Homestead mailing list

[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

The progressively contortive selectivity and presentation as fact of 
so-called intelligence that sold the DC Whorehouse on authorizing the 
invasion of Iraq may well be judged the biggest criminal act perpetrated in 
this decade or more. This editorial in The New York Times says it as well 
as any I have found:

Remember That Mushroom Cloud?

Published: November 2, 2005

The indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of lying to a grand jury about the 
outing of Valerie Wilson has focused attention on the lengths to which the 
Bush administration went in 2003 to try to distract the public from this 
central fact: American soldiers found a lot of things in Iraq, including a 
well-armed insurgency their bosses never anticipated, but they did not find 
weapons of mass destruction.

It's clear from the indictment that Vice President Dick Cheney and his 
staff formed the command bunker for this misdirection campaign. But there 
is a much larger issue than the question of what administration officials 
said about Iraq after the invasion - it's what they said about Iraq before 
the invasion. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, may have been 
grandstanding yesterday when he forced the Senate to hold a closed session 
on the Iraqi intelligence, but at least he gave the issue a much-needed push.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, 
Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support 
for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling 
chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to 
build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the 
administration's doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda 
and implied that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a good bipartisan job of 
explaining that the intelligence in general was dubious, old and even faked 
by foreign sources. The panel said the analysts had suffered from 
groupthink. At the time, the highest-ranking officials in Washington were 
demanding evidence against Iraq.

But that left this question: If the intelligence was so bad and so moldy, 
why was it presented to the world as what Mr. Tenet, then the director of 
central intelligence, famously called "a slam-dunk" case?

Were officials fooled by bad intelligence, or knowingly hyping it? 
Certainly, the administration erased caveats, dissents and doubts from the 
intelligence reports before showing them to the public. And there was never 
credible intelligence about a working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Under a political deal that Democrats should not have approved, the 
Intelligence Committee promised to address these questions after the 2004 
election. But a year later, there is no sign that this promise is being 
kept, other than unconvincing assurances from Senator Pat Roberts, the 
Republican who is chairman of the intelligence panel, that people are 
working on it.

So far, however, there has been only one uncirculated draft report by one 
committee staff member on the narrow question of why the analysts didn't 
predict the ferocity of the insurgency. The Republicans have not even 
agreed to do a final report on the conflict between the intelligence and 
the administration's public statements.

Mr. Reid wrested a commitment from the Senate to have a bipartisan 
committee report by Nov. 14 on when the investigation will be done. We hope 
Mr. Roberts now gives this half of the investigation the same urgency he 
gave the first half and meets his commitment to examine all aspects of this 
mess, including how the information was used by the administration. 
Americans are long overdue for an answer to why they were told there were 
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/opinion/02weds1.html?hp