More “Freedom” Fairy Tales From Dubya

(And by the way, I also posted here.)

In yesterday’s New York Times, writer James Traub profiled Dubya’s “legacy project,” or whatever it’s being called this week, on the grounds of Southern Methodist University (a background video follows with Keith Olbermann and Jim Moore of HuffPo from last Friday – spares me from having to go over all the details again).



I thought Traub’s report was pretty good, and he basically captured all of the angst arising from this attempt by the Bushies to rewrite history, but I just wanted to point out a couple of excerpts…

THE BUSH CENTER is still four years from completion, but the institute is to begin operating from temporary quarters off-campus by the end of the year. Bush’s friends and associates say that he is eager to invite the dissidents whom he made a point of meeting throughout his presidency — Natan Sharansky, the Russian activist Garry Kasparov and other such figures from China, Venezuela or the Middle East.

Well, Dubya may have met with Kasparov, but that doesn’t mean that they were pals; this tells us how the Russian chess champion “dressed down” Dubya and the G8 nations for “giving President Vladimir Putin a platform to present himself as a leader of the free world,” as the Reuters story tells us.

Also...

Elliott Abrams, who had a controversial tenure in the Reagan administration and who led the democracy-promotion bureau in Bush’s National Security Council, says that Bush “met with more democracy activists and dissidents than any other president.”

I don’t have any evidence to disprove that, but given that Iran-Contra crook Abrams is a world-class liar, I would be skeptical of such a claim. And even if it were true, it didn’t do former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History any good here; the story notes that, in addition to Russia, the “pro-Democracy” movement has taken a real hit in Venezuela, Lebanon, Palestine of course, and the rest of the Arab world (our response to the Hamas victory in Palestine was to withhold aid, exacerbating their already horrific poverty, as the story tells us).

Continuing with Traub's story...

KAREN HUGHES, President Bush’s longtime aide and confidante, told me that Bush started kicking around ideas for some kind of think tank soon after he was re-elected in November 2004. “We knew it would focus on freedom and responsibility,” she said, for Bush saw these as his twin themes, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks persuaded him that weak and authoritarian states, like Afghanistan, posed a grave threat to American security.

I thought that observation was interesting, even if – again – I don’t entirely take it at face value (the sincerity, I mean...and as I read online, I have every reason to believe that Richard Clarke would take strong exception to that characterization).

And what Hughes said got me wondering to the point where I searched back through those particularly awful post-9/11 days to find out when the former Bushco cabal decided to take Afghanistan seriously; I mean, to hear her tell it, it sounds like Bush made the connection between Afghanistan and 9/11 fairly quickly.

Well then, did he say that in public?

He didn’t connect Afghanistan to 9/11 here (in remarks upon arrival at Barksdale Air Force Base…I’ll grant that the initial shock hadn’t subsided). He didn’t connect the country here in his weekly radio address that Saturday the 15th (you mean to tell me that, with all of our surveillance, we somehow didn’t know by then? And yes, I know this is old ground, but Hughes “dusted it all up” here).

There was also no mention of Afghanistan in the Authorization to Use Military Force here (as far as I’m concerned, Congress was partly to blame for that too). There was also no mention in a meeting with President Megawati of Indonesia here in an appearance soon after the attacks (there was a softball question about Iraq though, the very first one asked).

But there was finally a mention of Afghanistan on September 20th here, in which the U.S. Agency for International Development stated the following…

Even before the events of September 11, relations between the international community and the Taliban were growing increasingly uncertain.

So, in a memo dated nine days after the attacks, it is implied that Afghanistan, which housed the Taliban then as now, was at the very least a “player” of some scope in the 9/11 attacks (which means that Hughes is admitting the truth here, and makes comments like this from then-SecDef Rummy all the more inexplicable about "no decent targets" in Afghanistan…yes, I remember how evil these people truly are).

This, yet again, is an example of our now-removed executive cabal trying to have it both ways on the subject of its response to the most horrific failure on its watch, telling us now that 9/11 persuaded Dubya of the immediate threat of Afghanistan, even though we know full well that, in response to the attacks, the majority of our military capability was brought to bear against a wholly other country that was blameless for the events of that fateful day.

And based on this, it seems that the online presence of Dubya’s Fabulous Freedom Foundation, or whatever it’s called, is every bit as secretive (by accident, I know) as the answer to the question of when it was exactly that Bush 43 believed that Afghanistan “posed a grave threat to American security” (grave enough anyway to merit a mention in the hopefully unsuccessful fundraising efforts for this sham of a legacy project).

Update: I've done some more ruminating over Hughes' quote about Afghanistan and "weak and authoritarian states," for what it's worth, and I think what I should have emphasized much more strongly is that I don't think it occurred to Hughes what a damning commentary that was on her former boss, seeing as how it took very nearly 3,000 American lives to demonstrate to him something so utterly obvious to much of the world about the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.