Conservatives falsely claimed White House and Congress saw "same intelligence" on Iraqi threat
Shortly after leading Democrats pushed for the completion of a congressional investigation into the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence, White House officials responded that such scrutiny of their handling of the intelligence is unwarranted because both the White House and Congress possessed the same flawed reports and came to the same incorrect conclusions. Numerous conservative media figures have since echoed this argument. But the claim that the administration and Congress saw the same intelligence ignores several important facts. First, taking into account assessments such as the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), the White House typically has access to more intelligence than does Congress -- and indeed, this was the case with prewar intelligence on Iraq. Second, the Bush administration began making claims about the Iraqi threat months before Congress received any substantial intelligence analysis. And third, the administration received information directly from alternative intelligence sources, specifically the since-discredited Office of Special Plans and Iraqi National Congress.
On November 1, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) forced the Senate into closed session and demanded a pledge that the Senate Intelligence Committee complete "phase two" of its investigation into prewar intelligence, as the committee's chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), had previously promised.
The "phase one" probe concerned the intelligence community's failure to provide accurate intelligence on the Iraqi threat and was completed in April 2004. During the course of the initial investigation, Democrats on the committee reached an agreement with their Republican counterparts to conduct a second phase of the probe. This investigation would examine five additional matters, including how the administration had used the available intelligence in public statements and reports. But 19 months after this agreement, and a year past the point at which Roberts had stated that "phase two" would become a priority, the Democrats on the committee claimed they had yet to see a draft, despite sustained efforts to move the investigation forward.
In response to Democratic demands for completion of phase two, the Republican National Committee issued talking points saying that "Just A Few Years Back, Dems Were Warning About WMDs In Iraq," and quoting numerous Democratic members of Congress stating in late 2002 that Iraq posed a significant threat to the United States. On the November 2 edition of CNN's The Situation Room -- a day after the closed Senate session -- White House communications director Dan Bartlett suggested that the investigation should start with the Democrats themselves, rather than the administration:
BARTLETT: Well, they don't have to have a secret session to have this debate. We ought to have it out in the open where the American people can see it. And maybe the investigation can start with the previous administration or [Sen.] Jay Rockefeller [D-WV] himself. He himself said that there was unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Harry Reid himself, who voted for the war, cited the same intelligence President Bush did. President Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Vice President Al Gore, John Kerry, there's a whole list of Democrats who stepped up, as did President Bush, looked at the threat in a post-9-11 world and said, this man is a threat.
We removed this dictator for good reasons. Now, everybody recognizes that the intelligence was incorrect. But the decision was correct in a post-9-11 world.
Also on November 2, on Fox News' Special Report, Fox News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle reported as fact that the Democrats saw "the same intelligence reports" as the administration:
ANGLE: Democrats charge administration officials exaggerated the intelligence in order to sell the war, but in late 2002, Democrats, using the same intelligence reports, issued statements almost indistinguishable from the president's.
In recent days, conservative commentators and other media figures have echoed the White House's criticism of the Democratic push for the "phase two" investigation and repeated the claim that the Bush administration and members of Congress saw the same intelligence on Iraq:
- Human Events editor Terence P. Jeffrey argued, "The intelligence that [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] used when she voted to authorize that war in October of 2002, provided -- a National Intelligence Estimate provided by the CIA directly to the Senate. We know already from the Senate investigation, it was the same information the president and vice president had. It was bad intelligence, but the Senate and the president had the same intelligence. It came from the CIA." [CNN's The Situation Room, 11/2/05]
- A November 3 Wall Street Journal editorial claimed, "The scandal here isn't what happened before the war. The scandal is that the same Democrats who saw the same intelligence that Mr. Bush saw, who drew the same conclusions, and who voted to go to war are now using the difficulties we've encountered in that conflict as an excuse to rewrite history."
- New York Times columnist David Brooks stated, "They all had the same evidence." [PBS' The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, 11/4/05]
- National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg wrote on November 4, "Sens. Evan Bayh [D-IN], Joseph Biden [D-DE], Hillary Rodham Clinton [D-NY], John Kerry [D-MA], and John Edwards [D-NC] all voted for the war. Most of these Democrats had access to the same intelligence as the president."
- Roll Call executive editor Morton M. Kondracke said, "[I]t is worth pointing out that Senator [Carl] Levin [D-MI] himself -- who is a member of -- the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and presumably saw whatever he wanted in terms of intelligence before this last war -- said, 'Uh-oh, Saddam Hussein may use chemical and biological weapons against our troops.' Now, what was that based on, if not his reading of intelligence that said that he had those weapons? [Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, 11/4/05]
- Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer claimed, "The Democrats are acting as if all of this happened in Armenia in 1917 secretly. It happened here two years ago. They looked at all of that intelligence. And that same night, they could hear what the administration was saying about the weapons. It isn't as if all of this was hidden." [Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, 11/4/05]
- Fox News Washington bureau managing editor Brit Hume stated, "[T]hey all looked at the same evidence, those guys on the Hill, many of whom are complaining about this now. And what did they do? They voted to authorize the war." [Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, 11/6/05]
- U.S. News & World Report executive editor Mortimer B. Zuckerman wrote in the November 14 edition of the magazine, "Democrats who saw the same intelligence as President Bush drew the same conclusions."
"The owner of intelligence"
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have repeatedly disputed the claim that members of Congress and the White House have equal access to intelligence information. During a November 4 press conference, Rockefeller and Feinstein directly addressed this issue. Both noted, for example, that committee members are not privy to the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) -- a written summary of intelligence information that the CIA provides to the president. (The White House even withheld from Senate investigators the PDBs on Iraq delivered to the Oval Office prior to the war.):
ROCKEFELLER: I mean, one of things that they -- that Chairman Roberts likes to do is to try to point out that there were a lot of Democrats who voted for the -- going to the United Nations, and if that didn't work, going to the war. And then people say, "Well, you know, you all had the same intelligence that the White House had." And I'm here to tell you that is nowhere near the truth. We not only don't have, nor probably should we have, the Presidential Daily Brief, we don't have the constant people who are working on intelligence who are very close to him. They don't release their -- an administration which tends not to release -- not just the White House, but the CIA, DOD [Department of Defense], others -- they control information. There's a lot of intelligence that we don't get that they have.
[...]
FEINSTEIN: As was said, the president gets intelligence that we do not get. The president is the -- White House is the owner of intelligence. We do not see the Presidential Daily Brief. Therefore, it is conceivable that the president would have had information that was not available to the Senate or to the Congress.
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), who served as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also made this point during an appearance on the October 8, 2004, edition of CNN's American Morning:
KERREY: The president has much more access to intelligence than members of Congress does [sic]. Ask any member of Congress. Ask a Republican member of Congress, do you get the same access to intelligence that the president does? Look at these aluminum tube stories that came out the president delivered to the Congress -- "We believe these would be used for centrifuges." -- didn't deliver to Congress the full range of objections from the Department of Energy experts, nuclear weapons experts, that said it's unlikely they were for centrifuges, more likely that they were for rockets, which was a pre-existing use. The president has much more access to intelligence than any member of Congress.
Indeed, the White House's involvement in development of the aluminum tubes allegation provides an example of how the administration's access to intelligence on Iraq differed from that of Congress. In particular, the aluminum tubes story exhibits the "very close" relationship -- which Rockefeller noted -- between the White House and those "working on intelligence."
An October 3, 2004, New York Times article detailed how the unfounded claim that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes designed to enrich uranium became one of the administration's primary pieces of evidence that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute Iraq's nuclear weapons program. According to the Times, while the CIA assessments provided to policy-makers during the buildup to war omitted crucial dissenting views regarding the probable use of the tubes, administration officials "repeatedly" discussed dissenting opinions with the agency:
From April 2001 to September 2002, the agency wrote at least 15 reports on the tubes.
[...]
But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.
[...]
"They never lay out the other case," one Congressional official said of those C.I.A. assessments.
The Senate report provides only a partial picture of the agency's communications with the White House. In an arrangement endorsed by both parties, the Intelligence Committee agreed to delay an examination of whether White House descriptions of Iraq's military capabilities were "substantiated by intelligence information." As a result, Senate investigators were not permitted to interview White House officials about what they knew of the tubes debate and when they knew it.
But in interviews, C.I.A. and administration officials disclosed that the dissenting views were repeatedly discussed in meetings and telephone calls.
The timing of the statements
The claim that Congress and the White House saw the "same intelligence" also ignores that the Bush administration's public pronouncements concerning Iraq began long before any substantial intelligence analysis arrived on Capitol Hill. According to Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the environment created by these definitive statements may have contributed to the intelligence community's faulty judgments on Iraq. These fundamental analytical flaws were clearly evident in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which -- as Human Events' Jeffrey noted above -- informed lawmakers' positions on the war.
In the "Additional Views" section of the Senate Intelligence Committee's "phase one" report, Sens. Rockefeller, Levin, and Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) provided numerous examples of conclusive public statements made by administration officials in the weeks and months prior to Congress' receipt of the NIE. The report itself concluded that the key judgments contained in the NIE -- which summarized all available intelligence assessments on the threat posed by Iraq -- were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting" and that the intelligence community "did not accurately or adequately explain to policymakers the uncertainties behind the judgments" in the document. According to an April 19, 2004, Washington Post report by assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, Stuart A. Cohen, acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the time the NIE was being prepared, admitted seeking to "avoid equivocation" in the document wherever possible so it would not amount to "pablum." Rockefeller, Levin, and Dubin argued that, in public statements made in the summer and fall of 2002, the administration "repeatedly overstated what the Intelligence Community assessed at the time":
These high-profile statements in support of the Administration's policy of regime change were made in advance of any meaningful intelligence analysis and created pressure on the Intelligence Community to conform to the certainty contained in the pronouncements.
The three senators further stated that, by not examining the basis for the administration's statements, the "phase one" report had not adequately addressed the effect they may have had on the intelligence community's assessments:
As a result, the Committee's phase one report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which Intelligence Community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public.
As noted above, administration officials were not simply recipients of intelligence. Whereas most members of Congress did not see a full assessment of the Iraqi threat prior to the delivery of the NIE, the president and his aides received daily intelligence briefings on Iraq throughout 2002. And more recent evidence -- such as the Downing Street Memo -- has further suggested that the administration participated actively in the interagency debates concerning what information would be included in the intelligence reports on Iraq.
The claim that the White House and Congress saw the "same intelligence" on Iraq is further undermined by the Bush administration's use of outside intelligence channels. For more than year prior to the war, the administration received intelligence assessments and analysis on Iraq directly from the Department of Defense's Office of Special Plans (OSP), run by then-undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas J. Feith, and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi.
The Senate Intelligence Commttee's "phase two" investigation is slated to examine the intelligence provided by these two entities. When the committee agreed to conduct the "phase two" probe, it laid out five areas of inquiry. Beyond determining whether government officials' "public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq ... were substantiated by intelligence information," the investigation was to examine:
F. any intelligence activities relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and
G. the use by the Intelligence Community of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress (INC)
In a November 4 letter to Senate leaders, Rockefeller, Levin, and Feinstein reiterated the need for these elements of the committee's investigation to be completed.
The Office of the Vice President (OVP) is reported to have heavily utilized the OSP and INC -- both of which have since been discredited -- as it assembled the White House's case for war with Iraq. A December 8, 2003, article (subscription required) in The New Republic described how Vice President Dick Cheney's distrust for the intelligence community led him to cultivate these alternative channels:
From the OVP's perspective, the CIA -- with its caveat-riddled position on Iraqi WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and its refusal to connect Saddam and Al Qaeda -- was an outright obstacle to the invasion of Iraq. And, as Cheney and his staff remembered so vividly from their Pentagon days, the CIA was often wrong on the biggest security questions. So Cheney reverted to the intelligence-gathering method he had perfected at Halliburton: He outsourced.
The Pentagon operation that would later be named the Office of Special Plans was formed by Feith in October 2001 to work on issues related to a potential conflict with Iraq. Over the next 16 months, the New Republic article reported, the office supplied the OVP with substantial amounts of intelligence:
In addition to actual planning, the OSP provided memoranda to Pentagon officials recycling the most damaging -- and often the most spurious -- intelligence about Iraq's Al Qaeda connections and the most hopeful predictions about liberated Iraq. In the fall of 2002, one of the memos stated as fact that September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent months before the attacks -- a claim the FBI and CIA had debunked months earlier after an exhaustive investigation. And the OSP didn't just comb through old intelligence for new information. It had its own sources.
An April 28, 2004, New York Times article detailed how the OSP's "two-man intelligence team" of Michael Maloof and David Wurmser operated. The team, known as the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG), "began work in October 2001 in a 15-by-15-foot space on the third floor of the Pentagon. The pair spent their days reading raw intelligence reports, many from the Central Intelligence Agency, in the Pentagon's classified computer system." The Times documented how Feith's analysts bypassed the CIA by presenting their findings directly to Pentagon officials and how they received intelligence directly from Chalabi:
At the end of 2001, Mr. Maloof and Mr. Wurmser briefed top Pentagon officials as well as John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security and a veteran of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Maloof also met with Mr. [Richard N.] Perle at his suburban Washington home. As chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group, he had security clearance.
That session was interrupted by a call from Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group. At Mr. Maloof's request, Mr. Perle asked Mr. Chalabi, now a member of the interim government of Iraq, to have his staff provide Mr. Maloof information gleaned from defectors and others. The request was unusual, because Mr. Feith's analysts were supposed to review intelligence, not collect it. And Mr. Chalabi at that time had a lucrative contract to provide information on Iraq exclusively to the State Department, which would send it along to the intelligence agencies.
Mr. Maloof later met with member [sic] of the Iraqi National Congress's staff.
Chalabi and the INC provided the basis for much of the intelligence that the OSP ultimately delivered to the vice president's office, as an article in the May 2004 edition of Vanity Fair reported:
[M]uch of the supposedly new intelligence which crossed the desks of [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and Cheney originated with the I.N.C., a group the C.I.A. had long distrusted. In the fall of 2001, and for much of the next year, Chalabi's people produced a series of men and women termed "defectors" from Iraq, and they were accorded disproportionate influence. At least two, who were interviewed by the D.I.A. [Defense Intelligence Agency] and whose information was taken very seriously by the Pentagon and vice president, brought with them hair-raising stories of Saddam's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. The most important, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, claimed that Saddam had secret labs making biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons hidden in underground wells, under villas, and beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad; to date, no trace of such facilities has been found.
In the October 27, 2003, edition of The New Yorker, journalist Seymour M. Hersh described the administration's swift distribution of INC intelligence, as well as the White House's efforts to conceal the intelligence community's doubts about these reports:
Chalabi's defector reports were now [early 2002] flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President's office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found.
[...]
A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified "secret," would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports -- invariably scathing but also classified -- would remain secret.
In the year prior to the war, Cheney became an ardent defender of the intelligence provided by the INC, according to the New Republic article:
Any doubts expressed by the intelligence community about the OVP's sources, especially Chalabi, were ignored. ... To the OVP, the CIA's hostility to such "unique" INC intelligence was evidence of the Agency's political corruption. Before long, "there was something of a willingness to give [INC-provided intelligence] greater weight" than that offered by the intelligence community, says the former administration official.
A November 7 Slate.com article underscored the special treatment the OSP's intelligence received and the high-level access the group enjoyed:
The information CTEG put together was treated differently than other intelligence. Unlike other reports, CTEG's conclusions about Iraq's training of jihadists in the use of explosives and weapons of mass destruction were never distributed to the many different agencies in the intelligence community.
[...]
Dick Cheney was CTEG's patron. He had the group present its material at OVP and the National Security Council. He made frequent public remarks, drawing on CTEG conclusions, alleging an al-Qaida/Saddam connection. (Even after the 9/11 commission delivered its verdict that there was no collaborative relationship between the two sides, Cheney announced that the evidence of the Bin Laden-Baghdad ties was "overwhelming.")
The New Republic further reported that "the OVP's alternative analyses found their way into the administration's public case for war." The foundations for many of these analyses have since been discredited, however. An internal assessment performed by the Defense Intelligence Agency determined in September 2003 that the information provided by the INC defectors "was of little or no value." Moreover, a report compiled by Levin and the Democratic staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee determined that OSP "misrepresented" to Congress the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
From the November 2 edition of CNN's The Situation Room:
JEFFREY: I think we have to remember, [host] Wolf [Blitzer], the CIA director at this time was George Tenet, appointed by Bill Clinton. He vouched for all of this intelligence. The intelligence that Dianne Feinstein used when she voted to authorize that war in October of 2002, provided -- a national intelligence estimate, provided by the CIA, directly to the Senate. We know already from the Senate investigation, it was the same information the president and vice president had. It was bad intelligence, but the Senate and the president had the same intelligence, it came from the CIA.
From the November 4 broadcast of PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:
BROOKS: We had a 98-0 vote in the Senate to get rid of Saddam because of the belief that he was a menace to the world. Now what changed? September 11 changed. September 11 said, OK, now -- the change in attitude was we now can't sit back and wait for him to use it. The threshold of tolerance changed. And so we had a big national debate. We were all here for it. A lot of Democrats supported it. Almost every single senior member of the Clinton administration supported the resolution to go to war. A lot of people like Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton voted. It was a big national debate. They all saw the same evidence.
From the November 4 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:
KONDRACKE: But it's worth pointing out -- it is worth pointing out that Senator Levin himself, who is a member of -- the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and presumably saw whatever he wanted in terms of intelligence before this last war, said, "Uh-oh, Saddam Hussein may use chemical and biological weapons against our troops." Now, what was that based on, if not his reading of intelligence that said that he had those weapons?
[...]
KRAUTHAMMER: The Democrats are acting as if all of this happened in Armenia in 1917 secretly. It happened here two years ago. They looked at all of that intelligence. And that same night, they could hear what the administration was saying about the weapons. It isn't as if all of this was hidden. It was all out in the open, and they were watching it as it happened. I never heard a single Democrat at the time saying, "The statement this afternoon is exaggerated."
From the November 6 broadcast of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday:
HUME: Now, I was told at a very high level this week that the White House is now prepared to have this debate about Iraq, that they are armed with all of the things that people like Senator [Charles E.] Schumer [D-NY], as you illustrated earlier on this program, said at the time, many of them with exposure to intelligence information every bit as good as that in the administration.
I mean, you heard about how he said he wasn't as convinced as the president was, but he said it every bit as strongly as the president did. And many others did as well. The list is endless.
[...]
HUME: Well, they all looked at the same evidence, those guys on the Hill, many of whom are complaining about this now. And what did they do? They voted to authorize the war.
The intel was "cooked" by the neocons from the get go, and the sheep fearing fall out from 9/11 went along. When the smoke settles, the neocons will be madeStevo responsible for the deaths of the GIs in Iraq, This includes hannity and limbaugh and the rest of the scum....
no one but the president gets all the info. but the real point is that the weapons inspectors found no weapons and we still went to war. when voting for use of force, kerry said it was to disarm iraq of wmd "if we cannot accomplish that objective through tough new weapons inspections". we had those inspections and bush had his war. and the republicans of course framed it as voting to protect america. but bob graham had it right. he said "we can't trust this president with a blank check." [sounds kind of like bush's fiscal policy too]
no one but the president gets all the info. but the real point is that the weapons inspectors found no weapons and we still went to war. when voting for use of force, kerry said it was to disarm iraq of wmd "if we cannot accomplish that objective through tough new weapons inspections".
When what passed for the Iraq NIE was cobbled together, a "white paper", summarizing (and further distorting) the NIEs findings was prepared and released to the public. By January 2003--well before the war--the UNMOVIC inspections had already managed to debunk most of the claims of that "white paper" with regard to alleged Iraqi weapons sites.[*] Bush's rubbish tied up UNMOVIC for weeks on one wild goose chase after another. Many of the facilities had once been involved in Iraqi WMD programs--they had long since been converted to other work or abandoned entirely. Equipment sealed and tagged by previous UN inspections a decade earlier was still present and accounted for. One of the inspectors described the U.S.-provided info as "garbage after garbage after garbage." The administration wasted UNMOVIC's time on "garbage," then used the fact that the inspectors turned up nothing as proof of the ineffectiveness of inspections.
[*]This was a carefully guarded secret in most of the corporate press (then busily parroting every Bush idiocy), but the story was out there for those who went looking for it. Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for the best report on it ("Hard Claims but Only Soft Proof So Far in Iraq," January 26, 2003)
classicliberal, If no one but the President gets the info, and that is a fact, if Democratic Senators KNOW THIS, why do they opine so definitively? I mean reading some of their statements, they're not prefaced with, "well, I don't have access to the same information the President has, but..........." Their statements are clear and stated as matters of fact. Don't the Senators, like Jay Rockefeller, that are on the Intelligence Committee get the same, or close to the same information the President gets? I'm having a bit of a tough time following the Democratic line which is, "ignore everything WE said that concurred with the President at that CRUCIAL TIME, and don't hold us accountable for our votes and our opinions, but the PRESIDENT IS A BALD FACED LIAR, even though we said virtually that very same thing and were saying it before the President ever came into office! Can someone explain that to me.
Greetings dagweer. I would like to make a brief comment to your post. The Dems were trying to have it BOTH ways. But there is one important caveat here: The INTEL that the Congress of the US was seeing was delivered by the Executive Branch. Original Classification Authorities also control Dissemination Lists. This in turn determines WHO will see WHAT and there is NO WAY to determine if the Executive Branch operatives have added, redacted, massaged, smoothed, or altered the information with the exception of a good old-fashioned BRAIN and some well placed reasoning...and MMFA!!
Hi bigg, but the question remains, and this is an absolute mystery to me, knowing this, why did Democrat Senators make such absolute, unambiguous declarations to the American people if they knew, and surely they did, all these things you point out. Also, they had been making almost these exact statements long before Bush became President. This just doesn't add up to me.
OK. Just read...First of all, the Dems were citing the information that they were GIVEN by the administration. In an attempt to have it BOTH ways, they parroted the administration. As for people trying to blame only the 2nd Democratic administration in the past 25yrs, I say this. Intelligence is NEVER absolute! It is given in varying degrees of certainty and is EXTREMELY nuanced. The previous administration NEVER (to my knowledge) made an ABSOLUTE statement about Saddam's WMDs. It was nuanced. Quit trying to spread blame and accept the blame due you and your ilk. THE RETHUGS HAVE BEEN IN POWER FOR 5+ YEARS AND NOW THE CHCKENHAWKS ARE COMING HOME...
One last point: It really didn't matter to this administration what was said to the US taxpayers because if WMDs did exist in Iraq, wherever they were, they would be found. This is why the VPOUS didn't mind stating that he KNEW Iraq had WMDs.
bigg, Sorry, I didn't mean to make you angry and I am not a Republican, I am an Independent that is able to think on his own. Thanks for your answer, however hostile, but it still falls short and seems to give Democrats a pass on their conclusions, yet condemns Bush for his. BTW, I voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 so your hostility is misdirected, but is something that is pushing me away from the Democratic Party. It seems that mindset seems to want it both ways on many issues and more importantly, is HOSTILE to any independent thought as your response to me clearly indicates.
Hey, I'm not angry. I'm not a Dem...However I failed to realize how SENSITIVE seriously-literate individuals can sometimes get the wrong idea from prose. To be honest, MOST of my comment was not to you but to the secondary audience who may be reading this thread without actually contributing to it. My comment to you stopped with my flacid attempt to explain why the Dems, at a minimum, were being duplicitous. Pleeez accept my heart-felt apology. I agree with you that it is quite challenging trying to "square that circle".
As for your switching parties, changing whom you vote for, etc...that's your call. But I don't really think the lay of the earth will change if you switch sides. Do you? I'll still be a puhtz...putz...(help!) regardless of whom you vote for ;-)
Are you saying that the Democrats should have known that BushCo was a gang of compulsive liars and thugs?
Since that what they've been calling him from day one, yeah, it would seem that they would have considered that possibility. Do you realize how silly your comment is? Do you remember what was said about Bush & Co's commitment to truth was in Florida when it was being contested? I have asked the question and none of you committed Democrats have been able to give me one single reasonable answer. Bigg got hostile towards me and called me a rethug, which is hilarious, and you make this off the wall and frankly silly comment. The one consistent in the two posts is neither addressed the reasonable question.
Your question is a straw man, that's why people are ignoring it.
dagweer - Wednesday November 9, 2005 11:05:59 AM EST
Two things about this stale talking point, first while long on rhetoric and they should be held accountable for that. The Dems werent doing what Bush DID. That is tell specific and verifiable LIES. Saying Iraq HAS WMDs and is a threat is very different from saying These aluminum tubes can ONLY be used for Gas Centrifuges when in fact the scientists had already told the white house they were unsuitable for GCs. Or these are mobile biological weapons labs when the scientists had already told them that the trucks (for producing hydrogen) were not suited for making bioweapons and they had been tested to death and not a scintilla of bioweapons residue was there. Or that the drones (so pathetic a reasonably bright ten year old could do better with balsa wood and twine) were for spreading chemical or biological weapons and could do so on the east coast (which this administration told the Senate) When the Air Force experts had already told them the payload was too small, they couldnt hold much weight and that they were almost certainly reconasance drones and NOT for speading bioweapons. Or making up an IAEA report that never existed to sell the nuclear weapons threat. See the difference. Bombastic rhetoric, about which they were wrong and outright lies and distortions told by the administration.
Second they were believing what the white house said. For instance IF the aluminum tubes had REALLY been for Gas Centrifuges it would have been powerful evidence of malfeasance by Iraq. The White House sent congress several reports on this issue not ONE of them included the Dept. Of Energy scientists reports that actually ridiculed the idea that they were for GCs. THAT is the difference and its a big one
But Solon, aren't you the same one that has been telling us that Bush was ALSO imcompentant for not paying more attention to an ambiguous, well known threat in a PDB prior to 9/11 that according to your stale talking points would have kept 9/11 from happening had he acted on it? I mean, you critisize the dude for NOT being vigilant enough one minute, the critisize him for being vigilant the next. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big Bush fan, but I am a HUGE fan of fairness and consistency and your stale talking points lack BOTH. These stale talking points of yours don't also address the issue of the clear, unabiguous statements made by many Democrats in the runup to Iraq when they could have stood up and said WAIT. You talk about Bush not being able to say he was wrong, why can't you people say these Democratic Senators, including Kerry, Clinton and Rockefeller were wrong as well. It hurts your credibility with Independents like myself.
dagweer: The ALL were wrong!! BUT only ONE man sent my young brothers and sisters to die: George Walker Bush.
bigg, That's not true, 77 Senators joined with the President in "authorizing" that action and they must also share responsibility. Many of those 77, INCLUDING KERRY AND CLINTON AND ROCKEFELLER are NOW calling the President a liar. That's hypocritical, unfair and just downright dishonest. That's clear to me and should be to anyone.
dagweer - Wednesday November 9, 2005 01:55:45 PM EST
No it isnt, now I am a big fan of holding the dems responsible for their actions vis a vis the war, but GW GUMP told outright lies and made specific distortions. Dems didnt do that. Here it is as plain as I can make it. Bombastic rhetoric, within the rules, outright lies and distortion, not so much. Dems did the former Bush did the latter
But Solon, aren't you the same one that has been telling us that Bush was ALSO imcompentant for not paying more attention to an ambiguous, well known threat in a PDB prior to 9/11 that according to your stale talking points would have kept 9/11 from happening had he acted on it? I mean, you critisize the dude for NOT being vigilant enough one minute, the critisize him for being vigilant the next.
Actually, he criticized Bush for not being competent in both cases. The problem with Iraq isn't a lack of competence, though--it's an intentional campaign to mislead the public.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big Bush fan, but I am a HUGE fan of fairness and consistency and your stale talking points lack BOTH. These stale talking points of yours don't also address the issue of the clear, unabiguous statements made by many Democrats in the runup to Iraq when they could have stood up and said WAIT. You talk about Bush not being able to say he was wrong, why can't you people say these Democratic Senators, including Kerry, Clinton and Rockefeller were wrong as well. It hurts your credibility with Independents like myself.
The congressional Demos should never have gone along with Bush on the war, and they had plenty of reason not to before they voted. That's absolutely irrelevant, though, because, for the umpteenth time, they didn't start the war.
"The congressional Demos should never have gone along with Bush on the war, and they had plenty of reason not to before they voted. That's absolutely irrelevant, though, because, for the umpteenth time, they didn't start the war."
You're exactly right. They gave Bush the opportunity make the decision, which was extraordinarily stupid, but they didn't make the decision.
dagweer - Wednesday November 9, 2005 01:31:16 PM EST
Like that is some kind of contradiction? Of course he should have taken all the warnings about Ben Laden seriously. What could he have done? How about moving toward more serious searches, telling the airlines that they need to move toward doors to the pilot area that cannot be entered from the main area like some international airlines have. Perhaps take the FBI agents who were talking about Arab people acting suspiciously in flight schools seriously like Maureen Rowley. There are lots of things he could have TRIED to do instead of what he DID, NOTHING. Spending the rest of the day fishing and the rest of the month on the longest presidential vacation since Nixon after only BEING president seven months. NONE of which involves the very serious action of INVADING A COUNTRY. Perhaps in your world it makes sense that the level of proof involved in trying to stop a terrorist action is the same as that involved in invading a country but that world would be devoid of reality. You never saw me claim that he could have stopped 9/11 we have no way of knowing he could have what he COULD have done and didnt was TRY. Invading Iraq using intel he either made up or distorted cannot be justified because he spent so long uninterested in the terrorist threat.
Thank You solon
The Dems werent doing what Bush DID. That is tell specific and verifiable LIES. Saying Iraq HAS WMDs and is a threat is very different from saying These aluminum tubes can ONLY be used for Gas Centrifuges when in fact the scientists had already told the white house they were unsuitable for GCs. Or these are mobile biological weapons labs when the scientists had already told them that the trucks (for producing hydrogen) were not suited for making bioweapons and they had been tested to death and not a scintilla of bioweapons residue was there. Or that the drones (so pathetic a reasonably bright ten year old could do better with balsa wood and twine) were for spreading chemical or biological weapons and could do so on the east coast (which this administration told the Senate) When the Air Force experts had already told them the payload was too small, they couldnt hold much weight and that they were almost certainly reconasance drones and NOT for speading bioweapons. Or making up an IAEA report that never existed to sell the nuclear weapons threat. See the difference. Bombastic rhetoric, about which they were wrong and outright lies and distortions told by the administration.
Some articles on my site catalog this deluge of lies: [link to claslib2.tripod.com] [link to claslib2.tripod.com] [link to claslib2.tripod.com] And so on. This site, in fact, is mostly made up of articles I wrote (or procured) regarding Iraq and Afghanistan.
classicliberal, If no one but the President gets the info, and that is a fact, if Democratic Senators KNOW THIS, why do they opine so definitively? I mean reading some of their statements, they're not prefaced with, "well, I don't have access to the same information the President has, but..........." Their statements are clear and stated as matters of fact.
Because the information was offered to them as fact. The NIE, to continue with the earlier example, was an absurd distortion of the available information, tailored to suit what the White House was demanding the IC produce. The white paper derived from the NIE, which was the primary source of Iraq intel for congress prior to the use-of-force vote, further distorted the information, removing even the caveats which had been largely relegated to footnotes in the original document. It was a distortion of a distortion (the white paper also added information not in the NIE at all, in order to make the Iraqi threat seem even more ominous).
All of that said, the "Democratic line" is entirely irrelevant. The Democrats in congress are spineless and pathetic, but its self-evident that they don't have the same access to the intelligence community as the exectutive branch--the IC being part of the executive branch and all--and they didn't drag the country into this war.
To suggest that ALL information that Senators receive is ONLY what the President wants them to have is absurd, and even that word is insufficient in describing the senslessness of the statement. I DO agree however with your statement that the Democrats are "are spineless and pathetic." At least that part of your post is accurate.
To suggest that ALL information that Senators receive is ONLY what the President wants them to have is absurd, and even that word is insufficient in describing the senslessness of the statement.
But I didn't suggest that (and even provided an example of something they received which the administration wouldn't have rather they not gotten), so I'm not sure what you're even talking about. Perhaps you don't, either.
dagweer - Wednesday November 9, 2005 08:23:45 AM EST
The president IS a bald faced liar. On Sept 7, 2002 he in a joint press conference with Tony Blair. Cited a 98 IAEA report that never existed about Iraq being six months from a nuclear weapon. The IAEA SAID there was never any such report. Bush pulled it directly out of his ass. NO DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN DID THAT. So they were NOT doing the same thing nor saying the same things.
The president IS a bald faced liar. On Sept 7, 2002 he in a joint press conference with Tony Blair. Cited a 98 IAEA report that never existed about Iraq being six months from a nuclear weapon. The IAEA SAID there was never any such report. Bush pulled it directly out of his ass. NO DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN DID THAT.
Details:
The "President," from September:
"I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied--finally denied--access, a report came out of the Atomic... the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
This incident raised a particularly red warning flag--the "President," with the whole of the United States intelligence community at his fingertips, was being forced to rely on obscure reports by international agencies to defend his own claims. And then the truth came out, and the flag grew even redder: The IAEA never issued any such report with any such conclusion at any time. Ever. They did, however, issue a report in 1998--the year to which Bush referred--stating that, "based on all credible information available to date, ... the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." [link to claslib2.tripod.com]
Let's face it, The only reason the Democrats are now starting this whole "we were misled" thing is because like predictable politicians they are (and the Republicans the same, for that matter) have their collective fingers in the wind and govern by polls. They see the unrest and the wavering support for the Iraq War and they are damn well going to may political hay out of it......they see this as a golden opportunity.
Granted, things had better improve and fast in Iraq and Bush is responsible for it - but for the Democrats who supported it, voted for it and funded it, to flip around and scream against it is nothing but politics. Both parties play the game so shamefully it's pathetic.
tommy - Wednesday November 9, 2005 02:12:52 PM EST
Is your point that misleading us into a war with distortions and outright lies is not important so Dems should just shut up about it?
solon,
My point is that if the War was going more positively than reported and the poll numbers for Bush were not in the toilet, the magnanamous Democrats would be on some other bandwagon - you can bet on that.
To deny that everything done in Washington is not politically motivated is crazy, it's all done in the context of elections and power......even you can agree on that.
tommy - Wednesday November 9, 2005 02:32:13 PM EST -
If THAT was your point I wholeheartedly and regretfully agree. No one says more often than I do how spineless the dems are. Not EVERYTHING is political there are a few (very few) ethical members of congress ( One less since Wellstone died may God Bless his soul). They DO exist, they are just a tiny minority.
solon,
I admit to being overly cynical when it comes to politicians and our electors these days. You really can't blame them completely, it's the people's fault for they vote for them over and over again......so we are stuck with them, I guess. One thing you always say that I agree with - hold them accountable, I just wish more people felt that way.
And for the record, as much as I disagreed with Paul Wellstone politically I did admire him greatly because he stuck with what he believed in, championed the causes he felt passionately about and was a decent, fair guy.
tommy - Wednesday November 9, 2005 02:39:54 PM EST
The problem is the influence of money in politics when we force politicians to whore for money as if they were dancing on the pole, its not hard to see why the ethical ones get weeded out and we are stuck with a sort of reverse political natural selection. I absolutly agree we have a sad lot in Washington on both sides. Think about it, when a middle of the road conservative and a far lefy liberal such as myself agrees on THIS, something is rotten in Washington
WOW I meant to say force them to whore for money like a dancer on the pole since they first ran for county commissioner....boy does my typing suck
"...if the War was going more positively than reported and the poll numbers for Bush were not in the toilet, the magnanamous Democrats would be on some other bandwagon ..."
...and Republicans like J D Hayworth would want Bush campaigning for them.
"My point is that if the War was going more positively than reported and the poll numbers for Bush were not in the toilet, the magnanamous Democrats would be on some other bandwagon - you can bet on that." --tommy
-------------------------------------------
You are absolutely correct. Remember when the Democrats were running for office in 2002 and 2004? Many of them were trying to emphasize how close they were to President Bush.
What a difference a few years and a couple wars make.
I am looking forward to Democrats being Democrats again for a change. Of course, the argument could also be made that Republicans haven't been Republicans either for the last 4 years or so.
Great post open_mind......both parties are pitiful right now.
by holaotravez - Wednesday November 9, 2005 02:14:47 PM EST
Haven't read the morning paper, have you?
Stinging Defeats for G.O.P. Come at a Sensitive Time
After months of sagging poll ratings, scandal and general political unrest, the Republicans badly needed some good news in Tuesday's elections for governor. What they got instead was a clear-cut loss in a red state, and an expected but still painful defeat in a blue one. -- New York Times
holaotravez - Wednesday November 9, 2005 02:14:47 PM EST
Let me translate this from wingnutese. WAAAAAAAHHHH stop telling vicious truths about the dimson. WAAAAHHHHHH its supposed to be our dirty little secret that Bush lied and distorted about Iraq, WAAAAHHHH, the rest of the post is just wishful delusional thinking. Most voters that voted 50 years ago are DEAD. Not really pertinent to todays political climate. The last four presidential elections had the Dems winning the popular vote three out of four. When YOU guys win four in a row get back to me
It's worth recalling what those in Congress who "voted for the war" actually voted for, namely, to authorize the use of force against Iraq only if the President Of the United States provided to congressional leadership, no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, details of his determination that the threat posed by Iraq was so great that "diplomatic or peaceful means" were no longer adequate to provide for the security of the United States.
It would be interesting now to see the substance of the President's determination, since he has publicly backed down from his pre-war claims of certain knowledge of Iraq's possession of WMDs; and since we now know that intelligence regarding Iraqi WMDs at the time amounted to little more than a guess — far from the the imminent "mushroom cloud" predicted by Condi Rice and the certainty of Dick Cheney that Saddam already possessed nuclear weapons.
It's funny. I don't remember conservatives saying that the Democrats who voted for the war deserved just as much credit for the war as Republicans back when Bush was trumpeting the "Mission Accomplished" faux war for votes. Bush wanted all the credit then, but now he is oh-so-eager to spread the blame.
Great point, Steve. Republicans are stumbling all over themselves trying to blame the Democrats for this war that the cons were drooling for. I love how Barlett suggested we look at Rockerfeller's statements first...because he doesn't want anyone to look at what the person who actually made the decision to go to war was saying.
Must suck to be a Republican these days.
The conservatives who deploy this line inevitably wheel out the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to prove their point. The NIE--the first attempt at a comprehensive analysis of the situation--was assembled in October 2002 in only three weeks (real NIEs require months to compile). Far from being a genuine assessment, it represented the intelligence communities' best effort to comply with the demands of the administration that it shape its work product to reflect the rubbish being publicly bandied about by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. The NIE was classified, and only a small handful of those in congress were ever allowed to see it; what most of them received, instead, was a "white paper" that even further distorted (in favor of the Bush line) the conclusions found in the NIE.
Setting all of this aside, however, one of the most important reasons why it's laughably disingenuous to cite the NIE as being the intel relied upon by the administration is that the decision to start the war had already been made before the NIE even existed; perhaps more than a year before. Certainly by early April 2002 (6 months pre-NIE), the invasion was a done deal, Bush having sought and received a British commitment to the project.
Actually Congress received the full top secret report before they voted and whether or not Bush had already decided to go to war was irrelevant on how they voted. The Dems knew exactly what the vote was for and the backpedaling now is laughable and the public knows it. That is why this issue is going nowhere. There are too many quotes by Bill Clinton and Al Gore saying Saddam had WMD and they saw all the intelligence.
"...Congress received the full top secret report before they voted..."
Do you have a source for this? I am curious how "full" that top secret report was.
"...Congress received the full top secret report before they voted..."
Do you have a source for this? I am curious how "full" that top secret report was.
He has no source for it, because he's misleading you. The full report went to congress in the middle of the night, only hours before hearings were scheduled to begin the next day. It was kept under guard, members were only allowed to look at it under guard, and seeing it required a security clearance for top secret material. No copies were allowed. No notes were allowed. None of it could be removed for inspection. The only thing most members of congress ever got was a summary, which even further distorted the distortions already contained in the original NIE (all caveats removed), and added new information, without explanation, that made the Iraqi threat sound even more ominous.
Actually Congress received the full top secret report before they voted and whether or not Bush had already decided to go to war was irrelevant on how they voted.
Actually, a small handful of members of congress received "the full top secret report", exactly as I said. The rest were given the "white paper" summary, which was even more of a distortion than the original NIE. The fact that the administration had already decided to start a war perhaps as much as a year before the NIE necessarily means it amounts to a massive lie for Bush and co. to hide behind that NIE as their excuse for war.
There are too many quotes by Bill Clinton and Al Gore saying Saddam had WMD and they saw all the intelligence.
Bush didn't say "Saddam Hussein has WMDs, therefore I'm going to start a war"; he made very specific allegations regarding those (non-existent) weapons--aluminum tubes, Niger uranium, mobile bio-weapons labs, and all the rest--and said those items amounted to a case for war. And he, NOT Bill Clinton, launched the war.
So why didn't those Democratic Senators that saw the full report let anyone else know about their concerns? I mean, assuming they really had concerns and not just pulling a political stunt.
So why didn't those Democratic Senators that saw the full report let anyone else know about their concerns? I mean, assuming they really had concerns and not just pulling a political stunt.
Several senators DID request further declassification. The administration flatly refused full declassification, but some items were released at the time. For example, the CIA released its judgment that the likelihood of Iraq initiating a WMD attack was virtually non-existent in the forseeable future. The administration, however, was careful to keep most of the NIE under wraps.
Superb, comprehensive article. Thanks, J.K.!
>> In response to Democratic demands for completion of phase two, the Republican National Committee issued talking points saying that "Just A Few Years Back, Dems Were Warning About WMDs In Iraq," ....
I know the talking points come out and that suddenly everyone on the Right is saying the exact same thing, but it's interesting to see the reasoning behind some of them. The Dems are so effectively muffled in the MSM that you don't hear about what they're pushing for, you just hear the Republican responses, which seem to come out of the nowhere.
I'm a registered Democrat, All I have to say to our Democratic leaders is if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything. If gut instincts tell you that you don't have all the fact demand more. If you really didn't beleive in the war why did you give bushieboy a blank check? These days some Democrats blow with the wind. Instead of forcefully making the case for the reasons againts the war they let the Republicans call them and anyone else who wasn't on board unpatriotic. Well that's horse hockey. In the face of an unpopular opinion they twist and turn. Get a position and stick to it.
I remember during the buildup to war that a lot of analysis said that Bush wasn't going to wait any longer simply because he had 150,000 troops waiting around to do something, and that costs money. It would have been ati-climatic for us to build-up a giant force only to yield to the mundane methods of the inspectors. Make no mistake, Bush was hankering from war from the beginning and would not have yielded to any stop sign, short of Congressional intervention. Unfortunately, 9/11 converted Congress to a sniveling administration lackey that had no ability to independently assess situations of national security. To do so, at that time, would have brought scorn from Americans who wanted to trust that their president should have lattitude to keep them safe. It's a bizarre confluence of factors that got us into this mess. Unfortunately, it's replaced reason with reaction. Only now are we waking up as a nation, hung over and regretting the decisions we made the previous night.
"If you really didn't beleive in the war why did you give bushieboy a blank check?"
Voting to authorize the use of force is quite different than advocating war.
And remember....we were assured that military action would be a last resort.
What should be clear to anyone paying attention is that the Bush Administration leaked SELECTED information to the press and used the press reports themselves to bolster their (false) argument for going to war in Iraq. In my book this is both a lie and immoral behavior. The GOP have sunk so low that they not only lied to the press but also lied directly to the American people in Bush's State of the Union Speech. What would stop them from lying to anyone else? What would stop them from lying to the Senate? Nothing. As MMFA points out on nearly a daily basis, the lies and distortions just keep on coming. Once you start lying yourself out of a lie it just gets worse and worse. They won't stop. They can't. They have gone too deep. Just like Nam, we will be in Iraq for years and years unless we elect someone who will commit to getting them out.
Anyone who defends this administration on these charges needs to have their heads examined.
There seems to be two problematic threads to this discussion.
One, everyone seems to forget that the vote cast in Oct. 2002 was to give the president the “leverage” to go to war, not war itself. It was not a given that war was “inevitable”. This is another Republican rewrite of history. Check articles of the day. The tone in the media regarding war was one of uncertainty. But ask Republicans now and they’ll say, oh we ALL knew we were going to war, who didn’t, certainly the Democrats did? I call it “reality drift”. Republicans are trying to imply that Democrats possess supernatural prescience. They don’t. If they did, they’d’ve nominated Howard Dean, inhuman scream or not, instead of John Kerry.
Second, the White House was the clearing house for whatever intelligence was passed down to Congress. That means the WH could “prism” the information however they saw fit. So until we have access to the raw WH intel and compare it to the reports handed down to Congress, there’s no absolute way to know how much information was withheld or altered or redacted or left as is. But it is undeniable that the WH does have access to more intel than Congress. Again, it boils down to how much intel the WH chooses to disclose.
Bush owned the war when he thought it was a winner. Now he is trying to pawn it off on Democrats. His people pushed the bogus intelligence used to persuade Dems to vote for the war. I agree that Dems were playing to political interests in voting for the war, but it's Bush's War and he will be paying the piper for it:
Intrabit ut vulpis Regnabit ut leo Morietur ut canis He comes in like a fox, reigns like a lion and dies like a dog.
Lets say for the sake of argument, the Democrats were provided the same information the President used to make his decisions to go to war. Does this mean that the Democrats have all lost their minds ans wish to overlook this very obvious fact concerning why we went to war? Add to this, they make the claim they were mislead into supporting this war in front of Congress, the Senate, and the American people. Could the Democrats be so stupid to now withdraw their support?
The only way the Democrats could make this claim is they were given material to fit the President's claim Iraq had WMDs. While we are at it, we need to ask if our President's efforts to go to war was transparent for all to see? Dose the President hide material or give standard reasons for denying our Senate information that will clear these questions up? What are these so called Downing Street Memos? Does these memo's counter what the President has told the Congress, the Senate, and the American people?
Sometimes things are not as simple as some, in this case the Republican, would have you believe. After all we are talking about smart exceptionally educated representatives to our government. Could there be a chance the President lied and manipulated the evidence, thus, misleading all involved in supported this war? Does that mean it matters not what the Democrats agreed to because they were being lied to? Lastly, Does everyone want to get to the bottom of all this for the sake of moving in the direction best for our situation? Sure we can.
Joseph
"Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States..." FALSE
"...continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability..." FALSE
"Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;" FALSE
"...including the development of weapons of mass destruction ..." FALSE