... the icy waters of the North Atlantic, George Bush is frantically looking for a rescue boat. Understandably he keeps pointing at the dinghy nearby—i.e. last year’s report issued by former Senator Chuck Robb and Judge Laurence Silbermann under the title,
Final Report on Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. However, that boat don’t float too good
and Bush’s credibility will continue, along with his Presidency, to sink beneath the weight of lies used to bamboozle America into a preemptive war.<clip>
The CIA analysts consistently warned the Administration that the info the Brits had also was unreliable and the reports of Iraq trying to get their hands on a nuke were wrong. The director of WINPAC at the CIA, Alan Foley, repeatedly warned NSC official Robert Joseph not that the Niger claim was unreliable. Undeterred Joseph inserted the bogus 16 words into the President’s 2003 State of the Union Address.
But the policymakers did not want to hear it. In fact, Don Rumsfeld and his minions were briefing TV and newspaper pundits just two weeks before the President's 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Niger.
Here is the bottomline. There is no such thing as perfect intelligence or perfect analysis. However, we do not serve the security of this country by perpetuating the myth that we went to war in Iraq because a couple of analysts believed Saddam's acquisition of aluminum tubes was part of a secret program to build a nuke.
Going to war was and remains a political decision made by a President.From
Cooking the Books and Politicizing Intelligence on November 14, 2005
More at the link:
http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/11/cooking_the_boo.html Senator Kerry said many important things today, but among them, I think the following need to be read, and read again:
When the President tried to pretend on Friday that the Intelligence Committee had already determined that he had not manipulated intelligence and misled the American public, he knew full well that they have not yet reported on that very question — that is why Democrats were forced to shut down the Senate and go into closed session to make the Republicans take this issue seriously. When the President said that his opponents were throwing out false charges, he knew all too well that that these charges are anything but false.
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The bottom line is that the President and his Administration did mislead America into war. In fact, the war in Iraq was and remains one of the great acts of misleading and deception in American history. The facts are incontrovertible. The act of misleading was pretending to Americans that they hadn’t made a decision to go to war, and would seriously pursue inspections when the evidence strongly suggests that they had already decided to take out Saddam Hussein, were anxious to do it for ideological reasons, and hoped that inspections, which Vice President Cheney had opposed and tried to prevent, would not get in their way.
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The facts speak for themselves. The White House has admitted that the President told Congress and the American public in the State of the Union Address that Saddam was attempting to acquire fuel for nuclear weapons despite the fact that the CIA specifically told the Administration three times, in writing and verbally, not to use this intelligence. Obviously, Democrats didn’t get that memo. In fact, similar statements were removed from a prior speech by the President, and Colin Powell refused to use it in his presentation to the UN. This is not relying on faulty intelligence, as Democrats did; it is knowingly, and admittedly, misleading the American public on a key justification for going to war.
This is what the Administration was trying so desperately to hide when it attacked Ambassador Wilson and compromised national security by outing his wife.
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If the President wants to use quotes of mine from 2002, he might look at the ones that were not the result of relying faulty intelligence and trusting the President’s word. As I said in my floor statement before the authorization vote:
“If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day…Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible.” In my speech at Georgetown on the eve of the war, I said:
“the United States should never go to war because it wants to, the United States should go to war because we have to. And we don’t have to until we have exhausted the remedies available, built legitimacy and earned the consent of the American people…We need to make certain that we have not unnecessarily twisted so many arms, created so many reluctant partners, abused the trust of Congress, or strained so many relations, that the longer term and more immediate vital war on terror is made more difficult…I say to the President, show respect for the process of international diplomacy because it is not only right, it can make America stronger - and show the world some appropriate patience in building a genuine coalition. Mr. President, do not rush to war.” Today our troops continue to bear the burden of that promise broken by this Administration.Link:
http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=1145
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