I try to put the best face on what people do. So what’s George Bush’s excuse? Rather than assigning him evil motives, a better face would be that he’s just inept.
For example, there’s that weapons of mass destruction thing. I learned a very long time ago that people fleeing a regime are biased. The ones with the most negative views are the ones who leave. They might lie to drum up support for the regime’s opposition. So when that attractive and articulate nurse who told about the atrocities that Iraqui soldiers did when they invaded Kuwait (e.g. throwing babies out of hospital incubators), should anybody be surprised when it turns out that she wasn’t a nurse at all, but the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter? The story was never substantiated.
So for the Bush administration to swallow what the people who fled Iraq had to say about WMD is a little naive, don’t you think?
So now there’s Hamdi. For three years, this US citizen has been held without the ability to talk to his family, talk to a lawyer, 0r present any evidence that he was not indeed an enemy combatant. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan grabbed the poor kid and sold him to the US for a bounty. Duh. The Bush administration fought tooth and nail to keep him out of court, and finally when the Supreme Court says he has to have a hearing, the government decides to let him go. S0 were they lying or just inept?