What the collective noun for hypocrites should be? A shite of hypocrites perhaps? Maybe a cunting?

I think we need to agree on one as there’s an awful lot in the media recently. Take George Bush (please! Bad-dum . . tish!). He’s in the press complaining that the New York Times has just blown the whistle on yet another shady spying operation by the NSA.

It’s not too long ago that Bush was defending his last weasel directive to wiretap the conversations of the American Public in a bid to root out the evil terrorist menace lurking in the heart of America. Despite recording – illegally – thousands of hours of conversations, the NSA didn’t find their Islamic bomb plot or bioweapons conspiracy . . . but they did, incidentally, end up with terabytes of conversations and emails that could be data mined for dirt on people which they coulld not possibly have obtained or shown to a court beforehand. Who knows, amongst that vast stack of unconstitutionally-gathered data might even be the supposedly private words of a political rival, or businessman?

So fast forward a month or two, and he’s trotting out the same invectives about those liberals and their funny ideas about rights, freedom, democracy, etc – shit like that – derailing his war on terror.

“If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money," he says, which for George is a very sensible thing to say.

It’s the same thing, incidentally, said by the CIA and FBI when they were investigating the funding trail for America’s no. 1 Most Wanted criminal: Osama Bin Laden.

So it’s odd that when Greg Palast started investigating why the security services seemed to let everybody down on Septmeber 11th, he found that it may (and he’s careful to stress “may”) have had something to do with George.

In “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”, p 91 he states that:

“The reports I did based on this information won the California State University School of Journalism’s Project Censored Award in 2002. It’s not the kind of prize you want to win – it’s given to crucial stories that were effectively banned from U.S. airwaves and papers”

So what was so controversial? According to his top-level CIA source, when George came into office, there was a major policy shift and investigators were told to back off from any enquiries that touched on Saudi Royals or their retainers. In short, George didn’t want his business bosses embarrassed – many of whom (including the Bin Ladens) were almost certainly being blackmailed by Osama and paying him off to leave their decadent-yet-profitable oil operations unmolested.

“Osama was the exception: he remained a wanted man, but agents could not look too closely at how he filled his piggy bank. The key rule of any investigation, ‘follow the money,’ was now violated and investigations – at least before Spetember 11 – began to die”

So is George, like most of his war on terror so far, just bolting the door painfully late after Trigger has bolted into the sunset? I’m not so sure – you see he’s eager to fight for some things: for exampla, as Michael Moore notes in “Dude, Where’s My Country?”, p22, in the aftermath of the September 11th security fumble, George instructed the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, to deny the FBI access to the suspected terrorist’s gun purchase records.

So you can eavesdrop and track the finances of law-abiding citizens, but you can’t see where some dead terrorist bought guns? That’s taking the Second Amendment a little far, don’t you think? Is it the NRA leaning on him to avoid any gun controls and security be damned? It would be expensive, after all, to have to screen all the members of those gun clubs that the Al-Qaeda manual advises you to join. Although possibly cheaper to check which members of “Patriot Moms for High Calibre Goodness” were buying AK-47s than a massive high-technology eavesdropping program.

Perhaps he was worried that WAMY, a group investigated by the US and Interpol as being a potential radicalisation group in some areas (Palast and the BBC have a tape of their Florida summer camp for teenagers, featuring rap songs about hostage-taking and suicide killings) might point back to two high profile members of his favourite oil family?

Who knows? George ain’t tellin’ because he seems to be the only one allowed to have secrets anymore.

Hmm. A President of hypocrites? How’s that sound?