The usual leftist packaging that contradicts the reality

In characterizing a report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on President Bush’s statements in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the committee’s chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller, said: “In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent.”

In fact, Rockefeller is up to the standard liberal lies, in which liberals issue an introduction or executive summary about a fact-finding document that grossly contradicts what is said in the body of the document.

As is shown by Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, the report says that President Bush’s statements about Iraq prior to the invasion—on the subjects of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, biological weapons, production capability and mobile laboratories, chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction overall, delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs, Iraq’s providing safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda, Iraq’s contacts with al-Qaeda, and Iraq’s support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda—were all “substantiated by intelligence information,” or “generally substantiated by intelligence information.”

Hiatt continues:

The report is left to complain about “implications” and statements that “left the impression” that those contacts [between Iraq and al-Qaeda], led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.

In the report’s final section, the committee takes issue with Bush’s statements about Saddam Hussein’s intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

While I have never been a supporter of President Bush and have never voted for him, throughout 2002, 2003, and 2004, I defended him at this website from a nonstop wave of overwrought and frequently lunatic charges from the left and the right concerning his reasons and motives for seeking war against Iraq. Further, as I have said many times, the fact that the anti-Bush forces behaved like enemies making lunatic charges against Bush and his neocon supporters, instead of conducting themselves as a loyal opposition making good-faith, rational criticisms of him, precluded the searching debate about the pros and cons of the war that the country desperately needed to have. If such a thoroughgoing national debate had been held, the spectacular errors the adminstration made might have been avoided.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 09, 2008 01:09 PM | Send