A Reminder of How Debate Over Prewar Intelligence Continues to Shadow Bush

[maddezmom]

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 - At a time when the Bush administration is furiously parrying a new round of accusations that it exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein in leading the nation to war, the imagery on Monday was startling.

There was Ahmad Chalabi, who as a leader of Iraqi exiles before the war funneled what proved to be inaccurate information about Mr. Hussein's weapons programs to the United States, being whisked into meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the most influential of the hawks in the administration when it came to Iraq.

The timing of the visit by Mr. Chalabi, now a deputy prime minister of Iraq, was coincidental. But his presence at such a sensitive moment was a reminder of how the debate over prewar intelligence continues to shadow President Bush more than three years after he began making the case in earnest for toppling Mr. Hussein and more than two years after it became clear that Iraq had no stockpiles of banned weapons.


With Mr. Bush politically weakened, the Democrats emboldened and public support for the war ebbing, the White House is building two main lines of defense. It is asserting that many Democrats saw the same threat from Iraq as the administration did. And it is pointing to two government studies that it says found no evidence that prewar intelligence, while admittedly flawed, had been twisted by political pressure.


more:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/national/15intel.html

[leftchick]

1. no photos were allowed at those meetings

he was secretly whisked in and out with rummy and cheney(with his pockets full?). I want to know if it made the TV news last night or KO's show. I missed everything because of scout meetings. I wonder if Americans are even aware he is still on the US payroll?

[ixion]

2. and the nytimes continues to prove that it can whore with the best of them

by not accurately reporting the series of events, and by conveniently ignoring the glaring realities of the situation... and by accepting that, in essence, this debacle is nothing more than a political 'trick' by dems.

NYTimes, you used to be the flagship of US newspapers...now it's just another rag who's lost all credibility because it couldn't report the truth.