The Reality of Bush and Cheney’s Assertions
Knight-Ridder has a good article addressing the assertions the Bush administration is making against its critics of the Iraq war.
An excerpt:
ASSERTION: In a Veterans Day speech last Friday, Bush said that Iraq war “critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.”
CONTEXT: Bush is correct in saying that a commission he appointed, chaired by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., found no evidence of “politicization” of the intelligence community’s assessments concerning Iraq’s reported weapons of mass destruction programs.
But neither that report nor others looked at how the White House characterized the intelligence it had when selling its plan for war to the world and whether administration officials exaggerated the threat. That’s supposed to be the topic of a second phase of study by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that was not part of our inquiry,” Silberman said when he released the panel’s findings in March.
Late Update: The full article is in PDF format and can be downloaded here.
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