Bush Knew He Was Lying!

On OffQ this past Friday, Local Attorney Heather Heidelbaugh said, when the topic of the evening's discussion turned from Scott McClellan's book to the run-up to the War in Iraq:

Again we're talking about "there was no weapons of mass destruction." Everyone agrees, all the Democrats, all the Republicans, George Tenet of the CIA who was appointed by George Clinton, everyone agrees that everyone believed--

At that point, the ever-vigilant John McIntire corrected Attorney Heidelbaugh on her (relatively minor) musical gaffe. It wasn't George Clinton, (the master of funk) who appointed George Tenet, but Bill Clinton, President of the United States.

--everyone believes that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons. And they believed he was capable of making a nuclear weapon within a year. Everyone believed that. And it did - yes, yes, yes, there's no question about that. And it did in fact turn out to be incorrect that he was able to build a nuclear weapon.

Later, speaking on what the general mood of the culture believed just after 9/11, she said:

We believe that Saddam Hussein has these weapons of mass destruction and we do not want to be in a position where we are attacked and so we should affirmatively step forward.

Now we can't fault Heidelbaugh for not knowing last week what is now known this week. And I think it's fair to say that what she believes to be true is a good example of how well the propaganda program from the current administration worked. Heather Heidelbaugh is certainly an intelligent person (certainly smarter than me, that's fer darn shure). For someone as so sharp to be taken in so completely only shows how good the propaganda was.

And what's known now that wasn't known then? From the McClatchy papers:

A long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report made public Thursday concludes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence.

The report, in PDF form, can be found here.

The news is rather bad for dubya and his cohorts.

CNN:

The Bush administration misused intelligence to build a case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report issued Thursday.

The White House exploited its ability to declassify intelligence selectively to bolster its case for war, the committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, said in the report.

Senior officials disclosed and discussed sensitive intelligence reports that supported the administration's policy objectives and kept out of public discourse information that did not, he said.

The report also found that the administration misled the American people about contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Reuters:

U.S. President George W. Bush and his top policymakers misstated Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq's arms programs as they made a case for war, the Senate intelligence committee reported on Thursday.

The New York Times:

The committee’s report cited some instances in which public statements by senior administration officials were not supported by the intelligence available at the time, such as suggestions that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda were operating in a kind of partnership, that the Baghdad regime had provided the terrorist network with weapons training, and that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague in 2001.

But the report found that on several key issues, including Iraq’s alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other top officials before the war were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates of the intelligence agencies, though the statements did not always reflect the agencies’ uncertainty about the evidence. All the weapons claims were disproved after invading troops found no unconventional arsenal and little effort to build one.

Even that last part - about how their statements were "substantiated" - does not bode well for them. The next phrase - about how they did not always reflect any agencies' uncertainty - points as well directly to their dishonesty. If they didn't always point out how much "uncertainty" there was about what they were saying, they were presenting something as true that they knew wasn't true.

And that's a lie. Plain and simple.

Bush lied. People died.