'Bush/Cheney Still Lie With Abandon By Robert Parry
Consortuimnews
What makes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney such extraordinary threats to the future of American democracy is their readiness to tell half-truths and outright lies consistently without any apparent fear of accountability.
While other politicians might spin some facts in a policy debate or tell a fib about a personal indiscretion, President Bush and Vice President Cheney act as if they have the power and the right to manufacture reality itself, often on matters of grave significance that bear on war and peace or the future of the nation.
Even in the face of growing public skepticism, Bush and Cheney continue to invent new lies and retell old ones, seemingly with the goal of at least keeping their gullible right-wing "base" behind the faux reality depicted on Fox News, the Rush Limbaugh radio show and other right-wing media outlets.
So, on April 5, Cheney showed no hesitancy in telling Limbaugh's listeners both an old canard about how Saddam Hussein's Iraq was in league with al-Qaeda terrorists and a new one about how a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."
Cheney surely knows that U.S. intelligence analysts have reached the opposite conclusions on both points - that there was no operational relationship between Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda; that terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was based in a section of northern Iraq outside Hussein's control; and that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been a boon to al-Qaeda that the terrorist group wants to extend, not end.
As one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, known as "Atiyah," wrote more than a year ago, "prolonging the war is in our interest." The letter, dated Dec. 11, 2005, and obtained by U.S. intelligence after Zarqawi's death in June 2006, urged that Zarqawi's jihadists in Iraq show patience and restraint in deepening their ties to Iraqi Sunni insurgents.
[To read the "prolonging the war" passage from the Atiyah letter at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, click here and then scroll down to the bottom of page 16 and the top of page 17.]'
Lees verder: http://consortiumnews.com/2007/040607.html Of:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040907N.shtml
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