Rewriting History

The Bush campaign, er, I mean, Administration has decided it wants to fight back on charges that it misled America about Iraq's WMDs, and its nuclear program in particular, in order to drum up public support for the war. Its chosen method to fight back: mislead some more.

First of all, Atrios addresses one of the arguments quite succinctly:

I think that the recently statements of Stephen Hadley are really all we need to put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush adminsitration's credibility on anything. These people are just quite literally loathsome.

Hadley argues that Democrats had the same intelligence because "parts of"
the NIE "had been made public."

Right, and the parts of the NIE which weren't made public were the parts
which suggested that the parts which were made public were full of shit.

Any talking head who overlooks this fact to try to claim that "democrats
had the same intelligence as Republicans" is just completely full of shit. They
only the had the bits that made their case, not the bits which took away from
it. And people question my patriotism?

Then the Washington Post nicely addresses several of the other recent untruths spouted by the Administration:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of
the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the
same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent
commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the
intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies
overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were
emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence
information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to
provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding
that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their
conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration
exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday,
countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the
intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some
committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have
concluded it did not happen."

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether
officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting
opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on
weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005:
"Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by
policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our
inquiry."

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied
that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence,
saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence"
are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of
political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the
House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support
removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley
had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the
President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence
Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from
Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of
force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not
included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used
publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been
cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use
weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to
terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day
before the Senate vote.

And Josh Marshall addresses the final point, which is to combat the argument that Clinton as far back as 1998 was claiming that Saddam had WMDs. The clear response: Clinton NEVER said that Saddam had a nuclear capability, nor did he deceitfully claim that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda, both of which the Administration did in order to seal the deal in early 2003. Marshall goes through the main lies that the Administration passed on in order to achieve their goal of war with Iraq:

1. Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq maintained
ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was always just a
plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real fights with the
Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the terror tie angle and much
less on WMD.) The president and his chief advisors tried to leverage Americans'
horror over 9/11 to gain support for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public
the president was sworn to protect.

2. Repeated efforts to jam purported evidence about an Iraqi nuclear
weapons program (the Niger canard) into major presidential speeches despite the
fact the CIA believed the claim was not credible and tried to prevent the
president from doing so. What's the explanation for that? At best a reckless
disregard for the truth in making the case war to the American public.

3. Consistent and longstanding effort to elide the distinction between
chem-bio-weapons (which are terrible but no immediate threat to American
security) and nuclear weapons (which are). For better or worse, there was a
strong consensus within the foreign policy establishmnet that Iraq continued to
stockpile WMDs. Nor was it an improbable assumption since Saddam had stockpiled
and used such weapons before and, by 2002, had been free of on-site weapons
inspections for almost four years. But what most observers meant by this was
chemical and possibly biological weapons, not nuclear weapons. Big difference!
The White House knew that this wasn't enough to get the country into war, so
they pushed the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam for which there was much, much
less evidence.

Yes, Democrats thought Saddam had WMDs in 2002 and 2003, and some even might have thought that Saddam was building a nuclear program. But that was primarily because the intelligence that the Administration shared with Congress reached those conclusions. What WAS NOT shared with Congress was intelligence that suggested the opposite, and there was apparently a lot of that. The lies about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda were never really designed to get Congress on board: those were aimed at a worried American public, knowing that that lie, combined with a fear of a nuclear weapon would ensure that the neocons dream for years would finally be realized.

At some point perhaps Colin Powell will come clean. Until then it's up to the right wing media and conservative bloggers to continue the stream of lies. Shame on all of them.
- posted by Joshua @ 10:51 PM