Today, of all days, George Bush decided to lie yet again about the pre-war intelligence that convinced a majority of senators to vote to authorize the war in Iraq. He claimed that both Democrats and Republicans had access to the same intelligence--now understood to have been flawed--that indicated that Iraq had and continued to develop and try to acquire WMD and was a clear and present threat to US security, and thus came to the same conclusion that authorizing the war was the right thing to do.
However, an article by Elizabeth de la Vega that was recently published in The Nation completely refutes these assertions, on a number of counts. Not only was the intelligence that Bush refers to fundamentally flawed, it was presented in a very skewed and cherry-picked manner that made it less than useless in determining whether to go to war against Iraq.
Here's the article:
The White House Criminal Conspiracy
Specifically, the article points to the final National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that contained the intelligence that Bush was referring to today that was used by senators to determined whether to vote to authorize the war, and asserts that:
- It was rushed through at the WH's orders and thus seriously flawed.
- It was released the night before hearings on the war vote were to begin, which didn't give senators enough time to review it properly.
- The complete, classified version could only be examined under tightly controlled conditions with no notes to be taken or references to its complete contents to be made in public hearings on the war vote.
- The public version of the NIE--the version that senators were allowed to take with them and quote from in the public hearings on the war vote--was cherry-picked to support the WH's case for war and left out any evidence or arguments contained in the full NIE that might have challenged it.
- The previous version of the NIE, released in late 2001, which was not rushed and far more credible, was far less supportive of the WH's argument for war.
Some key excerpts:
By now it's no secret that the Bush Administration used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to promote its war. They began talking privately about invading Iraq immediately after 9/11 but did not argue their case honestly to the American people. Instead, they began looking for evidence to make a case the public would accept--that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Unfortunately for them, there wasn't much.
In fact, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in effect as of December 2001 said that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; was not trying to get them; and did not appear to have reconstituted its nuclear weapons program since the UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors departed in December 1998. This assessment had been unchanged for three years.
As has been widely reported, the NIE is a classified assessment prepared under the CIA's direction, but only after input from the entire intelligence community, or IC. If there is disagreement, the dissenting views are also included. The December 2001 NIE contained no dissents about Iraq. In other words, the assessment privately available to Bush Administration officials from the time they began their tattoo for war until October 2002, when a new NIE was produced, was unanimous: Iraq did not have nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons programs. But publicly, the Bush team presented a starkly different picture.
In his January 2002 State of the Union address, for example, Bush declared that Iraq presented a "grave and growing danger," a direct contradiction of the prevailing NIE. Cheney continued the warnings in the ensuing months, claiming that Iraq was allied with Al Qaeda, possessed biological and chemical weapons and would soon have nuclear weapons. These false alarms were accompanied by the message that in the "post-9/11 world," normal rules of governmental procedure should not apply.
...
When in September 2002 Bush began seeking Congressional authorization to use force, based on assertions that were unsupported by the National Intelligence Estimate, Democratic senators demanded that a new NIE be assembled. Astonishingly, though most NIEs require six months' preparation, the October NIE took two weeks. This haste resulted from Bush's insistence that Iraq presented an urgent threat, which was, after all, what the NIE was designed to assess. In other words, even the imposition of an artificially foreshortened time limit was fraudulent.
Also, the CIA was obviously aware of the Administration's dissatisfaction with the December 2001 NIE. So with little new intelligence, it now maintained that "most agencies" believed Baghdad had begun reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs in 1998. It also skewed underlying details in the NIE to exaggerate the threat.
The October NIE was poorly prepared--and flawed. But it was flawed in favor of the Administration, which took that skewed assessment and misrepresented it further in the only documents that were available to the public. The ninety-page classified NIE was delivered to Congress at 10 pm on October 1, the night before Senate hearings were to begin. But members could look at it only under tight security on-site. They could not take a copy with them for review. They could, however, remove for review a simultaneously released white paper, a glitzy twenty-five-page brochure that purported to be the unclassified summary of the NIE. This document, which was released to the public, became the talking points for war. And it was completely misleading. It mentioned no dissents; it removed qualifiers and even added language to distort the severity of the threat. Several senators requested declassification of the full-length version so they could reveal to the public those dissents and qualifiers and unsubstantiated additions, but their request was denied. Consequently, they could not use many of the specifics from the October NIE to explain their opposition to war without revealing classified information.
Read the whole article if you have the time. It's quite damning, and has a LOT more to say about the war and the false case made for it by the Bush administration.