Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Watergate II

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/opinion/30rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=prin
t
One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada
By FRANK RICH
TO believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime
soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when
G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate
break-in.
But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that
burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand
jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took
"responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and
weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members.
In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original
petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but
wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John
Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."
In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may
look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name
contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to
the duplicitous culture of the whole.
The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair
is hardly the end of the story.
That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to
such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the
administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into
the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud)
that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.
After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective
the administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very
recently.
Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two
separate official investigations into the failure of prewar
intelligence.
With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that our
information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong.
But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough
inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate
lingo, "the big enchilada."
The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by
Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a
"sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick
Cheney.
It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their
semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG)
created to push all that dead-wrong intel.
Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of
defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon
supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled
the nation.
The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate
Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right.
After the release of its initial findings in July 2004, the
committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2
to determine whether the White House had misled the public would
arrive after the presidential election.
It still hasn't, and no wonder:
Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney
and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with "crucial
documents," including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of
Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to the U.N.
on the eve of war.
Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has prompted the
revelation of much of what these previous investigations left out.
But even so, the trigger for the Wilson affair - the administration's
fierce effort to protect its hype of Saddam's uranium - is only one
piece of the larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White House
subterfuge.
We're a long way from putting together the full history of a
self-described "war presidency" that bungled the war in Iraq and, in
doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic terrorism as
well.
There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic,
almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of
Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of
Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina.
There are countless riddles, large and small.
Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command?
Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government
contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries
into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud?
Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that
their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the
fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?
These questions are just a representative sampling.
It won't be easy to get honest answers because this administration,
like Nixon's, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an
alternative reality built on spin and outright lies.
Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts.
Long before he played semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge
of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial
matters of national security.
As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his new
assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide
review of U.S. "consequence management" in the event of a terrorist
attack.
As we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from
Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.
That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's unreliable pronouncements
about the war, from his early prediction that American troops would be
"greeted as liberators" in Iraq to this summer's declaration that the
insurgency was in its "last throes."
Even before he began inflating Saddam's nuclear capabilities, he went
on "Meet the Press" in December 2001 to peddle the notion that "it's
been pretty well confirmed" that there was a direct pre-9/11 link
between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence.
When the Atta-Saddam link was disproved later, Gloria Borger,
interviewing the vice president on CNBC, confronted him about his
earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three times that he had never
said it had been "pretty well confirmed."
When a man thinks he can get away with denying his own words even
though there are millions of witnesses and a video record, he clearly
believes he can get away with murder.
Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen.
His own false claims about Iraq's W.M.D.'s ("We found the weapons of
mass destruction," he said in May 2003) are, if anything, exceeded by
his repeated boasts of capturing various bin Laden and Zarqawi
deputies and beating back Al Qaeda.
His speech this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots is
typical; as USA Today reported last week, at least 6 of the 10 on the
president's list "involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks,
not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out."
In June, Mr. Bush stood beside his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales,
and similarly claimed that "federal terrorism investigations have
resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects" and that "more
than half" of those had been convicted.
A Washington Post investigation found that only 39 of those
convictions had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed
to, say, immigration violations).
That sum could yet be exceeded by the combined number of convictions
in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.
The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as the
hyping of Saddam's uranium: in both cases, national security scares
are trumpeted to advance the White House's political goals.
Keith Olbermann of MSNBC recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which
"a political downturn for the administration," from revelations of
ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings to fresh news of detainee abuses, is
"followed by a 'terror event' - a change in alert status, an arrest, a
warning."
To switch the national subject from the fallout of the televised
testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley in 2002, John
Ashcroft went so far as to broadcast a frantic announcement, via
satellite from Russia, that the government had "disrupted an unfolding
terrorist plot" to explode a dirty bomb.
What he was actually referring to was the arrest of a single suspect,
Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan - an arrest that had
taken place a month earlier.
For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White
House's infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon
administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning.
But Watergate's dirty tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless
desire to crush the political competition at any cost.
That's a powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this
administration has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war.
Back on July 6, 2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at
169 and Mr. Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak,
yet to write his column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that
"weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" were "little
elitist issues that don't bother most of the people."
That's what Nixon administration defenders first said about the
"third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.

 elitist issues that don't bother most of the people."
Ma come? Non erano fondamentali per ottenere l'assenso del Congresso 
per l'entrata in guerra?
Sono molto, moolto turbato...
Am.