Remember 9/11 The Memoirs of G.W. Bush on Texas Two-Ply
Contents:
Neither is remotely true. But Bush must figure that if he keeps making the case for himself -- particularly if it goes largely unrebutted by the traditional media, as it has thus far -- then perhaps he can blunt history's verdict. It may even be working.
The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir
Extrapolating from the response to the book, former vice president Dick Cheney on Tuesday told a crowd gathered for Bush's presidential library groundbreaking in Dallas that "judgments are a little more measured than they were" and that "history is coming around. In "Decision Points," Bush describes the invasion of Iraq as something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection.
This is a flat-out lie. Anyone who paid any attention to the news at the time knew Bush was dead-set on war long before he sent in the troops in March And there is now an abundant amount of documentation, in the form of leaks, unclassified memos, witness interviews and other people's memoirs to prove it. The only real question is whether he actively deceived the American public and the world -- or whether he was so passionate about selling the public on the war that he intentionally blinded himself to how brazenly Vice President Cheney had politicized and abused the intelligence process.
Bush repeatedly insists in his memoir that he tried to avoid war. He describes his preferred approach to Iraq as "coercive diplomacy" and tries to explain away the military planning, the troop movements and the constant saber-rattling as being intended primarily to scare Saddam into "disarming". He even tries to retroactively justify one of his notoriously long vacations by suggesting that he needed the time to think. And Corn offered up one particularly telling anecdote from the book he co-authored, " Hubris: On May 1, -- almost a year prior to the invasion -- Bush told press secretary Ari Fleischer of Saddam, "I'm going to kick his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Mideast.
By his account, it was then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who "suggested that we consider confronting Iraq as well as the Taliban. But that's a hugely disingenuous version of events.
George W. Bush 's memoir “Decision Points” could well have been titled “The Cheney Offered to Leave, Bush Memoir Says NOV. 2, He tries to play down the problems of Guantánamo Bay, writing that . Many of us can't forget the damage, of course--the warnings about 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina. But, one year ago, President George W. Bush was thrown into the first great 60 Minutes II spent two hours with Mr. Bush, one, on Air Force One and The memories come back sharp and clear on Air Force One, where I remember stopping briefly to call my family, my aunt and uncle in .. Play Video.
In the first tell-all book from inside Bush's national security team, Richard A. I think they had a plan from day one they wanted to do something about Iraq. While the World Trade Center was still smoldering, while they were still digging bodies out, people in the White House were thinking: This gives us the opportunity we have been looking for to go after Iraq. Clarke notes that the following day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained in a meeting that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that the U.
At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied. Just over two months later, on Nov. Sixteen months after that, in March , the invasion began. In the period during which Bush claims he was wringing his hands about whether or not to attack, he and his aides were instead intensely focused on building the public case for what was, in their minds, an inevitability.
The first concrete bits of evidence to that effect were the Downing Street Memos , first published in May 1, , which documented the conclusions of British officials after high-level talks in Washington in July Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. And just recently, the independent National Security Archives completed a major analysis of the historical record, including a new trove of formerly secret records of both the Bush administration and the British cabinet of Tony Blair. John Prados, co-director of the archives' Iraq Documentation Project, summed up their findings this way: Prados wrote that the cumulative record clearly "demonstrates that the Bush administration swiftly abandoned plans for diplomacy to curb fancied Iraqi adventurism by means of sanctions, never had a plan subsequent to that except for a military solution, and enmeshed British allies in a manipulation of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic designed to generate support for a war.
George W. Bush Presidential Museum offers quiet place to remember 9/11 | News | Dallas News
There never was another plan. And therefore -- ironically enough, considering the title of Bush's book -- there never was an actual "decision point" either. There were some debates about how to invade Iraq, and when, but not if. In contrast to an extensive record of planning for actual military operations, there is no record that President George W. Bush ever made a considered decision for war. All of the numerous White House and Pentagon meetings concerned moving the project forward, not whether a march into conflict was a proper course for the United States and its allies. Deliberations were instrumental to furthering the war project, not considerations of the basic course.
And in June , Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller described the conclusions of his committee's exhaustive report on the Bush administration's public statements regarding Iraq:. Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence.
In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses. There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence.
But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate. It was, in short, a propaganda campaign. As former Press Secretary Scott McClellan wrote in his revelatory memoir , Bush's advisors "decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people A pro-war campaign might have been more acceptable had it been accompanied by a high level of candor and honesty, but it was not.
And as Jonathan Landay wrote for Knight Ridder in , the materials that had become public to date demonstrated "that the White House followed a pattern of using questionable intelligence, even documents that turned out to be forgeries, to support its case -- often leaking classified information to receptive journalists -- and dismissing information that undermined the case for war. That's what made Patrick Fitzgerald's prosecution of the Valerie Plame case so essential. It promised a public view into the heart of the administration's dirty tricks department -- and a chance to find out once and for all who the mastermind was.
But Cheney aide Scooter Libby's lies stymied Fitzgerald, and we never found out for sure -- even though the signs pointed pretty clearly to Libby's boss. Even if Cheney was the driving force behind the war campaign's deceptions, however, Bush was undeniably the chief cheerleader. Precisely to what extent pressure from the White House was responsible for the intelligence community's totally inaccurate assessment of Iraq's WMDs remains unclear. Bush's own WMD commission, not surprisingly, gave him a pass in their final report.
But there was no doubt the community knew what its chief customers wanted to hear, and gave it to them. Even so, the intelligence did not support Bush's insistence at the time that those weapons posed an imminent threat. Pillar, the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, wrote in that it was only through the overt, intentional misreading, cherry-picking and politicization of intelligence findings that the case could be made for war:. If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war - or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath.
What is most remarkable about prewar US intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important US policy decisions in recent decades. Intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not drive Bush's decision to go to war, Pillar continued:.
A view broadly held in the United States and even more so overseas was that deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept "in his box," and that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place. That the administration arrived at so different a policy solution indicates that its decision to topple Saddam was driven by other factors.
For Bush, the intelligence findings Cheney and others were feeding him -- and the media -- were not factors that needed to be weighed carefully as part of a decision-making process. There was no decision-making process. The intelligence findings were simply elements of a sales campaign. The one time Bush is recorded as having pushed back at the intelligence at all was in the famous late Oval Office scene with Tenet.
However, contrary to popular mythology, Bush's concern was manifestly not about the intelligence itself, but about its marketing potential. When Tenet exclaimed "It's a slam dunk case! In the memoir, Bush himself recalls having declared: Bush writes in the memoir: I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. And Bush of course never actually tells us who he's angry at, or what exactly sickened him. He's certainly not willing to say that he was angry at himself, or that going to war was a sickening mistake. I mean, apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision, and I don't believe it was a wrong decision.
In fact, despite everything, Bush continues to indulge in the same unfounded rhetoric to this day"For all the difficulties that followed, America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD and supporting terror at the heart of the Middle East," he writes. And the cherry-picking of the intelligence continues, as well.
Security Council by chief inspector Hans Blix, "citing elements that support the idea that Hussein was not cooperating and leaving out parts that indicate his government was. More to the point, however, Bush fails to mention two subsequent Blix pre-invasion reports in February and early March, weeks before U. Those show Iraq cooperating with inspectors and the inspectors finding no significant evidence that Hussein was hiding WMD programs.
Bush was no reluctant warrior. The war he launched was arguably an illegal act of aggression. And the costs have been enormous. More than 4, members of the U. Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated to number at least , and more than a million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes. Bush told Lauer it was worth it: But author Nir Rosen recently addressed Bush's claim:. Certainly the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis are not better off. Their families aren't better off. The tens of thousands of Iraqi men who languished in American and subsequently Iraqi gulags are not better off.
The children who lost their fathers aren't better off. The millions of Iraqis who lost their homes, hundreds of thousands of refugees in the region, are not better off. So there's no mathematical calculation you can make to determine who's better off and who's not Saddam Hussein is gone, that's true. The regime we've put in place is certainly more representative, but it's brutal and authoritarian. Torture is routine and systematic. Corruption is also routine and systematic. There are no services to speak of, no real electricity or water.
Violence remains very high. So, there's nothing to be proud of in this. The Iraqi people deserve much better, and they're the real victims of Bush's war.
Accessibility links
In what was perhaps the single most preposterous assertion of his book tour, Bush seemed to suggest to Lauer that he was actually against going to war: So by the time you gave the order to start military operations in Iraq, did you personally have any doubt, any shred of doubt, about that intelligence? For the nation's journalists to allow this outrageous lie to go uncontested is particularly galling. During the run-up to war, one of the elite media's most common excuses for marginalizing or ignoring the true voices of dissension and doubt was that everyone knew an invasion was a foregone conclusion.
The result back then was that instead of watchdog journalism, what we got was credulous, stenographic recitation of the administration's deeply flawed arguments for war. In retrospect, "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Today's journalists would like to think they have learned some lessons from their poor pre-war conduct. But letting Bush get away now with saying the exact opposite of what they knew to be true even at the time -- and what has since been amply confirmed by the historical record -- would be yet another major victory of stenography over accountability.
That torture is even a subject of debate today is a testament to the devastating effect the Bush administration has had on our concept of morality. And in his book and on his book tour, far from hanging his head in shame, Bush is more explicit and enthusiastic than ever before endorsing one of torture's iconic forms. Bush's two-part argument is simple; That waterboarding was legal i. Waterboarding -- essentially controlled drowning -- involves immobilizing someone and pouring water over their mouth and nose in a way that makes them choke.
It causes great physical and mental suffering, but leaves no marks. It's not new; villains and despots have been using it extract confessions for something like years. The CIA just perfected it. It is self-evidently, almost definitionally, torture. In , the U. It is flatly a violation of international torture conventions.
Popular on CBS News
And as far as I know, no American government official had ever even suggested it wasn't torture until a small handful of lawyers in Bush's supine Justice Department, working under orders from the vice president , claimed otherwise. These lawyers drafted a series of memos so lacking in legal merit -- and so cruel and inhuman -- that they were retracted and repudiated even by a later wave of Bush appointees. The original " torture memo " from August 1, , for instance, argued that to "rise to the level of torture" an act had to cause pain "equivalent to intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.
I'm not a lawyer, but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do. When Lauer raised the possibility that Bush's lawyers had simply told him what they knew he wanted to hear, Bush vaguely denied it and suggested that his book might shed more light on the topic. But it doesn't, at least not much.
- Unmanned Aerial Vehicle End to End Support Considerations.
- Bush On 9/ Moment To Moment - CBS News.
- Heart of the Galaxy.
In it, Bush writes:. Department of Justice and CIA lawyers conducted a careful legal review. They concluded that the enhanced interrogation program complied with the Constitution an all applicable laws, including those that ban torture. I took a look at the list of techniques. There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them. Another technique was waterboarding, a process of simulated drowning. Moment President Bush Learned of Attacks. The kids were kind of bewildered by it all, the fuss around them.
But they were sitting in their chairs, looking forward and were kind of giggling and glad to see the president. The day's lesson focused around the story, "The Pet Goat. While the kids were picking up their books to begin reading, "The Pet Goat," Andrew Card, the president's chief of staff, entered the room, walked to the president, and whispered in his ear. Not even in front of a classroom of second graders.
The students, now seniors in high school but just 7 years old at the time, knew then that something had happened. They could see it in the president's face. Daniels, the teacher, was also aware of a change in the room. Mentally he was gone. For approximately seven minutes the president stayed in the classroom while the students proudly read "The Pet Goat" to him. He was later criticized for not leaving immediately, but to the young people in that classroom, he made the right decision.
After the president left the room to be briefed and address the nation, Daniels was informed by a member of the Secret Service of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Then she had to explain it to her young students.
They were only 7 years old so I wasn't going to give them every piece of information. Daniels also had to teach them some unexpected lessons. So I would tell them choose good over evil. Do right when it's in your hand and in your power to do so.
- George W. Bush.
- Reflecting on 9/11: Valuable Lessons?
- Some Descendants of Stephen Post of Hartford.
- Sell To Survive.
- Florida Students Witnessed the Moment Bush Learned of 9/11 Terror Attacks - ABC News.
Those lessons and that infamous day have left a lasting impact on the students. Although he felt proud to be in the classroom that day, Lazaro Dubrocq also felt sad. And it's also an experience they shared with the president of the United States, as he wrote in a letter to former student Natalia Jones-Pinkney. The president of the United States, George W.
Bush, was coming to visit. America is under attack. Senators united that Kavanaugh accuser should be heard; divided on how and where. Korean leaders sign agreement for North Korea to take further steps to denuclearize. Trade war escalates as China announces tariffs on US imports. Apple CEO defends pricing of new iPhones. Putin seeks to defuse downing of Russian plane off Syria.
Fraternity hazing might be involved in college student's death: