Glenn Kessler deconstructs George W Bush's State of the Union speech and finds some discrepancies
In his State of the Union address, President Bush waded right into the middle of the controversy over his warrantless domestic eavesdropping programme, making a number of assertions which have been the subject of intense debate.
For instance, he strongly suggested that the attacks of September 11th, 2001 could have been prevented if the phone calls of two hijackers had been monitored under the programme. This echoes an assertion made earlier this year by Vice-President Dick Cheney.
But the September 11th commission and congressional investigators said that the government had compiled significant information on the two suspects before the attacks and that bureaucratic problems - not a lack of information - were the main reason for the security breakdown. The FBI did not even know where the two suspects lived and missed numerous opportunities to find them in the 20 months before the attacks.
Bush also asserted that "previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have". But the most recent example cited by the administration - involving actions by President Clinton - is hotly disputed by Democrats, who say that the current and past situations are not comparable.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which required the executive branch to get approval from a secret court before conducting wiretaps within the US, was silent on warrantless physical searches of suspected spies or terrorists. So the Clinton administration asserted that it had the authority to conduct such "black bag" jobs, including searches of the home of Aldrich Ames, the CIA mole who spied for the Russians, which turned up evidence of his activities. Clinton later sought amendments to FISA which brought physical searches as well as wiretaps under its framework. Bush has never sought such amendments.
In other sections of his speech, Bush omitted context or made rhetorical claims which are open to question. Referring to Iraq, he said that the US was "continuing reconstruction efforts". He did not use the word "spending", because officials say that the administration does not intend to seek any new funds for reconstruction of Iraq in the budget request to be submitted to Congress in February. About $18 billion was previously budgeted, and $16 billion of that has been committed, but nearly a third was devoted to security and law enforcement.
At another point Bush said that the number of jobs went up by 4.6 million in the past 2½ years. There was a reason he chose not to start from the beginning of his presidency: that would have brought the net number of added jobs down to 2 million over the five years.
Bush also made a pair of contradictory pledges on the budget. He said that the budget deficit - which has soared during his presidency - was on track to decline by half by 2009. But he also urged a permanent extension of his tax cuts, due to expire in five years. The Congressional Budget Office says that this would send the budget deficit soaring after 2011.
The president said he had reduced the "growth" of non-security discretionary spending. This only means that this spending did not increase as much from year to year. Moreover, overall discretionary spending has exploded during his tenure, especially when military spending is included. White House budget documents show that overall discretionary spending has climbed from $644 billion in 2001 to $840 billion this year, an increase of more than 30 per cent.
Bush made a plea for a cut in oil imports, saying that oil was "often imported from unstable parts of the world". But the two biggest suppliers of oil to the US are very stable neighbours - Canada and Mexico. Only three of the 10 biggest suppliers are from the Middle East - Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Algeria.
At several points in his speech Bush made odd rhetorical leaps. He ended it with a stirring assertion that "every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing". But then he said: "The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe and been complicit in the oppression of others." This is historically misleading. At the end of the second World War, the US did accept the division of Europe between Soviet and Western spheres, although it drew the line at giving up West Berlin.
And the US fully accepted the Soviet Union's grabbing of large parts of other countries - or even entire countries, such as the Baltic states.
Bush should know this. In May, he flew to Latvia and declared that the US bore some blame for the "division of Europe into armed camps" - what he called "one of the greatest wrongs of history". - ( Los Angeles Times/Washington Post Service)