Well, today a bipartisan senate panel confirmed what we all already know (all except, of course, the Bush administration) – There was no real factual basis for believing that there were arms in Iraq.
Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the panel, said this morning:
“Before the war, the U.S. intelligence community told the president, as well as the Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and if left unchecked, would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade. Well, today we know these assessments were wrong. And, as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence.”
“…the key judgments in the October 2002 national intelligence estimate on Iraq’s WMD programs were either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence reporting.”
Finally, he noted that “a collective group-think” caused ambiguous evidence to be elevated to the level of conclusive evidence.
**It’s hard to know what to do with this report. On the one hand, it restates the obvious. It reconfirms what we’ve known for quite some time. On the other hand, it is yet one more mind-blowing reminder of the degree to which this administration doesn’t understand the concept of accountability. **
**For starters, no one has been held accountable for the two massive intelligence failures of the intelligence community. Only now is George Tenet leaving office, and, from all appearances, he left on his own, and not because Bush asked him to. As I said yesterday, if Bush and Cheney had not willfully lapsed into the same “group think” as the intelligence community, they should have been livid that they were embarrassed by the intel community and flayed people alive. But they haven’t done that. **And I suspect that that’s because they, too, wanted to build a case against Iraq by focusing on selective evidence. Their apathy belies their complicity.
An even more staggering example of how accountability has gone out the window is the stunning fact the administration is still insisting that Iraq had WMD, despite not having found a trace of them in 1.5 years. And despite the conlcusions of such reports. Bush is still trying to feed us the same line of BS, and any self-respecting citizen should be pissed. Even if you are conservative, you should not accept a president who either fails to take responsibility for his mistakes (and that is the charitable interpretation) or who thinks that you’re so stupid that he will keep feeding you explanations that so evidently have no foundation in truth. That’s when you’re basically giving up on democracy.
**Hopefully, the silent majority will hold Bush accountable in November. But, so far, it doesn’t seem too troubled by the shameful picture you see when you connect the dots – the false motives for war (no WMD, no Hussein-al-qaeda link), the continued assertions that these motives exist despite all evidence to the contrary, the destructive international “diplomacy” that destroyed our ****standing in the world, the loss of American troops (it topped 1,000 today), the thousands of soldiers missing limbs, the lack of post-war game plan, the lack of exit strategy, the torture in prison, the justification of torture by Justice Department lawyers, the lack of substantive progress on the al-qaeda front (Osama is still out there and when was the last time you heard of any major figure getting nabbed? you have to go back to Khalid Sheik Mohammad who was arrested in early 2003), the attempt to subvert the very foundations of our justice system (you don’t get a lawyer or a court date? it’s called habeas corpus, buddy!), the Patriot Act that lets the feds search library records but not records of recent gun purchases (what kind of illogically ideological crap is that?), the list goes on and so apparently does insanity in the US. **