How can we trust the President when he constantly lies to us? Last month he
told the people of this country that Congress had access to the same
intelligence about Iraq that he did. That was proven a lie a couple weeks ago
when a nonpartisan congressional investigation group released a report stating
the President has access to “far greater amounts” of intelligence than congress.
Now we find out about a lie he told in his press conference on Monday to
justify his illegal wiretapping program:
President Bush asserted this week that the news media published a U.S.
government leak in 1998 about Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone,
alerting the al Qaeda leader to government monitoring and prompting him to
abandon the device.The story of the vicious leak that destroyed a valuable intelligence
operation was first reported by a best-selling book, validated by the Sept.
11 commission and then repeated by the president.But it appears to be an urban myth.
The al Qaeda leader’s communication to aides via satellite phone had
already been reported in 1996 — and the source of the information was
another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time.The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the
source was bin Laden himself.Causal effects are hard to prove, but other factors could have persuaded
bin Laden to turn off his satellite phone in August 1998. A day earlier, the
United States had fired dozens of cruise missiles at his training camps,
missing him by hours.Bush made his assertion at a news conference Monday, in which he defended
his authorization of warrantless monitoring of communications between some
U.S. citizens and suspected terrorists overseas. He fumed that “the fact
that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type
of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak.” He berated the
media for “revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for”
and thus helping “the enemy” change its operations.
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So did Bush blatantly lie to us or has he ignored more facts about the man
who attacked us on September 11? Bush tries to validate his decisions over and
over again, but his validations usually end up being false. To think, this is
the man who constantly says “trust me”. No thanks, you got to earn trust and
Bush has done nothing to earn it.