Third Party & Independents: Archives

Whitehouse Failures Permeating Media

Forget media bias. Look at the sources in the stories and links below. The data flowing out in news this week is coming from highly credible sources and demonstrating failure after failure of the Bush administration. Sure, those on the right can spin a tornado into a butterfly’s wing flap, but, any objective reading of the following stories begs the question, why is Bush leading in the polls?

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Iraq has less than 30 percent of the trained police it needs. Radios for the Iraqi police service are in short supply - as is body armor, with the sets on hand constituting only about one-third of the number required.

Meanwhile, insurgent attacks are widely spread throughout the country. While a majority occur in Baghdad and the hotbed of the Sunni triangle, few parts of Iraq seem immune. In August and September almost 16 percent of incidents involving coalition or Iraqi forces took place in the northern city of Mosul.

These figures come from the US government's official weekly status reports of the situation in Iraq. While unclassified, and widely disseminated within the government, these reports have generally not been made public.

And then there is this American Prospect story highlighting Bush's capacity to lie to our American soldiers face to face. The President told our troops:

“We're improving benefits and the quality of life for our nation's citizen-soldiers,” Bush said. “ … We have expanded health-care benefits for Guard and Reserve forces and their family members, giving them access to the military's TRICARE system for up to 90 days before they report and 180 days after deactivation -- and I will ask Congress to make that expansion permanent.”

But the story goes on to report:

A kind sentiment, but these words becloud the fact that the Bush administration has consistently fought legislation that would guarantee permanent access to the military’s health-care system for reservists throughout their entire career in the Guard.

The entire article is an important read.

One need look no further than the Pentagon and Dept. of Defense for all that waste, fraud, and abuse spending Bush and Kerry have said they would go after. Yet, after more than 3.5 years in office the Bush administration has done nothing to go after it as the Washington Post reports in an article entitled, No-Bid Defense Contracts Found to Be Common. In fact, with the Halliburton scandal, the opposite appears to be true. The President is fostering non-competitive bidding which wastes American tax dollars. And why would the President support such waste, fraud and abuse? The answer is found in the following quote from the article:

President Bush received $5.4 million in political contributions from defense contractors between 1998 and July 31 of this year. Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) collected nearly $2 million during the same period.

Another Washington Post article entitled, Growing Pessimism on Iraq purports that President Bush is also lying to the American people about progress in Iraq. This article is particularly disturbing as it points to a growing lack of faith and trust in this administration by professionals in the intelligence and Pentagon agencies of our government. The article states:

A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.

While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.

The New York Times supports this lying by the President about progress in Iraq with this story entitled, Iraq Study Sees Rebels' Attacks as Widespread. While the administration is telling the public that violence in Iraq is contained to just a few areas, a private security company in the know is reporting something quite different. The article states:

Over the past 30 days, more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents have been directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north, according to comprehensive data compiled by a private security company with access to military intelligence reports and its own network of Iraqi informants.

Many Americans believe Bush could not have anticipated the events currently occurring in Iraq. Sen. Kay Baily Hutchison (R-Tx) made that argument just this morning in an interview. The truth however is otherwise as the N.Y. Times reports:

The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.

It is clear to this writer that if President Bush is reelected, the old adage that 'ignorance is bliss' shall forever be proven wrong. President Bush's administration, decisions, lack of planning and foresight, unwillingness to be counseled by expertise rather than ideology, is proving that American voter ignorance constitutes as grave a threat against our future as terrorists themselves.

Posted by David R. Remer at September 30, 2004 12:35 PM