PRESS CONFERENCE
Unanswered Questions... Will Bush Answer theses?
Courtesy of The Center for American Progress

President Bush will hold a rare press conference tonight at 8:30 p.m.— only the 12th of his entire presidency, and only his third televised in prime evening viewing hours. (At this point in their first terms, President Clinton and President George H.W. Bush had each done 72 press conferences.) He is expected to lead with a statement on Iraq. During the Iraq War, White House reporters like Elisabeth Bumiller of the NY Times have said the media have became "very deferential" and that reporters are now particularly loathe to challenge the President in a press conference like tonight's because "it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there." Bumiller defended the flaccid nature of the media at these high-profile press conferences, saying, "Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time, live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time." But as Editor & Publisher Magazine makes clear, the "starstruck media" has an obligation at such a serious time to challenge the President to provide substantive answers. Here are just a few questions that still have not been answered:

IRAQ QUESTION – DO YOU AGREE WITH CHENEY'S "IRAQ QUAGMIRE" ASSESSMENT?: Vice President Cheney, in his capacity as Secretary of Defense in 1991, said it would be a mistake to get bogged down in the quagmire of rebuilding Iraq: "Once we'd...gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government?...How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?" None of these questions have been answered in the current war, ostensibly leading us into the very quagmire the Vice President previously tried to avoid.

IRAQ QUESTION – ARE WE EMBROILED IN MAJOR COMBAT OPERATIONS?: Standing under a Mission Accomplished banner, President Bush said on May 1, 2003, "My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." It was dishonest to declare victory so quickly, however. In the past two weeks alone, 70 American troops have been killed, compared to 139 troops killed during the duration of Mr. Bush's defined "major combat." Thousands more have been maimed and injured. A year later, instead of scaling back to 110,000 troops, General Abizaid has asked the Pentagon to add at least 10,000 more troops for a total of 140,000 troops.

IRAQ QUESTION – HOW IS IRAQ DIFFERENT FROM VIETNAM?: Even with some surface differences, there are deeply disturbing parallels between the situation in Iraq and the quagmire of Vietnam which scarred the country thirty years ago. As Newsweek reports, the desert battlefield is just as confusing and deadly as the jungle when the military has no easily distinguished enemy. And "just as in Vietnam, it is not clear that America understands the enemy. The Viet Cong may have been communists, but they were nationalists first—and prepared to fight however long it took to free their country. The Iraqis are Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, age-old enemies, but there are disturbing signs that the Sunnis and Shiites were willing to bury their differences, at least for the moment, in the common cause of burying Americans."

IRAQ QUESTION – DID YOU REACH OUT TO ALLIES WHILE ON YOUR VACATION?: Instead of going the extra mile to assuage the fears of the international community, President Bush did not personally take the time during the crisis/his vacation to call the leaders of the countries whose citizens were held hostage last week. In fact, the President barely took time off from loafing at his Crawford mansion to deal with real problems, choosing to spend his time appearing on fishing television shows rather than addressing a major world crisis. The result is that global support for the U.S. effort in Iraq has further eroded as security deteriorates. Many allies are now finding it "difficult to resist calls to scale back their involvement or even withdraw." This pulling back unfortunately comes at the same time the U.S. is attempting to build a global force to protect the United Nations in Iraq, a proposal "essential to the fragile political transition because the Bush administration is relying on the United Nations to return to Iraq to help organize elections after the occupation ends on June 30." Without allied support, American troops will be left in harm's way to shoulder the burden.

IRAQ QUESTION – DID YOU COOK THE BOOKS ON THE IRAQI SECURITY FORCE NUMBERS?: Top U.S. military commanders in Iraq yesterday "acknowledged serious shortcomings in efforts to establish new Iraqi security forces and said the program is being reassessed in light of the failure over the past week of Iraqi units to join U.S. troops in combating militants." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld praised the Iraqi forces earlier this year and they were to have been the backbone of the transfer of power. Recently, however, "perhaps 20% to 25% of the Iraqi army, civil defense, police and other security forces have quit, changed sides, or otherwise failed to perform their duties." The WP reports, "the rush to create these groups from scratch has proved a mammoth undertaking that has been marked by persistent reports of poor vetting, inadequate training, equipment shortages and command gaps."

IRAQ QUESTION – YOU'RE NOT GOING TO NOMINATE JOHN NEGROPONTE, ARE YOU?: With only 80 days to go until the transition of power, the White House has floated the idea of nominating current U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte to replace Coalition Administrator Paul Bremer and become Ambassador to Iraq. Described as "the most challenging diplomatic assignment in the world, and the toughest to fill," the top job in Iraq is crucial. The person in the job will oversee about 3,000 employees, and manage the United States' largest embassy in the world. The Administration should consider the following guidelines: experience in the region, Arabic skills; a non-contentious and swift Senate confirmation, and separation from the Administration's march to war based on faulty intelligence. Negroponte has none of these qualifications.

9/11 QUESTION – WHAT ELSE DID YOU NEED IN ORDER TO REALIZE THERE WAS A THREAT?: President Bush has denied having any idea about the looming terrorist threat before 9/11, saying on 5/17/02: "Had I know that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people." He denied that the PDB he was given alerted him to the fact that there was an imminent terrorist attack in the making, saying it "did not contain enough specific threat information" and "was no indication of a terrorist threat" because it supposedly "said nothing about an attack on America." But as the NYT notes, the PDB "spells out the who, hints at the what and points toward the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that followed 36 days later." Even before the PDB, the President should have had an inkling that terrorists had designs on using planes as weapons: U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July 2001 that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations."

9/11 QUESTION – HOW WAS THE INTEL GOOD ENOUGH FOR WAR, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO PROTECT AMERICA?: In his single-minded push to go to war in Iraq, President Bush defended his lack of definitive proof of a WMD threat by saying, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late." However, he used exactly the opposite rationale to justify why he ignored far more compelling evidence about the terrorist threat leading up to 9/11. Despite explicit warnings that al Qaeda might be planning attacks inside the United States, he said, "There was nothing in [the PDB] that said, you know, there's an imminent attack. There was nothing in this report to me that said, oh, by the way, we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America."

ECONOMY QUESTION – WHY ARE YOU PUSHING POLICIES THAT ARE HURTING THE MIDDLE CLASS?: The President has repeatedly encouraged jobs to move overseas and systematically put the interests of working families behind the interests of its largest corporate contributors. The Bush Administration has "embraced foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years." At the same time, the Bush Commerce Department actively "sponsors" and "participates in conferences and workshops that encourage American companies to put operations and jobs in China." Meanwhile, six out of ten corporations didn't pay a single dollar in taxes last year. When companies dodge taxes, individuals pay more. However, President Bush has yet to support any of bills that close "the Bermuda loophole" which allows companies to move their offices offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. Meanwhile, when Congress passed a bill barring federal contracts from going to such companies, the White House did not support it and the bill died.

9/11
Watering Down the PDB

At a press conference yesterday with Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, President Bush faced more questions about the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) he received on August 6, 2001, that warned him of an al Qaeda attack on the homeland. Not only did the President repeat his denials, but he did not address questions about new revelations that references to Osama bin Laden were stripped out of the version of the PDB sent to federal agencies on August 7, 2001. That more public memo stripped out any mention of "the 70 FBI investigations into possible al Qaeda activity that the president had been told of a day earlier" and "did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of possible attacks with explosives in the United States or that the FBI had concerns about recent activities like the casing of buildings in New York." The secretive move is eerily reminiscent of the decision to strip out key caveats/dissents from WMD intelligence reports it used to make its case for war in Iraq. And the ramifications of these actions had the effect of leaving local law enforcement in the dark. For instance, in Seattle, the FBI field office and local law enforcement said they were never told of the al Qaeda plot on the city that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice confirmed the White House knew about before 9/11.

DISHONEST – TRYING TO SPIN WHAT'S IN BLACK AND WHITE: Despite the public now having the PDB, the President continued to make claims that are refuted by the document itself. He said there was nothing in the report that said "we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America." But the report – which has the headline "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S." – specifically said "[There are] patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York...CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."

ONE-DAY REVERSAL – BUSH CONTRADICTS HIMSELF WITHIN 24 HOURS: The President yesterday claimed that "the best way" to describe the PDB he was given "was kind of a history of Osama's intentions...kind of a history of what the agency had known." Yet, just 24 hours earlier, the President was challenged on this assertion by a reporter who said "Wasn't [the PDB] current threat information that wasn't historical, that was ongoing?" The President quickly said "Right" in agreement.


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