LTTE says Bush off the hook for Iraq by Senate Committee

[heidiho]

This letter was published today in my local newspaper:

Report clears Bush of ‘lying’

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on prewar intelligence has been published. The committee, consisting of eight Democrats and nine Republicans, has stated that it “did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s WMDs.” This was a unanimous statement. That means eight Democrats and nine Republicans all agreed with the above statement.

Accusing the president of the United States of lying to take our country to war is a very serious charge. Now that it has been proven beyond any doubt that the president did not lie, will those accusers now write letters to the editor apologizing for their accusations? I think not.

Then, those accusers must now also accuse John Kerry, John Edwards, Jay Rockefeller and many others on the Senate Intelligence Committee of lying and certainly incompetence in their responsibilities in overseeing the nation’s intelligence efforts.

The same report also debunks the charges made by Joe Wilson. The report says that Mr. Wilson is a partisan fraud whose Niger trip proved absolutely nothing. The State of the Union address given by President Bush was totally accurate.

The hypocrisy is evident, and should be noted by the voters in Wisconsin.

C.D. Schwaegler,

I'd like to refute this letter. Can anyone help me?

[billybob537]

1. Thats what they'd like us to believe

the facts are not that simple. This isn't the final report, And they agreed not to release the final report until after the election? Now does that raise any Questions, YOU'RE damn straight it does.
Proven beyond any doubt? this guy is touching himself.

[Brotherjohn]

2. Oh, it's just too easy!

1: The Senate report specifically did not look into the Bush administration's use of the intelligence they did receive, due to a deal reached between Repubs and Dems on the committee beforehand to postpone that issue until after the election. Whether or not the Bush administration "lied" was not even an issue they addressed.

2: The conclusion (which IS disputed by Dems on the committee) that there was no pressure on intelligence agencies to "cook the books" has nothing to do with whether or not the Bush administration misrepresented that data after the fact (i.e. lied). That is another issue (see No. 1 above).

3: The reports conclusions that the CIA was on the money as far as there being NO Iraq/Al Qaeda link direcly implicates the WH in lying on this issue. Likewise, the WH also exagerrated and misrepresented even much of the faulty, overreaching evidence they received from the CIA on WMDs, painting Iraq as even a greater threat than the intelligence agencies said. They often dropped qualifiers and ignored dissenting opinion within the intel community, and presented the opinions most matching their case for war as undisputed fact. Case in point: Stating unequivocally that the aluminum tubes were ONLY suitable for uranium enrichment when your own intelligence shows that your best experts on the matter (DOE) strongly disagree with this conclusion. This leads to one of two conclusions about the Bush administration: they are either lying or they are incompetent.

4: The charges made by Joe Wilson are in no way "debunked". It is a FACT that his trip proved what we came to know much later based on the obvious forgeries that were the basis of the Niger-uranium claim (as to why the WH and the CIA could not discover in months what the IAEA said a Google search could have discovered in hours is another issue altogether). The only other evidence for the Niger claim appears to be an unnamed source that the British discovered late in the game that they refuse to divulge. There is talk of an Iraqi trade delegation approaching Niger with a request of increased trade relations, which some have interpreted as a desire to get uranium. But that hardly constitutes an imminent threat to our national security. It is also hardly evidence that the Niger deal took place.

Wilson was asked to verify an alleged deal for uranium based on a summary of the (now known forged) documents provided by Italian intelligence, which he was briefed on. He came back stating that such a deal, based on this evidence, could not have taken place. he made it very clear from the beginning, on the record, that he had not seen the actual documents, and that he had spoken to people whose signatures "would have been required" on such documents (see the June 13, 2003 Wash Post story and Wilson's own July 6, 2003 OpEd in the NYTimes). For 3 Republicans on the Senate committee to be holding him to account for a mis-statement on an issue (whether he saw the documents earlier than he has said) about which his own public record is perfectly clear is an abvious attempt to discredit his character and story. As to the issue of who recommended Wilson for the trip, that is an irrelevant red herring that doesn't even merit addressing.

See http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ for more info on this.

There is so much more. Like the fact that the CIA didn't decide to invade Iraq, the WH did. Does the WH blindly follow what the CIA tells them? It's not like there weren't opposing opinions, and DATA, out there. While the CIA admittedly did NOT have "on-the-ground" operatives in Iraq and had to base much of their info on conjecture, the United Nations DID have people on the ground. Remember? We asked them to go in again! Problem was, on point by point, they found most or all of the administration's claims to be either dubious or outright false. And this was BEFORE the war (go to the UN web page and read Blix and El Baradei's reports to the UNSC in the two months leading up to the war). And this opposing intelligence gathered on the ground in Iraq was and still is a matter of public record.

I don't have all the links right now, but I believe several Dem senators published statements disputing some of the conclusions of this "unanimous" report, including whether there was pressure on the intelligence agencies, and making clear that this report did not address the issue of how the WH used the intelligence.