1 Boring Old Man

"and the truth shall set us free"

^{Published on Sunday, June 6, 2008 by the New York Times}

Bush Overstated Evidence on Iraq, Senators Report

[Report Text (pdf): Intelligence Activities | Public Statements]

A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.

The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.

The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the intelligence panel, said, “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

…

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, on Thursday called the report a “selective view” and said that the Bush administration’s public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources”…

^{Published on Sunday, July 6, 2003 by the New York Times}

What I Didn’t Find in Africa
by Joseph C. Wilson 4th

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat…

Like most, I was only vaguely aware of Wilson’s article, of his wife’s being sacrificed to discredit him, of Patrick Fitxgerald’s investigation. It was the jailing of Judith Miller and, I suppose the free time afforded by retirement, that got me started reading enough of the readily available material to realize what a monsterous hoax this whole thing has been.

The Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Phase I was released in July 2004. It examined the failings of the Intelligence Community and "identified numerous failures in the intelligence-gathering and analysis process. The report found that these failures led to the creation of inaccurate materials that misled both government policy makers and the American public." Phase II was to have examined the Administration, but was neven initiated by Committee Chairman, Senator Patrick Roberts [R-KS]. After the 2006 elections created a Democratic Majority and Senator Jay Rockefeller [D-WV] became Chairman, there were roadblocks that further delayed the Investigation.

Mr. Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings and suggested that the investigation was a partisan smoke screen to obscure the real story: that the C.I.A. failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policy makers that have since been discredited.

In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and of cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Rockefeller.

As an example, they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr. Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat.”