Bush's Joke About WMD Draws Criticism

Associated Press. Fri, March 26, 2004

WASHINGTON - President Bush's humorous references to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have drawn criticism from Democrats as inappropriate for wartime.

"This is a very serious issue," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said Friday on "Good Morning America" on ABC. "We've lost hundreds of troops, as you know, over there. Let's not be laughing about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction."

Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites)'s campaign said in a statement Thursday, "If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought."

Bush provided amusing descriptions of photographs Wednesday night during the annual dinner of the Radio and Television News Correspondents Association. Some showed the president in awkward poses as he looked behind furniture in the Oval Office. For those photos, Bush told the audience, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere ... nope, no weapons over there ... maybe under here?" Laughter erupted from the crowd of journalists, politicians and their guests then and at other times during Bush's remarks.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters Thursday she has treated the subject with respect and doesn't find it funny. "I had thought that that was a little casual about a serious subject, but now the president has made it open season," said Pelosi, who attended the dinner.

Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton called the joke "one of the most despicable acts of a sitting president" when he spoke Thursday night during a Democratic National Committee reception.

"Well, that's not a joke to us, Mr. Bush. Five hundred soldiers lost their lives, looking for weapons that weren't there. Billions of taxpayer dollars were spent looking for weapons that weren't there," Sharpton said. "But guess what? You gonna look out that window in January and see a moving van to send you back to Texas."

McAuliffe said legitimate questions have been raised about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a principal reason for going to war there. Nearly 600 U.S. soldiers have died since the war began in March 2003. "They're not there. That is the issue. We should not take it to a new step to make fun of the situation," McAuliffe said.

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Meanwhile... from COMMON DREAMS, the real story:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0318-04.htm

Published on Thursday, March 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Journalists Find Many Ways to Kill Truth in Iraq

by Ira Chernus



Truth dies, just as people die, every day in Iraq. Sometimes the people are killed by Americans paid with our tax dollars. But we rarely hear about it, thanks to other Americans, the ones who kill

truth: the journalists. There are different ways to send truth to its grave, as two current examples prove.

On March 13 the Iranian news agency Mehr reported a story that, if true, is surely the biggest news of this election year: "U.S. forces have unloaded a large cargo of parts for constructing long-range

missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the southern ports of Iraq. A reliable source from the Iraqi Governing Council, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Mehr News Agency that U.S. forces, with the help of British forces stationed in southern Iraq, had made extensive efforts to conceal their actions."

According to Mehr's source, the parts are old ones, just the kind the U.S. gave to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Once they are "discovered," they would be the smoking gun that George W. needs to get re-elected.

Five days after Mehr broke this story, a Google and Lexis/Nexis search failed to find it reported in any U.S. news source. Not even a story to say "We checked and found nothing to support the allegations." Why? Two possibilities come to mind. Perhaps American journalists in Iraq, and their editors at home, saw it and said "Oh, that's silly. With all the serious stuff we have to investigate, why waste a good reporter's precious time on such nonsense?" They are not warmongers or conspirators, just serious professionals doing their job in the approved manner. They got their jobs by sticking to

mainstream "common sense" thinking. Why change now?

Oh yes, they did use the same kind of mainstream "common sense" last year, when they assumed that the Bush administration must have secret evidence of Saddam's WMDs. But you don't abandon "common sense" just because of an occasional mistake, do you?

The other possibility is that some American journalists believe the U.S. might indeed be planting WMD parts in Iraq for pre-election "discovery." But the story is just too hot, too dangerous to touch. A reporter for a mainstream U.S. news source knows that his or her editor might very well not run it in any event. So why waste time on it, when so many other good stories are out there that could see the light of day.

In either event, if there is a startling pre-election "discovery," hang on to your Mehr News Agency report and remember: You saw it here first.

Of course, you don't have to bury the news to kill the truth. You can kill it by reporting it in a lethal way. That's what Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times did on March 17.

He revealed that, twice a week, Captain Jonathan Tracy hands out "sympathy payments" to the relatives of Iraqi civilians killed or injured by the U.S. military. No admission of U.S. guilt, but you get $1,000 for an injury and $2,500 for a death. Now you know what Iraqi life is worth, in official U.S. eyes. Captain Tracy, who is only 27, says he is "getting pretty burned out." That is understandable. It's a hellish job.

To make it worse, Tracy has to worry about cheaters. How does he know that the Iraqis who come asking for payments really deserve them? He "checks each claim a civilian files against a database of military incident reports," Gettlemen reported. "We do keep records of innocent civilians who are killed accidentally by coalition force soldiers," said Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, assistant commander for the

First Armored Division, which patrols Baghdad. "And, in fact, in every one of those innocent death situations, we conduct internal investigations to determine what happened."

But earlier in the very same news story, Gettlemen wrote: "Military officials say they do not have precise figures or even estimates of the number of noncombatant Iraqis killed and wounded by American-led

forces in Iraq. 'We don't keep a list,' said a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell. 'It's just not policy.'"

We used to assume that what Commander Campbell said was true. We rely on websites like www.iraqbodycount.net because we thought that our government was killing and not bothering to count the victims. Now we just ain't sure, because our nation's newspaper of record says, in the very same story, that our government does and does not keep a list.

When you say it's both night and day at the same time, truth is dead. When someone says the U.S. is planting evidence to "prove" the biggest lie yet, and you don't even bother to check it out, truth is dead. Truth is the first casualty of war. We always knew that. Now we know that there's more than one way to kill the truth.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of

Colorado at Boulder. chernus@colorado.edu

On Sunday, Hagel, a maverick Republican with a reputation similar to McCain's for speaking his mind, criticized the Bush campaign ad that called Kerry "weak on defense." Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Hagel said: "The facts just don't measure [up to] the rhetoric."

He said it is unfair to isolate one or two votes over a 19-year career to make such a sweeping assessment of Kerry. "You can . . . take any of us, and pick out the different votes, and then try to manufacture something around it," he said. ...

... While McCain and Hagel provided Kerry short-term cover, Clarke's comments could prove more damaging to Bush in the long run, Republican and Democratic strategists said. Clarke, who had a front-row seat to White House deliberations over al Qaeda and Iraq, is making the same case Kerry is -- that Bush could have done more to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks and should have done more to hunt down Osama bin Laden. A top GOP strategist, who insisted on anonymity because he represents clients with interests before the Bush administration, said Clarke's comment also built Kerry's case that Bush may have something to hide.

In a broader context, Clarke sounded concerns expressed by O'Neill and John J. DiIulio Jr., the former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: that Bush is running an insulated White House driven by conservative ideology and politics. DiIulio, the first former Bush official to publicly criticize the president, said in a 2002 magazine interview that "it's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."