Brave editorial from the Roanoke Times...
"This White House has gone beyond mastering damage
control to making pre-emptive strikes that distort
unfavorable information or keep it hidden from public
view.
THE PICTURE emerging of the Bush White House is
that of a radical administration so certain of its
ideological rightness that it will distort and
manipulate information as needed to soothe moderates
and silence critics.
And beware of telling truths that stymie
administration aims or contradict its spin. That
offense can endanger loved ones."
http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/news/story153538.html
Saturday, August 09, 2003
Bush's scary message control
This White House has gone beyond mastering damage
control to making pre-emptive strikes that distort
unfavorable information or keep it hidden from public
view.
THE PICTURE emerging of the Bush White House is
that of a radical administration so certain of its
ideological rightness that it will distort and
manipulate information as needed to soothe moderates
and silence critics.
And beware of telling truths that stymie
administration aims or contradict its spin. That
offense can endanger loved ones.
This latest and, to date, most chilling allegation
comes from retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV,
whose wife was exposed by conservative columnist
Robert Novak as a CIA operative. Novak says he got his
information from senior administration officials.
If so, someone high in the administration broke
the law. Wilson is sure the disclosure is meant to
warn off anyone who can reveal information on the
administration's possible misuse of intelligence
during the run-up to the Iraq war.
Wilson was in a position to do so because, at the
behest of the CIA, he had traveled to Niger in
February 2002 to check the reliability of a document
that contended Iraq was trying to buy nuclear weapons
material.
Wilson found no basis for the report - bad enough,
from the perspective of a White House building its
case for war. But Wilson ran truly afoul of the
administration only last month, when he wrote an op-ed
article in The New York Times that revealed both his
role and the duplicity of senior administration
officials in contending that only low-level
intelligence officials knew of his findings.
The White House was forced at last to admit that
it knowingly included in President Bush's State of the
Union address in January a justification for war that,
in Wilson's words, was "so transparently
unsubstantiable."
Outing an undercover operative would escalate
hardball politics to political suppression. And
Wilson's frightening portrayal of an administration in
which "spin" is spinning wildly out of control is all
too credible.
Bush shows time and again his willingness to
censor, distort or simply ignore scientific evidence
contrary to his policy objectives - including data on
global warming, on Arctic oil drilling and wildlife,
on stem-cell research, on tax cuts and budget
deficits, on abortion, on condoms and "abstinence
only" sex education.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman's 40-page report
detailing administration manipulations might be
dismissed as partisan politics - except that, in
recent months, the editors of a list of prestigious
scientific journals have sounded the same alarm.
Every modern president's penchant for controlling
the message has metastasized during this presidency
into controlling the free flow of information that is
the lifeblood of a self-governing society. Bush and
his advisers are heading beyond partisanship onto
dangerous new ground.