LA Times: Bush Never Lied
New Republic editor James Kirchick writes in the LA Times that Bush never lied to us about Iraq:
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, …
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.
And if Democrats “vent their spleen" at the CIA, they should stand up and admit that they destroyed our intelligence abilities through years of systematic deconstruction, from the Hughes-Ryan amendment of 1974 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to the Torricelli Principle.
Blog post #7013 in category
Intelligence
posted 16 June 08