Senate Intel Comm: Bush Admin Deliberately Misrepresented Iraq Intel

[MTAtech]

Quote:

WASHINGTON - A new Senate report gives a fresh shot of adrenaline to the election-year debate over the Iraq war. President Bush and his top officials deliberately misrepresented secret intelligence to make the case to invade Iraq, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. link

What I and many others said (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) at the run up to the war has not only been confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee but by former members of Bush's Administration.

As Paul Krugman said in 2003, "And anyone who talks about an “intelligence failure” is missing the point. The problem lay not with intelligence professionals, but with the Bush and Blair administrations. They wanted a war, so they demanded reports supporting their case, while dismissing contrary evidence."

Just to remind anyone that this isn't 20/20 hindsight:

March 12, 2003,

Quote:

Originally Posted by MTAtech

Bush gets on TV and says that Iraq is linked to al Qaeda and 9/11. Americans take his word at face value with little or no proof.

Bush says that war is necessary to prevent Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. However, as long as U.N. inspections are going on, Iraq’s plans to develop such weapons are contained without war.

Bush says that Iraq is a threat to the U.S. There is no evidence of this either.

[MTAtech]

Today's NY Times editiorial:

Quote:

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.
The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

[osprey4]

So ask for your money back.

[mad1]

Quote:

The Senate report, however, found that intelligence supported most of the administration's statements about Iraq before the war. But officials often did not mention the level of dissension or uncertainty in the intelligence agencies about the information they were presenting.

From your link?

[pickel]

Senate Intelligence Committee.

Is that a contradiction of terms or an oxyMORON ?????

[jokostel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pickel

Senate Intelligence Committee.

Is that a contradiction of terms or an oxyMORON ?????

A fricken men.

[Pexster]

I saw Richard Clarke on one of the news shows a day or so ago. I think his point should be taken very seriously. This kind of thing should not be allowed to happen again. And if we do not learn from this, it will. People in the administration need to be held accountable. At some point, I hope they will. Yet there are many of us who were complicit in this. The news media absolutely failed us. And the public, as a whole, were led around by the nose. We should be able to trust our leaders, but we cannot always. As The Boss said almost 25 years ago, "Absolute faith in your leaders can get you killed."

[mad1]

This sums up the article, "The panel put a new spin on old charges".

What I do not see in this article is a link to the report, not surprising. What a convenient time to bring this out!

[Gomer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mad1

What I do not see in this article is a link to the report, not surprising. What a convenient time to bring this out!

It's right there in the article Mad1.

Quote:

On the Net:
Senate Intelligence Committee: http://intelligence.senate.gov

[Pexster]

What I find astonishing about the neo-con "spin" on this being "old news" is that when it was "new news" it was criticised as lies about our Fearless Leader and his scary lieutenants. Years later, they term it "old news." Hmm . . .