Secret Agent Man

Jeff Wells, Rigorous Intuition

Parsing the statements of George Bush is of course handicapped by the man's uncommon illiteracy, though when he sticks to his prepared texts we can get some indication of what his keepers want us to hear, even if Bush himself doesn't know what he's saying. Take, for one bizarre instance, the opening remarks to his Rose Garden news conference last Friday. In defence of torture and secret prisons he boasted of the "valuable information" obtained by the CIA from waterboarding "men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" (whose telephone conversation with Mohammed Atta, including final approval for the attacks on September 10, are known to have been monitored and translated by the NSA, but apparently not acted upon). Much like Atta's unacknowledged Florida life of strippers, booze and cocaine, the supposed mastermind of September 11 was a high-living womanizer who loved clubbing and lavish hotels, and who once impressed a girlfriend by flying a helicopter past her office window trailing a banner that read "I love you."...

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