Media Awash in Reports That Pres Bush did NOT Lie About Threat From Saddam

…Another investigation finds that the Bush Administration didn’t lie, fabricate, or deliberately mislead people about the threat posed from Saddam Hussein’s regime. STILL, the average Joe seems to believe that President Bush is an evil mastermind capable of fooling 535 members of Congress, all the national and international media, and successfully cover up a myriad of lies about “Saddam’s wmd” in almost a dozen independent, bi-partisan, often international investigations. Amazing.

New York Times 6/5/08

The report on the prewar statements about Iraq found that on some key issues — most notably Iraq’s purported nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs — the public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies.

Washington Post

Why does it matter, at this late date? The Rockefeller report will not cause a spike in “Bush Lied” mug sales, and the Bond dissent will not lead anyone to scrape the “Bush Lied” bumper sticker off his or her car. But the phony “Bush lied” story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

Los Angeles Times

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.

New York Sun

Quoth Senator Rockefeller: “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.” Well not exactly. On many key judgments before the war, the report itself found that statements on Iraq’s biological weapons capacity, its nuclear and chemical weapons programs, the president and his cabinet secretaries generally followed the intelligence assessments of the spy services.

 Associated Press

The Senate report, however, found that intelligence supported most of the administration’s statements about Iraq before the war.

No doubt Congressional Democrats want us all to believe that they’re idiots who were duped by a brilliant mastermind like George W Bush, or that somehow or another “they didn’t see the same intelligence” (let’s ignore that people like Sen Kerry, Edwards, Rockefeller, and others all had dozens of closed door meetings w intel agency leaders for 5 months before the invasion)  Certainly they don’t want us to remember how even President Clinton was promoting the invasion of Iraq.

Face it, the intelligence was weak (because the intelligence agencies’ budgets had been scrapped after the fall of the Soviet Union, and their leadership replaced by political appointees and bureaucrats.  Democrats and Republicans, Bush Administration officials, and former Clinton Administration officals, the Executive branch and Congress all believed that while there was dissent (as there always is) regarding the limited intelligence on Saddam’s regime the preponderance of intel demonstrated a threat, and Saddam’s refusal to fully, immediately, and unconditionally comply with the UN after 12yrs made the matter due for resolution.  Lastly, the threat posed by Saddam’s regime and its history of working with Al Queda groups made the question of “unaccounted for weapons of mass destruction” far too dangerous to continue addressing with a foreign policy of national denial, procrastination, and/or laissez faire.

more here:

Senators Caught Distorting and Misleading Intelligence Report

Senators Remove Their Own Statements From Report on Pre-War Iraq Intelligence

KEY POINTS Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Phase II investigation report on pre-war Iraq Intel