When News Comes Full Circle, Truth Should Follow

I remember well the morning of November 8, 2000. I woke up in my freshman college dorm, just a stone’s throw away from The White House. On my way to class, I eagerly picked up a copy of the New York Times to see the final results of the heated election between Al (“Who needs Bill Clinton?”) Gore and George (“What’s this presidency thing all about, anyway?”) W. Bush. Surprisingly, the front page was filled with inconclusive headlines. “Voters Remain Divided, to the Very End,” was the title of one article, while another read, “An Electorate Largely Split Reflects a Race So Very Tight.”

For months, we agonized over who would lead this nation into the 21st century. As an 18 year-old first-time voter, I couldn’t help but wonder if all Presidential elections were this exasperating. When all was said and done, George W. Bush received his mandate, as millions of registered democrats received their Prozac prescriptions.

The four years that followed were, admittedly, somewhat of a blur. Something about “evil-doers” in 2001 seemed to propel W to extremely high approval ratings. Indeed, he responded well to the attacks of 9/11. But not long after that is when it started getting fishy, and that’s when I started paying attention.

As an intern for Senator Hillary Clinton during the summer of 2002, I was finally exposed firsthand to American politics, and it wasn’t pretty. Capital Hill is a clean and pleasant place to the untrained eye, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that politics was not the career for me. Somewhere between opening Senator Clinton’s mail with Latex gloves to protect myself from potentially hazardous materials (aka, Anthrax), and repeatedly hanging up on dissatisfied constituents calling to “have their voices heard”, I decided that I was more fit for another line of work.

Bush rode those approval ratings and Anthrax scares and elevated terrorist alerts straight into the Middle East, launching a full-fledged war against….Iraq. You see, to the average American, Iraq and those “evil-doers” responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were pretty much one in the same; they were both “over there” somewhere and both intent on killing innocent people. Not too many people seemed too perturbed at the onset of this new war, myself included. Saddam was openly defying the UN, an international body established, in part, to maintain peace. If this wasn't reason enough to invade Iraq, argued the Bush team, here's the clincher: weapons of mass destruction. In a State of the Union address, Bush outlined Saddam's attempts to obtain uranium from Niger in order to create biological warfare.

I found myself in Spain when the war broke out. Not sure how I got there or what language I was speaking, so I turned to the newspapers for some direction. Oddly, the stories in Spanish newspapers were not like the stories in American newspapers. For one, they were in Spanish. But more importantly, they had a different tone, a less optimistic tone. I wondered whose perspective was right. The American press, the Spanish press, or the hundreds of other points of view covering the unfolding events. What was being said in Iraqi newspapers? Where was the truth relative to all the stories floating around? Confused, I trusted the story I knew best, the American story. I was convinced that the war was founded on sound, reliable facts. I wrote an opinion paper for one of my Spanish classes, shrewdly outlining all the reasons we were invading Iraq, and I felt confident doing so. But as the war proceeded, criticism in the Spanish press mounted. I no longer took for granted the Bush story. And pretty soon, I regretted writing that scathing paper.

I returned to the U.S. about the same time Bush’s approval ratings returned to earth. I began working for CNN’s political talk show, Crossfire. One day in July 2003, Robert Novak, one of two hosts “from the right”, didn’t show up to work. The news said something about an article he wrote, outing a CIA operative’s name. I vividly remember thinking to myself, “how trivial is this?” What importance could this CIA operative have, relative to all of the issues in the world today? I thought, with the war turning out to be more of a headache than we ever expected (or were led to believe), and those elusive WMD’s not showing up, who cares about some CIA operative. Let’s get down to the real news!

The following day, Novak made some statement on air about the article he wrote, and while I doubt too many people listened to him, it was enough to get people to forget about it for a while. Attention quickly turned to the election of 2004. John (“I know war, I’m a Vietnam Vet! And I’m tall! And I once rode on a boat with JFK!”) Kerry, the Senator from Massachusetts, was going up against George (“Hello? Didn’t anyone hear me the first time? What’s this presidency thing all about, anyway?!”) W. Bush. So Bush looked at the polls and longed for the days when his approval ratings were out the roof. He was really sliding, in light of a recession and, to put in mildly, a lack of progress “over there.” So he did what any subservient, inept President would have done: he listened to his main-man, his go-to-guy, his clutch performer: Karl Rove. And Rove produced a rabbit from his hat, like he had done so many times before. As Americans started realizing that Bush’s plan for Iraq was, well, nonexistent, Rove reminded them of something more timeless than any little war, more meaningful than any passing economic recession: morals and values. And in an election only slightly less exasperating than the previous one, Bush was again the victor, not in small part due to his conservative base connecting to his “stand-up” morals. Finding any relationship between high morals and a war based on deceit was a road Republicans were not willing to take their S.U.V.’s down.

Well, we’re two and a half years removed from the day in July 2003 when Novak didn’t show up to work, and we’re just under one year removed from the refusal of Americans to find any inconsistency between morals and a fraudulent war, and just now it seems like the article Novak wrote was the real news, despite my inability to acknowledge it.

The news has come full circle. This morning, “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, was indicted on five counts, all in some way related to Robert Novak’s article that I dismissed as insignificant. The CIA operative’s name outed by Novak, Valerie Plame, was the wife of Ambasador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was sent to Niger by the CIA to research Saddam’s alleged attempts to obtain uranium. This uranium, argued the Bush team (including Scooter Libby), was proof that Saddam was harvesting WMD’s and a well-founded reason to invade Iraq. Here’s the problem: Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV determined that there was no proof Saddam was in fact buying uranium from Niger. He made public his findings when he realized the Bush team was ignoring his hard work. How did the Bush team respond to Mr. Wilson’s aggressive criticism? Well, some believe that, in an effort to send a message to Mr. Wilson (and people with similar intentions), they leaked his wife’s identity to the press. Enter stage left: Robert Novak.

So what do we make of all this? The New York Times summarizes the likely consequences of today’s news in an article written by David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson.

"Rather than marking the end of the matter after 22 months of an intensive investigation that went to the heart of the White House, the indictment opened a new chapter. Mr. Libby could face a trial that seems likely to expose to the public some of the administration’s innermost workings.”

Now it’s up to us, the public. Do we choose to do what we’ve repeatedly done throughout Bush’s presidency – fail to dig deeper into the heart of the issues? Or do we seek the truth about this administration and the rationale they claimed for bringing this country into war? I think the families and friends of the over 2,000 U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq would ask us to choose the latter. Is that too much to ask?