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In the history of the American Republic, perhaps no political family has been more protected from scandal than the Bushes.
When the Bushes are involved in dirty deals or even criminal activity, standards of evidence change. Instead of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that would lock up an average citizen, the evidence must be perfect.
If there's any doubt at all, the Bushes must be presumed innocent. Even when their guilt is obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense, it's their accusers and those who dare investigate who get the worst of it. Their motives are challenged and their own shortcomings are cast in the harshest possible light.
For decades -- arguably going back generations -- the Bushes have been protected by their unique position straddling two centers of national power, the family's blueblood Eastern Establishment ties and the Texas oil crowd with strong links to the Republican Right. [For details on this family phenomenon, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
This reality was underscored again by how major news outlets and the right-wing press reacted to a new piece of evidence implicating George W. Bush in a criminal cover-up in the "Plame-gate" scandal.
Though the evidence is now overwhelming that President Bush was part of a White House cabal that leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA officer and then covered up the facts, major newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, continue to pooh-pooh this extraordinary scandal.
The latest piece of evidence was the statement from former White House press secretary Scott McClellan that Bush was one of five senior officials who had him clear Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby in the leak when, in fact, they were two of the leakers.
"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore the credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," McClellan said in a snippet released by the publisher of his upcoming memoir.
"So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby," McClellan said. "There was one problem. It was not true."
After McClellan's statement touched off a brief furor on the Internet and cable TV shows, his publisher Peter Osnos tried to soften the blow. Osnos told Bloomberg News that McClellan didn't mean that Bush deliberately ordered his press secretary to lie.
"He told him something that wasn't true, but the President didn't know it wasn't true," Osnos said.
What Bush Knew
But neither McClennan nor Osnos knows what Bush really knew.
The revelatory point in McClellan's statement was that Bush was a direct participant in the campaign to protect Rove and Libby as they lied about their roles in the leak. Previously that was an inference one could draw from the facts, but it had not been confirmed by a White House official.
Indeed, looking at the available evidence, it would defy credulity that Bush wasn't implicated in the Plame-gate leak and the subsequent cover-up, which led to Libby's conviction earlier this year on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.
For Bush not to have been involved would have required him to be oblivious to the inner workings of the White House and the actions of his closest advisers on an issue of great importance to him.
From the evidence at Libby's trial, it was already clear that Bush had a direct hand in the effort to discredit Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he had gone public in July 2003 with his role in a CIA investigation of what turned out to be bogus claims that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Bush, who had cited those bogus claims in his 2003 State of the Union Address in making his case for invading Iraq, was worried about his credibility when U.S. forces failed to find WMD evidence and when Wilson became the first Washington insider to start questioning Bush's case for war.
So, Bush collaborated with Vice President Dick Cheney in mounting a counter-attack against Wilson. Bush decided to selectively declassify portions of a National Intelligence Estimate in order to undercut Wilson's credibility and agreed to have that information leaked to friendly reporters.
See more stories tagged with: bush, cheney, white house, bush family
Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."
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