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Feb 11, 2004 | Thank you for inviting me to speak at this timely conference on the Uses and Misuses of Fear in our political system in America.
It is an honor to be part of a program that includes so many distinguished scholars who, unlike me, have genuine expertise in these matters.
And I want to acknowledge that I have already learned a lot from them by reading some of what they have written and by calling some of them on the telephone before trying to organize my own thoughts on this topic.
It's also a personal pleasure to share a dais with my friend and former Senate colleague Bob Kerrey, who brings to this discussion not only his experience in political and academic leadership but also -- it bears noting because of the subject of our discussions here -- his extraordinary personal example of how to stare down the fear of death and lead with raw courage in circumstances that are hard for the rest of us to imagine.
We are meeting, moreover, in a city that has itself been forced to learn how to conquer terror. And because we are gathered very close to ground zero, we should of course begin our deliberations with a moment of respect and remembrance for those who died on 9/11 and for those who have been bereaved.
Terrorism, after all, is the ultimate misuse of fear for political ends.
Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger the terrorists are capable of posing.
That is one of the reasons it was so troubling last week when the widely respected arms expert David Kay concluded a lengthy and extensive investigation in Iraq for the Bush administration with these words:
"We were all wrong."
The real meaning of Kay's devastating verdict is that for more than two years, President Bush and his administration have been distorting America's political reality by force-feeding the American people a grossly exaggerated fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger posed by Iraq.
How could that happen?
Could it possibly have been intentional?
Well, there are some clues ... the fear campaign aimed at Iraq was timed for the kickoff of the midterm election campaign of 2002 -- you know, the one where Max Cleland, who lost three limbs fighting for America in Vietnam, was accused of being unpatriotic.
The curious timing was explained by the president's chief of staff as a marketing decision -- timed for the post-Labor Day advertising period.
For everything there is a season -- particularly the politics of fear.
And it did serve to distract attention from pesky domestic issues like the economy, which were, after all, beginning to worry the White House in the summer of 2002.
And of course there is now voluminous evidence that the powerful clique inside the administration that had been agitating for war against Iraq since before the inauguration immediately seized upon the tragedy of 9/11 as a terrific opportunity to accomplish what they had not been able to do beforehand: invade a country that had not attacked us and didn't threaten us.
They were clever and they managed to get the job done.
But some deceitfulness took place somehow.
The so-called intelligence was stretched beyond recognition, distorted and misrepresented.
Some of it that the president personally presented to the American people on national television in his State of the Union address turned out to have been actually forged by someone -- though we still don't know who (and, amazingly enough, the White House still doesn't seem to really care who forged the document).
The CIA had warned his staff not to let him use that particular document, but there was some kind of regrettable communications foul-up inside the National Security Council.
But now the president has expressed his determination to find out who is actually responsible for the intelligence being "all wrong."
Over the past 18 months, I have delivered a series of speeches addressing different aspects of President Bush's agenda, including his decision to go to war in Iraq under patently false pretenses, his dangerous assault on civil liberties here at home, his outrageously fraudulent economic policy, and his complete failure to protect the global environment.
Initially, my purposes were limited in each case to the subject matter of the speech.
However, as I tried to interpret what was driving these various policies, certain common features became obvious and a clear pattern emerged: In every case there was a determined disinterest in the facts; an inflexible insistence on carrying out preconceived policies regardless of the evidence concerning what might work and what clearly would not; a consistent bias favoring the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the broader public interest; and a marked tendency to develop policies in secret, avoid accountability to the public, the Congress or the press; and a disturbing willingness to misrepresent the true nature of the policy involved.
And no matter what the issue, it is now clear that in every instance they have resorted to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit debate and drive the public agenda.
The administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after 9/11, to create a political case for attacking Iraq.
Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with al-Qaida.
Iraq was said to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability.
Defeating Saddam Hussein was conflated into bringing war to the terrorists, even though what it really meant was diverting resources away from the pursuit of the people who attacked us and causing us to lose focus on that task.
The administration also did not hesitate to use fear of terrorism to launch a broadside attack on measures that have been in place for a generation to prevent a repetition of gross abuses of authority by the FBI and by the intelligence community at the height of the Cold War.
I served on the House Select Committee on Intelligence immediately after the period when the revelations of these abuses led to major reforms.
Conservatives on that panel resisted those changes tooth and nail.
They have long memories, and now these same constraints have been targeted in the PATRIOT Act and have been sharply diminished or removed.
And the president wants the PATRIOT Act extended and made permanent.
