Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie -- and Why Trump Is Worse by Eric Alterman

Author:Eric Alterman [Alterman, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781541616820
Amazon: 1541616820
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-08-10T23:00:00+00:00

In ideological terms, Bush made a 180-degree turn in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. He had taken office in January 2001 speaking of the necessity for humility on the world stage. “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us,” he said, but “if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.” Guided by his vice president, Dick Cheney, by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and by their respective aides—including, especially, the prominent neoconservative thinker and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the post-9/11 version of George W. Bush embraced a more expansive definition of US national security and empire than any previous president. Bush put the rest of the world on notice: no longer would he “stand by while peril draws closer and closer.” Never again would he “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” The United States was undertaking a crusade against “evil,” and other nations needed to decide whether they were “with us or against us.” America would now “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had been a counselor to Richard Nixon and his ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as Gerald Ford’s defense secretary after that, put the matter more bluntly in private. Speaking on the evening after 9/11, he insisted, “We need to bomb something else [other than Afghanistan] to prove that we are, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks”6

The lies began immediately. For instance, in its eagerness to get the stock market trading again and avoid an economic free fall, the administration immediately informed New Yorkers that it was safe to breathe the air in and around what became known as “ground zero,” where the attacks on the World Trade Center towers occurred. This turned out to be a lie, and it was one that would inflict lifelong health problems upon a vast number of the brave Americans who committed themselves to helping victims in the aftermath of the attack. The truth, according to a comprehensive study later undertaken by the Sierra Club, was that no one had made “any reasonable effort to evaluate the actual safety of breathing that air.” Even when it was “confronted with information revealing harm,” such as the fact that 9/11 dust was “highly caustic” to those breathing it in, the Bush administration failed to disclose this to the public—including those heroic volunteers and first responders answering their nation’s call in its time of profound peril. These lies had deadly consequences. In June 2019, for instance, New York Police detective Luis Alvarez succumbed to cancer at age fifty-three following sixty-nine rounds of chemotherapy. His doctors blamed his condition on the time he spent as a first responder at ground zero. He was but one of thousands. Office workers continued to suffer the health effects for months and years afterward. According to Dr.

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