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November 15, 2005
Bush's Lies and Deceptions Defined
A NY Times Editorial in today's paper explains the ways which President Bush misled the American public in the buildup to the Iraq war. I have been looking for a more detailed description, asking specifically what the Democrats in Congress knew before voting to support a possible use of force against Saddam. It seems clear that the Administration gave Congress a sanitized version of information they wanted them to see and not the entire package, including doubts on the veracity of evidence of WMD. This is important to me because more and more Democrats are attacking the President. These same Dems voted to support the possible use of force. If they saw all the evidence, voted for the war and are now attacking the President, then they are clearly hypocrits. However, if they only saw heavily edited information that the Administration provided, designed to support their desire to attack Saddam, then that is a much different story.
Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.
Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.....
Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.
Posted by Chip Spear at November 15, 2005 8:51 AM