The Truth Comes Out

June 17th, 2008

Bush never lied to us about Iraq
The administration simply got bad intelligence. Critics are wrong to assert deception.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”

Yet Rockefeller’s highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.


Filed under Commentary, War Against Islamic Fascism | Comment (1)

One Response to “The Truth Comes Out”

  1. Michael R. Bernstein on June 23, 2008 June 23, 2008 - 8:23 am

    Hmph. My own position is that the administration was engaged in willful ignorance and stupidity. They got the (bad) intelligence they went looking for, and dismantled or circumvented procedures put in place to guard against this sort of wish-fulfillment. Nay-sayers were systematically ousted. Yea-sayers with few qualifications were placed in positions of authority. And so on.

    And yes, they also lied, but probably not more than average for an administration. But those lies were on top of, and in support of, a staggeringly huge tottering pile of assumptions and wishful thinking.

    And so, disaster.

    In the corporate world, this sort of process failure leads to debacles like Enron. But it is hard to prosecute executives for building a self-running wish-fulfillment machine unconnected to reality per-se, so any deviation from GAAP (IOW, actual lies they told) are what gets latched onto.

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