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Sunday, April 09, 2006

Credibility gap, aka, bald-faced lying

Robyn Blumner of the St. Petersburg Times comes up with some really good columns. Like this one: Lies lurk behind U.S. terror policy 04/09/06

Oh, my, you can tell she's not an official Big Pundit! She actually says "bald-faced lying" in discussing Bush. The Big Pundits are still trying to avoid saying that. She writes:

President Bush once famously stumbled over the phrase "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It was a Freudian slip. Bush knew just how often he's put one over on the American people. Why rub it in?

Slowly this country has come to the realization that nothing the president and his minions say is believable, yet they still want us to just trust them. There hasn't been a more dangerous combination of incompetence, mendacity and arrogance since Lansford Hastings encouraged the Donner Party to diverge from the Oregon Trail and take his "short-cut."

Ouch! That's a good analogy: a Donner Party foreign policy. Yeah, that works, that really works.

She uses Guantánamo as an example.

She writes about those supposedly dangerous terrorists who have to be held indefinitely in prison and sadistically tortured because they are such a threat to the United States:

The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is perhaps America's biggest international black eye and moral morass. We have been told by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that only "the worst of the worst" are incarcerated there, when that isn't remotely true. ...

Also, 164 prisoners, almost a third, were deemed enemy combatants because of links to groups the Defense Department designated as terrorist organizations that were not al-Qaida or the Taliban. What's interesting about this is that 52 of the 72 organizations that the Defense Department named as terrorist groups do not appear on either the Patriot Act Terrorist Exclusion List or two separate State Department terrorist lists, according to the Seton Hall study. These are the lists used to keep terror suspects from entering our country.

That means the Defense Department is justifying indefinite incarceration of prisoners due to their associations with groups whose members are not even considered dangerous enough to be barred from visiting the United States.

Her conclusion sounds spot-on to me:

If there is one consistent theme running through Bush's war on terror, it is that the administration's public claims turn out to be a smoldering heap of nonsense. Yet for some reason we keep buying it. Shame on us.

posted at 1:39:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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