WASHINGTON: The administration of George W. Bush is looking more and more like a bait-and-switch operation. Much like a profiteer who advertises a too-good-to-be-true deal to lure customers into his store, this White House is willing to shade and manipulate information to sell its policies to the American people and our allies around the world.

But that cynical strategy erodes our government’s credibility at home and abroad. It must stop.

To justify a pre-emptive war with Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials selectively used — and may have misused — intelligence information to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to his neighbours, to US interests in the Mideast and even to Americans here at home.

The most egregious example: The president declared in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for production of nuclear weapons — when in fact that information had been discredited at least three months earlier.

The White House continues to claim that Bush’s statement was technically accurate because he attributed it to British intelligence. But that is disingenuous because the CIA had undertaken a review of the reports from Niger at the request of Vice President Cheney and had found them bogus — and the CIA told its British counterpart in September 2002 that it had “reservations” about the information.

Claims about Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons, and his ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, have yet to be verified.

And it appears the administration has stretched some information to justify those claims. For example, President Bush and others said high-strength aluminium tubes being shipped to Iraq were to be “used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were not for uranium enrichment but for conventional weapons.

Last week under questioning from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rumsfeld disclosed that the cost of operations in Iraq are $3.9 billion a month. That is nearly twice the estimate the administration had given to the public as recently as April.

With such disclosures, it’s no wonder that this White House has such a passion for secrecy. It was little noticed when the president signed an executive order in March 2003 delaying the release of millions of classified archival documents that would otherwise have been automatically declassified after 25 years. That order also gave government bureaucrats broader authority to keep materials secret.

Such tactics are coming under attack. A federal appeals court ruled on July 8 that the White House must release records from the energy task force chaired by Vice President Cheney in 2001 — records kept hidden from the General Accounting Office and other investigators for nearly two years.

But the battles continue. Last year, I co-chaired a special joint House- Senate inquiry that investigated the intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We not only tried to lay out the facts for the American people; we identified the lessons that we should have learned and made recommendations for reforms to avert a repeat of that tragedy.

We filed the classified version of our report on Dec 20, 2002. It has taken seven months for the administration to decide what portions of the report can be made public. I am hopeful that the declassified version will be released this month. Then Congress can finally begin working on legislative solutions to the problems we have identified.

But we have lost valuable time to work with first responders to apply our findings and bolster our homeland security — and, even more seriously, there is much valuable information in the 800-page report that we will not be allowed to release.

Why? Because the executive branch controls the classification process, and this information would embarrass the administration or otherwise not serve its policy ends. Rather than a free and open debate over policy, analysts in the intelligence community and other agencies can see that the White House only wants information that will further its political goals. Instead of speaking truth to power, the political appointee tells the powerful what he wants to hear; and the American public cannot assess accountability or proposals for reform.

Is that what happened when the CIA reviewed a draft of the State of the Union speech — or crafted its assessment of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

Only an open, honest and independent investigation will determine the answer to that question. —Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post-Newsday.

(The writer is a Democrat from Florida and is running for president)