I am the first president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt.

I presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world.

I am the first president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation, and I did so against the will of the United Nations and the world community.

I created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.

I set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history.

I am the first president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission.

I am the first president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board.

I removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of congressional oversight than any presidential administration in US history.

While the scandal has so far focused on Iraq, the manipulations appear to be global. For example, one person from the intelligence community recalls an administration hard-liner's urging the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research to state that Cuba has a biological weapons program. The spooks refused, and Colin Powell backed them.

Then there's North Korea. The C.I.A.'s assessments on North Korea's nuclear weaponry were suddenly juiced up beginning in December 2001. The alarmist assessments (based on no new evidence) continued until January of this year, when the White House wanted to play down the Korean crisis. Then assessments abruptly restored the less ominous language of the 1990's.

The latest issue of the Naval War College Review describes the ambiguities of the North Korean uranium program and argues that U.S. officials "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes."

"Is there a parallel with what is now going on, after the fact, in estimates about Iraq?" asked the article's author, Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, in an interview. "I think there may be."

So that chiding White House official was right: there was more to the picture. But I'm afraid the bigger the picture gets, the more it looks like a pattern of dishonesty.  

Bush said the CIA's doubts about the charge -- that Iraq sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore in Africa -- were "subsequent" to the Jan. 28 State of the Union speech in which Bush made the allegation. Defending the broader decision to go to war with Iraq, the president said the decision was made after he gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

Bush's position was at odds with those of his own aides, who acknowledged over the weekend that the CIA raised doubts that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger more than four months before Bush's speech.

The president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective.

In the face of persistent questioning about the use of intelligence before the Iraq war, administration officials have responded with evolving and sometimes contradictory statements.

When George W. Bush ran for president, one of his big selling points was responsibility. Americans were tired of Bill Clinton's fudges and legalisms. They were tired of hearing that the latest falsehood was part of a larger truth, or that it was OK because the president had attributed it to somebody else, or that the country should "move on." Bush promised to end all that. He promised an "era of responsibility" in which leaders and citizens would no longer "blame somebody else."

There isn't much more to say about the flap over President Bush's State

of the Union use of fraudulent evidence regarding Iraq's nuclear program.

We know that an administration desperate to make a case for war seized upon

material that it had been repeatedly warned was suspect or (as is actually

the case) outright forged and presented it to the American public. That

impeachment hearings aren't already being held is just another sign of the

deep dysfunctionality of our political system -- in which partisan

operatives in Congress can drum up an impeachment vote when a president

lies about his sex life, but when a president lies about the gravest

matters of war and peace, it's not even considered worth an investigation.

What is interesting here is that this story is playing out at

precisely the same time the nation may be slowly coming to the belated

realization that things really aren't going so well in the president's

open-ended, no-clearly-defined-goals "war on terrorism." Our principal foe,

Osama bin Laden, remains on the loose, and his organization continues to

operate in a region sandwiched between one nation that we conquered and one

that is nominally our ally. His principal ally, Mullah Omar, is also on the

loose. The leader of the other nation we've recently invaded, Saddam

Hussein, is also on the loose. Is there a pattern here? Why can't we find

these guys?

This is, of course, an intelligence failure -- and that's where these

two stories intersect. At the very same time that the Bush administration

was corrupting our intelligence agencies by demanding that they produce the

evidence for an already decided-upon war, it needed to rely upon them to

locate its foes. I'm not an intelligence insider and I don't know whether

U.S. intelligence's failure to locate Osama et al. is a function of

incompetence, demoralization, structural weakness (reliance on technical

means rather than people who speak the language, for example) or other

factors.

But it's obvious that the bogus Iraq/Niger nuclear connection story is a

sign of just how derailed, corrupted and ineffectual the U.S.intelligence

effort has become. If you're busy squabbling over whether to offer

fabricated evidence for a trumped-up war, you have that much less time to

do your real job.

Let me put it in simple terms: if Bush lied about the reasons for war, it would be the gravest crisis in the nation's history. It would exceed Watergate because of the cost in terms of money and lives. It would be the worst failure of the Presidency since the founding of the republic. A gross abuse of the office and its powers.

If you cannot believe the President on going to war, what can he say that anyone can believe? Which is a lot more important than if the Dems score a few points on the campaign trail.

I would hope that the GOP would understand that their entire future rides on the credibility of Bush and his team. If they are seen to be dishonest, their jobs are on the line as well.

But then, this is George Bush's pattern. He looks good until he has to start making decisions and then it all comes crashing down. He's failed his entire life, a series of bad decisions coming home to roost, over and over. Make no mistake, this is not some political crisis he can solve with a few distractions. This is a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands of families.

American now stands isolated, trapped in Iraq, our allies unwilling to help, except in the most nominal way. Now, the President's top aides are regarded as liars. Their dissembling shames both their office and the man they serve.

Bush used the benefit of the doubt which all Presidents get to get his war, now as the costs of it explode beyond anything he said, beyond anything he imagined, his aides are reduced to the most shameful kind of fingerpointing.

Personal accountability, it seems, is only for the poor and weak.

Why did Bush contenance these lies? Because he thought he'd bet right. Getting rid of Saddam would be little more than a sideshow. But it isn't. It has trapped the US Army in a nasty guerrilla war, one his father predicted would have occured in 1991 if we had tried to seize Baghdad.

We should expect many more days of lies to come as the foundation of this war collapses like rotting wood.

What do we have here?

Here is CIA Director Tenet arguing in October of 2002 against the use of the Niger evidence, stating bluntly that it was useless. He made this pitch directly to the White House. These concerns were brushed aside by Bush officials, and the forged evidence was used despite the warnings in the State of the Union address. Now, the administration is trying to claim they were never told the evidence was bad. Yet between Tenet's personal appeals in 2002, and Ambassador Wilson's assurances that everyone who needed to know was in the know regarding Niger, it appears the Bush White House has been caught red-handed in a series of incredible falsehoods.

There are two more layers on this onion to be peeled. The first concerns Secretary of State Powell. One week after the Niger evidence was used by Bush in the State of the Union address, Powell presented to the United Nations the administration's case for war. The Niger evidence was notably absent from Powell's presentation. According to CBS News, Powell said, "I didn't use the uranium at that point because I didn't think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world."

What a difference a week makes. The White House would have us believe they were blissfully unaware of the forged nature of their war evidence when Bush gave his State of the Union address, and yet somehow the Secretary of State knew well enough to avoid using it just seven days later. The moral of the story appears to be that rotten war evidence is not fit for international consumption, but is perfectly suitable for delivery to the American people.