Iraq Study Group Recommendations 46, 72 and 78: Government officials should not lie

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT editorial: About Those Other Problems
Published: December 10, 2006

....We were particularly drawn to Recommendations 46, 72 and 78. Under separate headings dealing with the military, the federal budget and the nation’s intelligence agencies, they share one basic idea: Government officials should not lie to the public or each other, especially in matters of war....

Consider Recommendation 46, which calls on the new secretary of defense to create “an environment in which the senior military feel free to offer independent advice” to civilian leaders, including the president. That is their sworn duty. But the back story is the Pentagon’s prewar refusal to listen to the former Army chief of staff (and who knows how many other generals) who warned that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize a post-invasion Iraq. The good news is that the new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, acknowledged as much in his confirmation hearings. The bad news is that Mr. Bush has not.

Recommendation 72 says that “costs for the war in Iraq should be included in the president’s annual budget request.” The report warns that the White House’s habit of using emergency funding for the war has eroded both “budget discipline” and Congressional oversight. And just in case you were worrying that you hadn’t been paying sufficient attention to the war’s price tag, the report says the White House presents its requests in such a “confusing manner” that only detailed analyses by budget experts can answer “what should be a simple question: How much money is the president requesting for the war in Iraq?”

And finally, Recommendation 78 calls on the Pentagon and the intelligence community to “institute immediate changes” in how they collect data on violence in Iraq “to provide a more accurate picture of events on the ground.” The report says that officials have used a standard for recording attacks (it notes that “a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted”) that systematically underreports Iraq’s mayhem. It cites one day this past July when the government recorded 93 “attacks or significant acts of violence,” while the Iraq Study Group’s own analysis “brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.”...

***

It is mind-boggling that this commission felt compelled to deliver Governing 101 lessons to the president of the United States....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/opinion/10sun1.html

[DeepModem Mom]

1. a.m. kick

[gratuitous]

2. Well, we know three recommendations that won't be followed

Lying comes as easily to this administration as breathing, and if they didn't tell at least five juicy ones a day, they'd be even more paralyzed than they already are. The tell-all books are trickling out now about how often and how big this administration lies. It will be a veritable flood in the next couple of years.

[DeepModem Mom]

3. Well said! "At least five juicy ones a day..." nt

[calimary]

6. Yep. You watch. You just watch. In the next couple of years, the pileon

will include multitudes of books whining about how badly they were treated or lied to or misled or intimidated. Interviewers and reporters and news anchors and former White House insiders and disgruntled congressional people who feel mishandled and wronged or have scores to settle or wish to wash the blood off their own hands or otherwise distance themselves from what they once enabled and for which they once made all kinds of excuses. You just watch. I've said this myself. You'll get the books, by the score, from people writing about what it was really like, the White House spin machine juggernaut and how it used 9/11 to bully and intimidate everyone it touched, how it lied, terrorized, demonized, and silenced objectors. Really, among the few who have a God-given right to produce such a book would be Helen Thomas. But you'll get the mealy-mouthed like Katie Couric and Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff and Paula Zahn (and other such airheads looking to add some gravitas and make you forget how they bowed and scraped) and Chris Matthews and that schmuck tim "buy my book" russert and the whole lot of them. Waaah, they fooled us! And they were mean to us! Waaah! They'll be a dime a dozen, these books. And as EVERY one of them comes out, each more pathetic and laughable than the one before it, we'll sit and watch and shake our heads and growl - WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU WHEN THIS, AND HE, COULD HAVE BEEN STOPPED?????

One by one, they'll come around as they see the sea change in the American public, not just in the war. The war was always obvious. It's the change in the public support that these good-time-Charlies and Johnnie-come-latelies will notice. They're whores, so that's what it'll take to get through to them, finally. It's started now. They'll come around. You're already seeing it in the tucker carlsons and even pat buchanans and occasionally even bill orally who claim they've been against the war from the beginning (yeah, SUUUUUUUUUUUURE). They're just trying to sell books. We'll get some nominal satisfaction in knowing that every new book that comes out, and adds to the pileon, merely proves yet again that WE were correct about this from the start.

bush will lose his smirk, permanently. The smirking rights will be OURS.

[DeepModem Mom]

7. Great post, calimary. Yep -- we were on to Bush II from the very beginning.

And, a quote JFK used just comes to mind: was it "He who rides the back of the tiger ends up inside"? The enablers rode the back of Bush's extremist "tiger," in love with a silver cowboy belt buckle, because it was of benefit to them. Now look where we, and they, are.

[leesa]

4. So, Nancy, is there some sort of upper limit to the NUMBER of times he

is allowed to lie to Congress before it's an impeachable offense?

[pdxmom]

5. And here is exactly why any reports that Bush will be receiving in

the next few days, from the NSC, the Pentagon, State Department, etc., will be totally useless.

The Baker/Hamilton group put it straight out there that the various entities have shaped their advise to the administration based on what the administration wants to hear. And anything that comes from them now will just be more of the same. Whether I like the Baker/Hamilton report or not, I believe that it is going to be better than any reports that come out of all of these government departments.