Remember That Mushroom Cloud?
Published: November 2, 2005
The indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of lying to a grand jury about
the outing of Valerie Wilson has focused attention on the lengths to
which the Bush administration went in 2003 to try to distract the public
from this central fact: American soldiers found a lot of things in Iraq,
including a well-armed insurgency their bosses never anticipated, but
they did not find weapons of mass destruction.
It's clear from the indictment that Vice President ***** Cheney and his
staff formed the command bunker for this misdirection campaign. But
there is a much larger issue than the question of what administration
officials said about Iraq after the invasion - it's what they said about
Iraq before the invasion. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, may
have been grandstanding yesterday when he forced the Senate to hold a
closed session on the Iraqi intelligence, but at least he gave the issue
a much-needed push.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald
Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures,
built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was
stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices
and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney,
the administration's doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al
Qaeda and implied that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.
Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a good bipartisan job
of explaining that the intelligence in general was dubious, old and even
faked by foreign sources. The panel said the analysts had suffered from
groupthink. At the time, the highest-ranking officials in Washington
were demanding evidence against Iraq.
But that left this question: If the intelligence was so bad and so
moldy, why was it presented to the world as what Mr. Tenet, then the
director of central intelligence, famously called "a slam-dunk" case?
Were officials fooled by bad intelligence, or knowingly hyping it?
Certainly, the administration erased caveats, dissents and doubts from
the intelligence reports before showing them to the public. And there
was never credible intelligence about a working relationship between
Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Under a political deal that Democrats should not have approved, the
Intelligence Committee promised to address these questions after the
2004 election. But a year later, there is no sign that this promise is
being kept, other than unconvincing assurances from Senator Pat Roberts,
the Republican who is chairman of the intelligence panel, that people
are working on it.
So far, however, there has been only one uncirculated draft report by
one committee staff member on the narrow question of why the analysts
didn't predict the ferocity of the insurgency. The Republicans have not
even agreed to do a final report on the conflict between the
intelligence and the administration's public statements.
Mr. Reid wrested a commitment from the Senate to have a bipartisan
committee report by Nov. 14 on when the investigation will be done. We
hope Mr. Roberts now gives this half of the investigation the same
urgency he gave the first half and meets his commitment to examine all
aspects of this mess, including how the information was used by the
administration. Americans are long overdue for an answer to why they
were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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