In my 35 years as a reporter, I have never heard a former cabinet secretary go public on a sitting president. It is true that Cyrus Vance resigned in protest of Jimmy Carter’s attempt to rescue the Iran hostages, but he kept silent afterward. What Paul O’Neill did was pull the curtain away from a White House in which much of America had invested hope.
There had been hints from other sources, including the president himself, of the revelations to come from O’Neill. Diane Sawyer pressed President Bush on the failure to discover Saddam’s much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction. In a little watched interview, the president dismissed her questioning with an offhand “what’s the difference” remark. He was right. He seemed to have gotten away with taking America to war on a lie.
Over the holidays, Secretary Powell confirmed there was no evidence of the WMD in Iraq. Now Paul O’Neill tells us what Bush’s most virulent enemies have claimed is true: Bush intended to take us to war from the day he took office. All this is capped by a new report from the Army War College saying the war in Iraq diverted us from the war on terror and was a major strategic blunder.
These events explain why the president has steadfastly refused to grant the 9/11 commission access to the intelligence about terrorism threats he saw prior to 9/11.
In the months after 9/11, O’Neill had received responsibility for investigating terrorist financing. Our staff contributed to many stories on those investigations, including the revelation that O’Neill met with a group of men connected to Islamic businesses and charities that had been raided by O’Neill’s own agents on suspicion of terrorist financing. Why would O’Neill do that? Did someone from the White House tell him to meet with these people? Was he asked to call off the dogs? These are questions we hope O’Neill will answer.
When the Wall Street Journal reported the story of O’Neill’s bizarre meeting with suspected terrorist financiers, we expected the rest of the media would begin to cover the political connections between the Republican Party and Muslim charities with ties to the most extreme elements of Islam. Instead, the coverage has been piecemeal and disjointed.
The White House that O’Neill describes on “60 Minutes” and the papers that he presents to back up his claims go to the heart of our democracy. Other presidents have lied to the people: Johnson and Nixon about Vietnam, Clinton about his abysmal behavior. But if what O’Neill is saying is true, the damage President Bush has done to the reputation of the United States may never be repaired. The president may have handed extremist Islam the tools to fire up hatred against the United States for yet another generation. Imagine if you were an average Iraqi and you saw documents proving the United States planned to divide up your natural resources nine months before 9/11.
A document put on display during the “60 Minutes” telecast demonstrated a plan for carving up post-war Iraq. The plan, developed during the opening weeks of the Bush administration — long before 9/11 or public expressions of the need for “regime change” in Baghdad — even dealt with dividing the Iraqi oil supply. If the documents are real (so far the White House is expressing displeasure but not denying the truth of what O’Neill presented), then the president must explain what was going on in the months before 9/11 and do it soon. If he lied about the war plan in Iraq, and if it had nothing to do with 9/11 as these documents seem to demonstrate, then President Bush has committed the worst crime a president can: He sent our greatest treasure to Iraq to die for purely cynical reasons. As I write these words, 495 American lives and thousands of Iraqi lives have been sacrificed for this “policy.”
President Nixon was reelected and got away with his lies — for a while. If President Bush sought revenge against Saddam for what Saddam supposedly tried to do to the president’s father, then he has to fess up to it, not tell Treasury to investigate the Cabinet-level whistle blower.
The events that Paul O’Neill brought to light transcend politics. Can this President be so callow that he would send our best to die on a personal vendetta? Is this the Corleone or the Bush family?
