That was a long read. Okay, where to start. First off, it's ironic that the author refers to lies repeated often enough that they just don't die. The administration is a master of this. FB and Major have given good replies to the "WMD in general" issue. More will be forthcoming, I'm sure, because the documentation showing the administrations' cherry-picking of weak, unsupported evidence is rich and abundant. I thought they had WMD too, even six months to a year after "mission accomplished." Didn't make sense for them to keep the UN sanctions in place if they had complied. I truly believe that Bush and the WHIG cabal truly believed that Iraq had WMD. I don't think that they "lied" in the sense that they just fabricated the whole thing to get support for the war. Most people believed they had WMD, including the Clinton administration and intelligence from other nations. This doesn't change the fact that the administration willfully dug up, cherry-picked, exaggerated, or possibly even fabricated many specific occurences of "evidence". This is so well documented on so many points I don't even know where to start. In my opinion they knew it was there, they weren't going to bother with the nay-sayers trying to hold them back, they were going to invade, find the materials, and get to say "I told you so" once it was done. In the meantime they needed to cook up enough stuff to get the American public on board with them. Theirs was not a sincere response to what they saw as a legitimate immediate threat; they wanted to invade and democratice Iraq well before 9/11. All of the bits about Democratic senators claiming being duped: the defensive response is that they saw the same evidence. No, they saw the administrations' hand-picked evidence. If they had known the numerous struggles between Cheney and the CIA, or between Rummy and the Dept of State and the Pentagon... well, things would have been different. As for the Libby indictment defense. I addressed this in another thread. Fitz is being a very nice boy and limiting the indictments in question only to the indictments in question. Good for him. Those of us allowed to look at the big picture can see that Libby purposefully lied to misdirect the investigation. They could have/would have uncovered more if he had not. They may yet do so. Libby may walk with the Oliver North "I don't recall" defense but nobody with common sense will believe it. More of the stellar defense: "All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam’s stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him." Uh, no, it doesn't also conveniently dispose of that charge, nice try. Many documented instances of hype and exaggeration and cherry picking of evidence are out there. That other nations and administrations believed there was WMD doesn't change this. The author tries to dismiss the administration's advertisement of the threat as imminent by sticking only to the SOTU (again, ugh) and other speeches by Bush. There were plenty other people hyping the war wagon other than the president. Some hinted or flat out said it was an imminent threat. Perhaps the biggest joke of all is that he relies on the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission to say that the administration didn't pressure intelligence agencies and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee to affirm that the Saddam link with Al-Queda is true??? Good god this is ridiculous. First off, these "bipartisan" committees are republican majority controlled and totally stonewalled anything that could possibly say anything bad about the administration. Anybody watch the news lately? There was this closed session in the Senate to discuss how utterly that branch of government had failed in oversight of the administration, in particular these "bipartisan committees." These committees haven't even finished their duties (haven't even started phase two). The link to AQ has been so utterly totally debunked it is no longer worthy of conversation. It was a joke that Cheney still held on to it in the VP debates over a year ago; it's worse now. Talk about repeating a lie enough to make it true. If this is all the author has to back up what he's saying, he doesn't have much to say. Referring to British intelligence and the Butler commission is a common repub fallback. Of course the British covered their asses; they were caught with their pants down too when no WMD were discovered. Now, this is flat-out funny: "The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium," So lack of proof is proof? Where's the evidence that they 'sought' it? The author's defense of the sixteen words is basically that Bush wasn't saying much. Stirring fears of nuclear mushroom clouds in the hearts of Americans is a lot more serious than that. This is the best defense he has? More: "if Cheney had actually been briefed on Wilson’s oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger." The CIA was more inclined? Then why did they fight the inclusion of the words? Furthermore, the idea that Cheney didn't ask for someone to check out the Niger story is taken on Cheney's word. It's perfecty possible that Cheney is lying to cover his own ass. "distortion, misrepresentation, and selective perception" is exactly what was used by the administration in cooking up war support. If the verb "misled" was used, or the adjective "disingenuous", would that make the administration supporters feel better?
Think Progress Bites back... http://thinkprogress.org/2005/11/11/iraq-intel/ Bush Resurrects False Claim That Congress Had “Same Intelligence” On Iraq In his speech today, President Bush claimed that members of Congress who voted for the 2002 Iraq war resolution “had access to the same intelligence” as his administration. This is patently false. Nevermind that much of the intelligence offered to the public and to Congress was inaccurate and misleading, or that according to the Downing Street memo and other documents, such intelligence was likely intentionally “fixed.” It is simply not true to state that Congress received the “same intelligence” as the White House: FACT — Dissent From White House Claims on Iraq Nuclear Program Consistently Withheld from Congress: everal Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments [of intel suggesting aluminum tubes showed Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program] said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department’s dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.” [NYT, 10/3/04] FACT — Sen. Kerrey: Bush “Has Much More Access” to Intel Than Congress: Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), ex-Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman: “The president has much more access to intelligence than members of Congress does. Ask any member of Congress. Ask a Republican member of Congress, do you get the same access to intelligence that the president does? Look at these aluminum tube stories that came out the president delivered to the Congress — ‘We believe these would be used for centrifuges.’ — didn’t deliver to Congress the full range of objections from the Department of Energy experts, nuclear weapons experts, that said it’s unlikely they were for centrifuges, more likely that they were for rockets, which was a pre-existing use. The president has much more access to intelligence than any member of Congress.” [10/7/04] FACT — Rockefeller: PDBs, CIA Intel Withheld From Senate: Ranking minority member on the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller (D-WV): “[P]eople say, ‘Well, you know, you all had the same intelligence that the White House had.’ And I’m here to tell you that is nowhere near the truth. We not only don’t have, nor probably should we have, the Presidential Daily Brief. We don’t have the constant people who are working on intelligence who are very close to him. They don’t release their — an administration which tends not to release — not just the White House, but the CIA, DOD [Department of Defense], others — they control information. There’s a lot of intelligence that we don’t get that they have.” [11/04/05] FACT — War Supporter Ken Pollack: White House Engaged in “Creative Omission” of Iraq Intel: In the eyes of Kenneth Pollack, “a Clinton-era National Security Council member and strong supporter of regime change in Iraq,” “the Administration consistently engaged in ‘creative omission,’ overstating the imminence of the Iraqi threat, even though it had evidence to the contrary. ‘The President is responsible for serving the entire nation,’ Pollack writes. ‘Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the US government – and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.’” [Christian Science Monitor, 1/14/04] FACT — White House Had Exclusive Access to “Unique” Intel Sources: “The claim that the White House and Congress saw the ’same intelligence’ on Iraq is further undermined by the Bush administration’s use of outside intelligence channels. For more than year prior to the war, the administration received intelligence assessments and analysis on Iraq directly from the Department of Defense’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), run by then-undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas J. Feith, and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi.” [MediaMatters, 11/8/05]
Who's lying? Bush and company again. I am bolding all the lies - mostly just from one speech. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10009710/ Asterisks dot White House’s Iraq argument Administration had access to intel that wasn’t shared with Congress President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence. Neither assertion is wholly accurate. The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements. But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions. National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen." Senate hasn’t probed manipulation claim But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence." Some intel kept close to the sleeve But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country. In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote. Few in Congress read intel report The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary. Even within the Bush administration, not everybody consistently viewed Iraq as what Hadley called "an enormous threat." In a news conference in February 2001 in Egypt, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said of the economic sanctions against Hussein's Iraq: "Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction." A vote for regime change? Bush, in his speech Friday, said that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support." The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power. The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce "all relevant Security Council resolutions," and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend "against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." Hadley, in his remarks, went further. "Congress, in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," he said. "And, as you know, the Clinton administration took some action." But the 1998 legislation gave the president authority "to support efforts to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein" by providing assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including arms, humanitarian aid and broadcasting facilities. President Bill Clinton ordered four days of bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998, under the 1991 resolution authorizing military force in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Describing that event in an interview with CBS News yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: "We went to war in 1998 because of concerns about his weapons of mass destruction."
Bush: "Disarm!" Iraq: "what, we don't have any weapons" Bush: "Disarm" Iraq: "disarm what, we don't have anything" Bush: "Alright, since you refused to disarm, we have no choice but to destroy you."
This is pretty misleading. Its acknowledged that Saddam was engaging in brinksmanship over the existance of weapons programs and obsfucating the inspection process.
you forgot to bold this part. cherry picking, are you? The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.
Not at all. I have stated multiple times that the lies are in the details. I've also never said every statement he makes is a lie. You asked who's lying. I pointed out lies made by Bush just yesterday. The statements I bolded are simply not true, and the article details exactly why. For example: <I>"those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."</I> They concluded no such thing. This statement is simply false.
uhmm, no. http://powerlineblog.com/archives/012231.php -- Milbank and Pincus devote most of the article to arguing that two sub-claims made by the Bush administration are "not wholly accurate." The first is the claim by Stephen Hadley that "those people who have looked at that issue [manipulation of intelligence], some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen." Milbank and Pincus note that these bodies concluded only that that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, not that the administration did not exaggerate these conclusions. However, they have already conceded that the intelligence agencies concluded that Saddam clearly had WMD. So how did President Bush, in making this same claim, exaggerate their conclusions? Milbank and Pincus imply that this could have happened through the omission of caveats and dissenting opinions. But if the intelligence was "overwhelming," it would have made no sense to discuss caveats and dissenting opinions. The administration lied or misled only if it affirmatively stated that there were no caveats or dissents, which it never did. The Post, and you, also want to quibble with President Bush's claim that Democrats in the House and Senate had access to the same intelligence he did. The Post notes that members of Congress do not have access to the president's daily brief. But Bush didn't claim that the Dems received every piece of paper Bush saw -- he merely said they had access to the same intelligence. Milbank and Pincus do not suggest that the daily brief contained anything materially different from what Congress had access to. They do point out that Congress didn't get the National Intelligence Estimate (summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq) until "just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country." But how does this rebut Bush's statement about what Congress had access to? Are the Dems who are feeding Milbank and Pincus this talking point claiming that they didn't have time to read the report, which consisted of a mere 92 pages? What was on their plates that was more important? Milbank and Pincus also complain that some of the "doubts" expressed in the NIE either were not cleared for public disclosure until the last minute or were not cleared at all. But the legislators still had the right to consider this material when they voted; indeed if they credited those doubts, they had an obligation to do so. As noted, though, the intelligence community overwhelmingly thought that Saddam possessed WMD. To their credit, Milbank and Pincus ultimately seem underwhelmed by the efforts of hypocritical, gutless, and/or lazy Dems to explain away their vote to go to war. But it's unfortunate that they give voice to these lame explanations and, in doing so, suggest that the Bush administration is being less than honest in defending itself.
So, they're all liars. No new news there. The war is still unjustified, and it's still being waged for the benefit of those who started it.
Out of curiosity, what was the last world power to enter a hostile country, and successfully hold it with force? It doesn't seem to work for the US very well.
This makes the same points that you were making before. Yes most people believed there WMD's. That wasn't the lie that Bush told. Bush lied about details, and ommitted qualifying information about that intel. This blog also incorrectly states that the Dems voted to go to war. The Dems were told it was a vote to keep the peace. Bush said that is what it was all about. The article tries to state that congress did have access to the same intel while admitting they didn't receive the daily brief, and doesn't even try to explain the qualifiers where various experts voiced their doubts over parts of the evidence submitted. Instead they received the evidence as if it were certain.
The author of this article is intentionally omitting material facts regarding the war on Iraq (sound familiar?). Wonder, who's lying now? All this re-writing of history is really sad and dangerous, it means that the same mistakes can be made again some day.
