The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of SIU at Carbondale. Except during vacations and exam weeks, The Daily Egyptian is published Monday through Friday during the fall and spring semesters and TWThF during the summer semester."

Bush and the war on truth

The Bush administration took a break from the war on terrorism last week to concentrate on the latest assault in its increasingly intense war on truth: the Battle of Richard Clarke.

The administration, unable to refute the allegations Clarke leveled at it in his new book and in testimony to the congressional 9/11 commission, instead resorted to the tried-and-true technique of character assassination.

Of course, this is nothing new.

The administration has unleashed its attack dogs whenever anyone, especially a government official, has had the courage to expose Bush's lies and incompetence to the American people.

It happened to Larry Lindsey, the former director of the White House's National Economic Council, who was driven out of office when he put forward what turned out to be a conservative estimate of the cost of war in Iraq.

It happened to Valerie Plame, who was outed as an undercover CIA agent not because she did anything wrong, but because her husband wrote an opinion piece exposing Bush's lies about Iraqi weapons.

It happened to Richard Foster, who was threatened with dismissal from his job as Medicare's top accountant if he revealed the real cost of Bush's Medicare destruction bill.

And it happened to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill when he revealed just how out of touch, uncurious and unqualified Bush really is.

But none of these smear campaigns came close to what the Bush administration threw at Clarke.

Realizing that Bush's re-election hinges on his continued ability to dupe voters into believing he has made them safer, Karl Rove dispatched everyone short of the White House gardener to the talk-show circuit in an attempt to distract the voters from the important questions Clarke raised.

Vice President Dick Cheney launched his attacks from the safety of "The Rush Limbaugh Show."

In between misleading Limbaugh's listeners about Clarke's role in post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts and blaming Clarke personally for al Qaeda attacks during the Clinton administration, Cheney made it perfectly clear how important terrorism was to the Bush administration before 9/11.

"He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff," Cheney said of the administration's former top terrorism expert.

This was presumably an attempt to show that Clarke didn't know what he was talking about. But by saying that their terrorism czar was out of the loop, it came across as an admission that Clarke's charges about White House inattention are true.

Not to worry, though. Cheney was just lying again.

Two days later, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice corrected him, telling reporters that Clarke was "in every meeting that was held on terrorism."

When she wasn't cleaning up after Cheney, Rice was also on the attack last week, appearing on seemingly every talk show in the country to impugn Clarke's character.

But unlike Clarke, Rice has a real credibility problem.

She has refused to take time out of her talk show schedule to testify under oath in front of the bipartisan 9/11 commission investigating the deaths of 3,000 people.

Why is she so afraid of telling the truth?

And how can someone with Rice's obvious lack of credibility attack Clarke, who is known as someone who "tells it like it is" regardless of the consequences?

Clarke knew from the administration's attacks on O'Neill, Plame, Foster and the others that he too would face personal attacks. But he was courageous enough to subject himself to the onslaught in order to get the truth to the American people.

If there was ever any doubt about the truth of Clarke's allegations, the White House's relentless personal attacks have eliminated it for all but the most loyal of Limbaugh fans.

Jesse is a junior in journalism. Divided we stand appears every Tuesday. These views do not necessarily reflect those of the DAILY EGYPTIAN.

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