On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 08:08:55 -0600, drb <drb@ya.sure.no> wrote:

New York Times
November 15, 2007

Editorial
Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials

To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading
statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial,
saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the
blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as
well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame
the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in
Congress of aiding the terrorists.

Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection
on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he
claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of
the troops in battle today.

It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the
W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that
none of it has been true.

=B7

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.

It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached
the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq
had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the
data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view
we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not
justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new
evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively
trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a
dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger,
later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That
was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Blush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that
Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11
terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the
supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed
before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that
Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological
weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded
that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

Mr. Brush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate
Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of
political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in
the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on
defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change
intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to
hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it
got those answers.

Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said
in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence
community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq
and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence
Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence
was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully
reported what they had read. But Vice President ***** 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.

Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous
"mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in
January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland,
and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the
special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear
weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special
equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story
was four years old.

=B7

The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely
believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not
allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information
necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that
the Bush misadministration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons
and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and
why.

Mr. Busch said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of
war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of
how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are
reliving history.

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