{"id":2240,"date":"2008-06-06T05:10:07","date_gmt":"2008-06-06T10:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=2240"},"modified":"2008-06-06T07:35:28","modified_gmt":"2008-06-06T12:35:28","slug":"2240","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/06\/06\/2240\/","title":{"rendered":"the Lie…"},"content":{"rendered":"

"and the truth shall set us free"<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
Published on Sunday, June 6, 2008<\/strong> by the New York Times<\/sup><\/em> <\/p>\n
Bush Overstated Evidence on Iraq, Senators Report<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n
[Report Text (pdf): Intelligence Activities<\/a> | Public Statements<\/a>]<\/div>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.”<\/div>\n
…<\/div>\n
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”…<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Remember this? <\/div>\n
\n
Published on Sunday, July 6, 2003<\/strong> by the New York Times<\/em><\/sup><\/div>\n
What I Didn’t Find in Africa<\/strong><\/a>
by Joseph C. Wilson 4th<\/div>\n

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?<\/p>\n

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…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It seems a lifetime ago, the summer of 2003. I was preparing to retire at the end of the year. We were getting ready to sell our house in Atlanta and move to the mountains. I had never believed in the Invasion of Iraq and doubted that we’d find anything, but I actually hoped we would – that I was wrong. By July, it was becoming obvious that there wasn’t going to be anything found in Iraq to justify our invasion. But, even then, I don’t think I could have imagined that the worst case scenario – that our own government had lied about our reasons for invading. The full story would elude me until after the 2004 elections.<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Phase I<\/strong><\/a> 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." <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

Former Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Roberts [R-KS] slammed the report in a Press Release<\/strong><\/a>, and four of the active Republican members of the Committee questioned the conclusions of the report (including Senator Saxby Chambliss [R-GA]): <\/div>\n
\n
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.<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.” <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
There was a time that I would fill the rest of the page arguing with this Minority Report, but I no longer feel the need to do that. If anything, the report is too soft. It talks about what the Administration did, but it doesn’t talk about why. Phase I implied that the Intelligence Community was wrong in assessing Iraq’s programs, and the Administration has continued to claim that they were misled. That’s simply not true. Most of us know that now. Even Scott McClellan evades saying the L word<\/strong><\/font> – that the whole Iraq Invasion was based on a Lie<\/strong><\/font>, a Lie<\/strong><\/font> that’s still being told today. Well, it was a Lie<\/strong><\/font>, a conscious deception.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

There’s an old saying, "We are only as sick as our secrets."<\/strong><\/font> To continue the medical analogy: The Iraq Invasion remains an open sore. Even healed, it will leave an ugly scar. But better to be dealing with the scar than an actively infected wound…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

"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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}