OPINION:

Does the Bush Administration Care for Facts?

Technically, hallucination means the apparent perception of sights and sounds that are not actually present. The person hallucinating often fails to realize that he is seeing things that no one else is. Of false visions and voices, command hallucinations are the most dangerous, for they prompt the person to take action. Dr. Dale McNeil of the University of California has recently found a disturbing relationship between command hallucinations and aggressive behavior.

Though failing to meet technical definition, Sharpton’s accusation simply means that the Bush administration does not see facts or acts, sometimes too strongly, based upon facts that no one else finds credible. This is a harsh indictment of a president elected primarily for his straightforwardness and clarity of vision. Sharpton furnishes no facts to prove his point, but his statement seems to refer to the president's war expeditions abroad and law and order polices at home.

September 11 was of course no hallucination. Towers fell in reality. Deaths were tangible. The anguish across America was genuine. Osama videos, showing him smiling over the tragedy, were not made in America. And President Bush’s tears, co-mingled with many others, were real.

In reaction to the September calamity, however, the Bush administration has most certainly been overly cautious even at the expense of facts. The administration has reacted in ways contrary to the established constitutional principles of liberty and due process. Hundreds of immigrants and citizens have been swooped up from their homes and businesses, detained, and kept incommunicado for months, even though the administration had scant facts to justify the sweep. In combating terror, the enforcement agencies are under institutional pressure to monitor places of worships, charities, and religious gatherings. This pressure cultivates among public officials a propensity to see and hear things out of context. In one case, for example, three medical students were arrested in a highway chase for allegedly laughing about September 11. In another case, a Muslim cleric was falsely charged with carrying bags laced with TNT. Such episodes begin to make the case that the Bush administration favors caution over facts.

Sharpton's accusation is even more believable in analyzing the war on Iraq. Was the Bush administration relying on facts about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? It is no secret that the president argued that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed a direct threat to the United States. Satellite photos--shared with the UN Security Council--showed Iraqis trucking away weapons from a suspicious production site. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency and UN inspectors failed to trace these weapons. Frustrated, the president waged a controversial war to prove his point. So far no weapons of mass destruction have been found, shoring up the rhetoric of hallucination. Yet, one might simply say that the president was given bad intelligence or that the president’s real intention was to dismount a brutal dictator.

Sharpton's accusation begins to gather mass when the president’s two self-damaging declarations are added to the evidence. In May, the president declared that the Iraqi war was over. One would think that the president had relied upon credible facts before making such a momentous declaration. Later developments demonstrate, however, that the announcement was no more than wishful thinking, for since then the news from the battleground has been anything but good. Even capturing Saddam and killing his sons did little to end the war.

The president’s other declaration—that he sees a wave of democracy sweeping through the kingdoms of the Middle East—is equally troubling, for it too seems to ignore facts. The people in the Middle East--including Palestinians--yearn to have personal freedoms and democratic options. But it will take a miracle for these people to believe that the president is a champion of civil and political rights for Muslims at home and abroad. Moreover, stable institutions of democracy grow from within and do not flow from the barrels of guns. Despite the president's sincere assurances that he sees Islam as a peaceful faith, the rhetoric of good and evil has muddled more than cleared the waters of the Middle East. Only time will tell whether the president's vision about democracy in the Middle East is real.

Meanwhile, as the election contest draws near and as Rev. Sharpton departs from the main stage, his wild accusation that President Bush believes in hallucinations might survive as a fact in the records of history.