Seems Jackie-boy recalls meeting with Bush MANY times.
From NY Times:
WASHINGTON -- The disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff told a magazine editor in recent days that he had met with President Bush many times and was invited to the president's Texas ranch for a gathering of campaign contributors in 2003, the editor said Thursday.
Hardly just a photo op or two.
How long can the White House stonewall this?
More from NY Times:
In one message, Abramoff is reported as saying that Bush had "one of the best memories of any politician I have ever met" and that he "saw me in almost a dozen settings and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids." He is reported to have added: "Perhaps he has forgotten everything. Who knows."
...snip
The White House has tried to distance itself from Abramoff, and at a news conference last month, Bush said that while he might have had photographs taken with the lobbyist, "I don't know him." He added, "I frankly don't even remember having my picture taken with the guy."
Gee shucks, just cause I invited him out to the ranch and remembered his kids ....
And meanwhile, the Wash Post has this coming:
WASHINGTON--The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of ``cherry-picking'' intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Saddam's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.
``Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,'' Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration ``went to war without requesting--and evidently without being influenced by--any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.''
``It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between (Bush) policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized,'' Pillar wrote.
This from the SENIOR CIA analyst in the effort, who has since retired.
