Yellow Dog

The Bush administration, faced with charges that they misled us into war based on false intelligence about WMD, have adopted a new talking point: that Democrats had access to the same intelligence that the administration did.

It's basically the defense of "But, but...they did it too!" The problem is, it's completely false.

From today's Washington Post:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

The only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release.

Nice try, Dubya.

Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument

Man, you know things are bad when even the media mouthpiece for the Bush administration has to admit that Bush's approval ratings "continue to suffer."

Fox News puts Bush's approval rating at 36%. Ouch.

(I'll bet you anything that misguided 36% consists of Fox News viewers.)

FOXNews.com - FOX News Polls - FNC Poll - 11/10/05 FOX Poll: President Bush's Ratings Continue to Suffer

In his Veteran's Day speech, Bush petulantly lashed out at critics of his (mis)handling of the war in Iraq and had the nerve to accuse his critics of "rewriting history" of our motives for going to war. Excuse me? Bush should know a lot about rewriting history, given his ever-shifting rationale for the war.

From The Washington Post (October, 2004):

In announcing 19 months ago that the United States was poised to invade Iraq, President Bush told the nation: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. . . . The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

But the argument that the United States faced a moment of maximum peril in early 2003 from Iraq has been greatly weakened by the release of the comprehensive report of chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer. The report found that the 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons capability, leaving it without any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein hoped to someday resume his weapons efforts, the report said, but for the most part there had been no serious effort to rebuild the programs.

In the wake of the report, President Bush has reframed the way he characterizes his rationale for the launching the war. A review of his public statements before the war and this week shows how broadly his public argument has shifted, away from warnings that Hussein actually possessed horrible weapons in favor of talking almost exclusively about the dictator's intent.

Bush then "reframed" his argument a third time, from the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to the weaker claim that they had weapons-related-programs to, finally, the rationale that we invaded in order to build a democratic government in Iraq (even though he claimed in 2000 that he was against "nation-building"). Which of these 3 arguments is it, Mr. President?

This constant "reframing" of the rationale for sending our troops into Iraq is sounding a lot like "rewriting history." If only we could rewrite history and go back to that fateful day when the Supreme Court overruled the American voters and handed the presidency to the most incompetent leader we've ever had....

Bush Recasts Rationale For War After Report (washingtonpost.com)

A newly declassifed report provides further proof of what we already know: that Bush used "intentionally misleading" data to send our soldiers to war. In plain English (which Bush is such a big fan of), that means he LIED.

US military intelligence warned the Bush administration as early as February 2002 that its key source on Al-Qaeda's relationship with Iraq had provided "intentionally misleading" data, according to a declassified report.

"This newly declassified information provides additional, dramatic evidence that the administrations pre-war statements were deceptive," said Democrat Carl Levin, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who pushed for partial declassification of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document.

The unveiling of the documents came as Senate Democrats are stepping up pressure on their Republican colleagues, trying to force them to complete a second report on pre-war intelligence that would focus on whether members of the Bush administration had misused or intentionally misinterpreted intelligence findings.

US intel on Iraq-Qaeda ties 'intentionally misleading': document - Yahoo! News

In other headlines of the day, four more US soldiers and countless innocent civilians were killed by a suicide bombing in Iraq today. You might say they were "intentionally misled" to their early deaths.

Suicide Bomber Kills Four GIs in Iraq - Yahoo! News

It should be scary enough that the United States Congress is trying to pass an amendment banning torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. But it's even scarier that our government leaders, such as Cheney, are fighting tooth and nail to stop this ban. In Cheney-world, you don't have to follow the rule of law.

From the Washington Post:
"Over the past year, Vice President Cheney has waged an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects, according to defense, state, intelligence and congressional officials.

Last winter, when Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, began pushing to have the full committee briefed on the CIA's interrogation practices, Cheney called him to the White House to urge that he drop the matter, said three U.S. officials.

'The debate in the world has become about whether the U.S. complies with its legal obligations. We need to regain the moral high ground,' said one senior administration official familiar with internal deliberations on the issue, adding that Rice believes current policy is 'hurting the president's agenda and her agenda.'"

The problem is with assuming that Cheney (or anyone in this corrupt, lying, treasonous administration) has such a thing as a "moral high ground."

Cheney Fights for Detainee Policy