin Laden’s key lieutenants are now trying to organize in cooperation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime ” Wolfowitz said.
True? No. But don’t worry, Wolfowitz later explained that he had simply misspoken. When he said that the U.S. knows of “a great many” bin Laden lieutenants working with Hussein loyalists, he meant we knew of one rogue guy who may be involved.
“[I] should have been more precise,” Wolfowitz admitted.
See? He didn’t lie or deceive. He just wasn’t precise enough. I feel better already.
There’s also the more infamous Dick Cheney claim made before the war that he believes that Iraq “has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” This claim has since been thoroughly and completely discredited, and has been used as a classic example of the administration making outlandish claims about the Iraqi threat that were later proven false.
Cheney’s response on Meet the Press over the weekend? “I did misspeak,” Cheney said. He added, “We never had any evidence that [Hussein] had acquired a nuclear weapon.”
What a convenient standard. Make an incorrect claim, hype a non-existent threat, and when you called on it, chalk it up to a verbal gaffe. Using this approach, no lie is actually a falsehood, everything is just a rhetorical error.
As Scheer put it, “The pattern is clear: Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar. It is really quite ingenious in its cynical effectiveness.”
I even remember a couple of examples that Scheer missed.
In July, Bush said, “[W]e gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”
Obviously, this was false. Hussein did let U.N. weapons inspectors in after the U.N. passed Resolution 1441, but we had the inspectors removed after they didn’t find anything so we could begin an invasion. Was Bush lying? Nope, his advisors said, just a misstatement.
I also enjoyed seeing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on July 13. Stephanopoulos reminded Rumsfeld that on March 30, he claimed that U.S. forces knew the location of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
“We know where [WMD] are,” Rumsfeld said in March. “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and, and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
Then, on the July program, four months after Rumsfeld claimed to know where the WMD are, Stephanopoulos asked if those sites had been inspected yet. Turns out — you guessed it — Rumsfeld had just misspoken and we didn’t really know their location.
“I probably should have said, ‘We know where they were,'” Rumsfeld said, “instead of, ‘We know where they are.'”
Well, this explains everything.