the smoking tubes

[rlev1223]

The Rove fog machine has been going full blast this week as more and more evidence piles up that none -- none -- of the public justifications for war were accurate.

The biggest lie being mouthed all over cable news is that intelligence committee members, and by extension the Congress as whole, had the same information as the President, so he can't be blamed for acting on bad data.

The most important story, although it has been pushed aside a bit by the CIA report, is the NY Times piece which shows that opinions about the aluminum tubes (used to suggest a continuing nuclear program) were divided, to say the least, within the administration; this uncertainty was never revealed to either Congress, the UN or in any of the public pronouncements about nuclear mushroom clouds. It turns out the tubes were not useful for nuclear arms, but were the same as Saddam had used for conventional misiles. A discarded CIA report was the only basis for the more sinister view.

This is really the smoking gun about whether it was simply wrong intelligence that everyone agreed about or deliberate distortion that led to the decision to invade Iraq. Even though the town hall meeting is about "domestic' issues, Kerry should get this in strongly, because a mushroom cloud in New York is certainly a domestic concern -- it should be the center piece of his "truthfulness" theme.