About Those Lies

Its funny the tendancy to take an obscure statement and run with it. Anyhow...

Jack Kelly: About that Iraq 'deception'

Mr. Reid claimed his action was prompted by the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for allegedly lying to a federal grand jury about from whom he learned that Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA.

"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq," Sen. Reid said.

But Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had made it clear that that was not what the Libby indictment was about. "This indictment is not about the war," he said. "This indictment will not seek to prove the war was justified or unjustified."

The Iraq Survey Group found no large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. This could be because no such weapons actually existed.

Or it could be because they were moved to another country between the time Congress authorized the use of force against Iraq and when the war actually began.

"We've had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official told reporter Kenneth Timmerman.

Or it could be the Iraq Survey Group had an unusually restrictive definition of what constitutes a WMD stockpile.

The 4th Infantry Division discovered in an ammo dump near the town of Baiji 55 gallon drums of chemicals which, when mixed together, form nerve gas. They were stored next to surface-to-surface missiles which had been configured to carry a liquid payload.

If prewar intelligence was faulty, the fault lies with the CIA which supplied the erroneous information, not with the political leaders, Democratic and Republican, who relied upon it.

But Democrats who had access to the same intelligence President Bush had, and who because of it voted to authorize war with Iraq, are charging now that the president deliberately deceived the nation into war.
[...]

The press' amnesia has convinced Democrats they can regain power by lying about prewar intelligence. But facts are stubborn things. "The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments," said the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments," said the Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence, issued in March. Thanks to really lousy reporting, most Americans are unaware of how much evidence there is of Saddam's WMD programs and his ties to international terror groups. This is a debate Republicans should welcome.