One of the problems Democrats face is that since the national press has been reduced to being mere stenographers (because like the Post’s John Harris, who knows what a conservative blogger would say?) - Bush and company can just say anything and the media will simply print it using the new litmus test for fact - the president said it, so it must be true. Case in point:
Bush:
” That’s why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate — who had access to the same intelligence — voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.”
Reality:
Congress doesn’t see same intelligence as president, report finds
Bush Resurrects False Claim That Congress Had Same Intelligence On Iraq
This is a patently false thing the President has said. It’s not a mistake on his part, but rather a smart gamble that the product of the right’s assault on the press has reduced an army of stenographers that will simply report what was said without concern for the truth. Until folks on the progressive side begin to realize that the media is just another type of copy machine, they’ll continue to lose.
Related
Reality Vs. Bush, 9/27/06
Bush vs. Reality
Pulling For Bush
Didn’t the Senate investigation into the allegations of this matter show that the information that the Senators did not see was even more hyperbolic than that which they did see ?
Again, though, Elrod, the wingnuts are just deflecting. The real problem here is that Bush lied when he said that Congress saw the same intelligence that he did. It has been proven that he had information that Congress did not.
Another documented lie by the pResident.
Recollections are great guys. Do any of you have any links?
Senator Graham of Florida complained several times that the classified NIE that he saw relegated important doubts to footnotes, and when Tenet produced an unclassified version of the NIE for the whole Senate, he took out all the doubts and caveats altogether. It was this act of manipulation that led Graham to make his quixotic run for the Presidency. But Graham couldn’t reveal everything he heard in classified session. The Phase II of the Senate Intelligence investigation, which Sen. Roberts has stalled, is supposed to look into this in more detail.
Just putting the facts out there. Dugger’s a reasonable man, contrary to what seem to believe. Search through some of Kevin Drum’s and Left Coaster’s archives on this stuff and you’ll see a more in depth analysis of what Congress investigated and what it did not investigate. I’m too lazy and I don’t have time to resurrect it right now. There was a great New Republic piece on Senator Bob Graham on the NIE too. I’ll find it later.
JD,
Phase I of the Intelligence investigation only looked at what the intel agencies saw, not what they or the Administration did with it. And yes, what they saw was undoubtedly more hyperbolic because it was filled with every speculation under the sun. Raw intelligence is always more hyperbolic. It includes stuff like, “Abu Muhammad says his friend Mahmoud Jabbar is carrying a nuclear suitcase and is planning on placing it underneath the Sears Tower”. That said, what the intel agencies concluded based on this is a different matter and hasn’t really been investigated yet.
I don’t know JD. Have a link to that?
JD,
That is my recollection also.
Dugger
Priceless, JD. Just priceless.
JD and Dugger, you are again missing the point, just as you two always do.
It’s not what that additional intelligence said, it’s the fact that the president lied when he said that Congress had access to all the intelligence he did. That was patently false.
So, who cares what it contained? Once again, your president lies to you and you sit there defending it.
frameone - you are an intelligent fellow. I am sure you know how google works.
“Again, though, Elrod, the wingnuts are just deflecting. The real problem here is that Bush lied when he said that Congress saw the same intelligence that he did. It has been proven that he had information that Congress did not.”
No, it has not. What has been said is that he had ACCESS to other information, such as raw intel and source information. It may well be that Bush actually SAW and USED the same intel he sent up to the hill.
Keep hurling the mud kids, maybe something will stick.
But remember, you can’t just flush the history of all those democrats voting in favor of the war down the old memory hole
We have lots of pieces, but nobody has bothered to put them together to see what they make.
The congressional research service lists four areas in which intelligence data is generally made available to the President, but not to Congress.
There was a great deal of intelligence data made available to Congress before the invasion of Iraq.
Everybody get out your pencils and draw the Venn diagrams. Are these two sets congruent, exclusive, or intersecting?
Congress saw the same intelligence he did in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. So Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked the non-partisan Congressional Research Service to look into the matter and report back whether or not what the president said is true.
They reported back today. http://feinstein.senate.gov/crs-intel.htm
….” Absent a court ruling more clearly defining executive and legislative branch authorities in this area, which most observers view as unlikely, the executive branch has contended that it is under no legal obligation to provide Congress access to all national intelligence.”
“No, it has not. What has been said is that he had ACCESS to other information, such as raw intel and source information. It may well be that Bush actually SAW and USED the same intel he sent up to the hill.”
So, what you are saying is that Bush had access to other information that could help him make an informed decision, and he ignored it.
Or are you saying that he only sent the information he used to the hill, and withheld other information that he didn’t choose to use, but could have been part of Congress’ decision making process to vote for IWR?
“Dugger will be saying that there s absolutely no proof that the president ever lied about anything. ”
You are correct sir. No lies documented, ever, by anyone, at any time.
Dugger
From page 9 of the Senate Intelligence Report:
[capitalization and emphasis mine]
In other words, whatever was deemed relevant according the the various intelligence communitees was in the NIE.
Would someone care to point to any claims about WMDs and terrorism made by the Bush administration that were not present in the NIE?
Additionally, page 8 noted:
What I interpret here is that Bush is saying that Congress had all relevant data - same as the President. Since Congress and the Presdient deal in different worlds, no serious person is actually trying to say that each saw all the very same papers etc. At work here is a paranoia that somehow dumb frat boy hid data from the Dems and Repubs (for would not the likes of Hagel, Chafee and McCain also be concerned and say something if there was an attempt to mislead?) that would have changed their position on Iraq. As always, its all about motive as guessed at by the left and never about content.
Dugger
dpedro - To follow along with your prior thoughts, subsequent reports have indicated that had the legislators been given access to further raw intel, they would have been even more likely to have taken a position supporting the action.
As Dugger pointed out, they like to assume that since they did not have access to every available piece of information, that the information that they did not have was likely to be “exculpatory”, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Dugger will be saying that there s absolutely no proof that the president ever lied about anything.
You are correct sir. No lies documented, ever, by anyone, at any time.
& even though the evidence that he has lied and is lying is far more compelling than the evidence for WMD ever was - even with all the hyperbole.
Thank you, Dugger.
This is one place I agree with Quaker,
unfortunately we will never know for sure.
But this remains a specious argument. In theory, the president has access to EVERY BIT of information in the US Government. I am sure anyone could parse all that data and find something that says “AHA…he should have know THIS”, but that of course is ridiculous.
The important data that had already been analyzed is what both the pres and congress had to work with. It is disingenous, and in fact a straw man, to suggest that had Kerry been given access to all the raw intel he would have voted differently
Shorter Dugger: That depends on what the definition of is is.
Dugger,
“Since lying requires intent, what evidence do you have re Bush s intent ? Mind reader, are we?”
Bush 1999: (Before 9/11)
There are many other examples that show intent and a motive to twist intelligence. Bush was lying when he said war was the last option.
mrC
Wilbur,
Since lying requires intent, what evidence do you have re Bush’s ‘intent’? Mind reader, are we?
Dugger
And this is a rare occasion when I must agree with pedro. Even if the spineless Dems had access to every scrap of data, the administration still would have made them their punks.
Dugger,
Are you really comfortable enough with your faith in Dear Leader that you imagine he’d be vindicated if his lies/mistatements/half-truths were parsed in a court of law?
You are correct sir. No lies documented, ever, by anyone, at any time.
Dugger
Don’t forget ‘no mismangement’ of the war either.
JD, nice of you to use your telepathic powers to tell us how congresspeople would’ve reacted to further intel. I didn’t realize you had such predictive powers.
I want to thank the Bush apologists in this thread for making the very point I wrote about.
There is no evidence that George W. Bush, other than when he states his name and simple personal facts, such as parent’s names etc, has ever told the truth about anything else. Ever.
According to the Downing Street Memo:
“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Now, more and more, we find that yes indeed, intelligence was massaged and cherry picked to support the ginning up of the war machine in advance of the 2002 elections.
Quack, quack, quack.
BREAKING NEWS FOR RIGHTIES: The decision to go to war was actually made by President Bush in March of 2003 and not by the Seanate in October 2002. During this time, Bush obtained in-country accesss to Iraq and had an additrional 5 months to flush at the questionable intelligence that was contained in the NIE as well as that which was not.
Also let’s not forget that Cheney & Libby withheld papers from the Senate Intelligence Committe.
As to O Dub’s point, he’s right … Bush lied when he stated the Senate had the same intelligence he had.
Dugger’s standard that you can never say lie because you can never know what one actually intended is absurd. People are on death row and even executed on circumstantial evidence of intent - with the blessing of righties - all the time. You just need to look at the sly phrasing of the Africa/uranium and ties to al Qaeda statements Bush made in the SOTU speech and Cinncinati speeches to determine he intended to mislead the American people.
You’re welcome. So it should be easy for someone like you with all this insight to list a claim about WMD or terrorism made by the Bush administration that was not discussed in the NIE and made available to Congress.
I’ll remind you that
Well?
I still don’t understand how the “intent” thing is much of a defense. Either he intentionally lied, or he just made the sort of human mistake that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of people.
There is always some form of punishment for even honest mistakes that have egregious consequences.
I keep getting accused, via generalizations if not personally, of being blinded by overwhelming, stomach-turning Bush hate. Although this isn’t true, does this mean I can fire back that some of you are blinded by overwhelming, stomach-turning Bush love? And that this is why a man can get a free pass for making such a terrible error?
All you need to get you started on how Bush manipulated intelligence and kept dissenting analysis and facts from Congres:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_11/007556.php
frameone,
The NIE was the “authoritative” report from the Intelligence Community. What did the Bush administration claim that was not reported in the NIE?
It’s a simple question…yet no one can answer it.
As far as your link is concerned…it lists the errors made by the Intelligence Community (as reported by the Senate Intelligence Committee). Which of those errors were known to be errors by the Bush administration?
The Claim: Saddam Hussein was developing long range aerial drones capable of attacking the continental United States with chemical or biological weapons. President Bush made this claim in a speech in October 2002 and Colin Powell repeated it during his speech to the UN in February 2003.
What We Know Now: The Iraqi drones had nowhere near the range to reach the United States, and Air Force experts also doubted that they were designed to deliver WMD. However, their dissent was left out of the October 2002 NIE and wasn’t made public until July 2003. Link.
“all the congresscritters had the classified memo available.”
Care to give us the link to this information?
And the link doesn’t list errors made by the intelligence community. It lists all the known incidents in which the Bush administration kept classified dissenting analysis and contrary facts. May I suggest you read a little more closely next time?
Wrong, all the congresscritters had the classified memo available.
This is such a tired argument…with twenty-twenty hindsight you can ALWAYS find someone who argued in the negative.
The reason that we are able to refute the intelligenct so well now is….we walked into Iraq and looked for ourselves! If we hadn’t, we would still be having the same argument.
Remember, the UN declarations made it a positive duty for Iraq to PROVE that they had destroyed all the weapons of mass destruction, it did not simply say Iraq had to open its doors so we could look around.
If 100 years from now we find that aliens HAVE been beaming mind control rays at us, think of all the “I told you so’s….” we are going to have to put up with from the Tin Hat Leftists!
In other words, Graham was one of the few members of Congress allowed to see the classified version of the NIE which included a number of, albeit downplayed, dissents to the case for WMDs. When he requested an unclassified version to be prepared so that all the members of Congress and the public couls see the case for or against WMD, all the dissenting analysis was removed. Because this information remained classified, Graham says, he was not able to publicly point out the discepancies in the two versions. Yup, everything above board there.
also are you calling Graham a liar:
“I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.
And do remember to apply the Dugger-standard.
“Care to give us a link…”
No, just as I don’t care to give you a “link” to prove you are breathing air.
And I was not calling Graham a liar, I just inferred that he meant most of his collegues didn’t have the stones to call BS.
Common sense rules. If congress is voting on an act, do you really think they would put up with not being given the classified data? Come on man….
“If congress is voting on an act, do you really think they would put up with not being given the classified data?”
Your common sense? That’s your proof that Congress saw the classified NIE? That’s too rich. You guys crack me up. Come back when you get some facts.
And Dr. Pedro, you do know what caveat emptor means, right?
“Common sense rules. If congress is voting on an act, do you really think they would put up with not being given the classified data? Come on man& .”
DRpedro,
That’s why Senators like Edwards say they were misled. They believed the Administration when they saw the unclassified NIE. Graham was not allowed to tell them what was different from the declassified and classified NIE without violating his security clearance. Graham was on the intelligence committee. Members of the intelligence committee have higher security clearance than the rest of the Senate. They get to see things that the rest of the Senate does not see.
Thanks JWG, you beat me to the punch!
Link:
From “Fact check.org”
“The President’s main point is correct: the CIA and most other US intelligence agencies believed before the war that Saddam had stocks of biological and chemical weapons, was actively working on nuclear weapons and “probably” would have a nuclear weapon before the end of this decade. That faulty intelligence was shared with Congress along with multiple mentions of some doubts within the intelligence community in a formal National Intelligence Estimate just prior to the Senate and House votes to authorize the use of force against Iraq.
No hard evidence has surfaced to support claims that Bush somehow manipulated the findings of intelligence analysts. In fact, two bipartisan investigations probed for such evidence and said they found none. So Dean’s claim that intelligence was “corrupted” is unsupported.”
“The intelligence to which Bush refers is contained in a top-secret document that was made available to all members of Congress in October 2002, days before the House and Senate voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq. This so-called National Intelligence Estimate was supposed to be the combined US intelligence community’s “most authoritative written judgment concerning a specific national security issue,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report was titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
Emphasis mine
Here’s the link…http://www.factcheck.org/article358.html
Any more questions kids?
Graham refers to a report released to the public on Oct. 4 by Tenet titled “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.”
The factcheck.org report refers to report it says was released to Congress in “October of 2002″ with no specific day titled: “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
Here’s the site that sort of clears this up: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/#doc15
It’s important to point out there’s still no way of knowing what was in the “Continuing” report because the White House has only released the Key Judgements section of the report and redacted most of the rest of the 93 page document. And yet Factcheck takes the Key Judgements section as proof enough that Congres saw all the intelligence. But the key judgement sections of the report released includes dissenting analysis on only two issues:
“The released key judgments section is also notable for its reporting of dissents within the Intelligence Community on two related issues - when Iraq could acquire a nuclear weapon, and its motive in seeking to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes.”
These were the dissents presented by the State Department and Department of Energy, dissents which “senior Bush administration officials” had been downplaying as “footnotes” in the New York Times in articles written by Judith Miller.
At the same time, the key judgements section also mentions evidence about biological and chemical weapons labs and Hussein’s links to al-qaeda presented without any mention of the dissenting opinions about this evidence and its sources known at the time by the intelligence community as listed in the Washington Monthly post I link to.
Factcheck.org overplays what it knows because most of the document it cites is redacted. If those redacted portions didn’t include all the dissenting information that we now know existed and was circulating within the intelligence community then Congress didn’t get the same information. At this point it’s impossible to know if Congress got all the same intelligence because we don’t know what was in the actual NIE that was shown to Congress.
Here’s what we do know for a fact according to Graham: The public summary of the NIE released on Oct. 4 by Tenet contained no dissenting opinions at all. Why did the Bush administration decide that the public had no right to know that there were dissenting opinions about WMDs in Iraq?
pedro, jwg,
It appears that your cite and frameone’s don’t contradict each other.
The Factcheck.org article says that Congress received a version of the NIE in 2002.
In the article frameone cites, Graham describes that as a limited version that withheld dissenting opinions on key findings.
Always fun to watch dugger do his backflips trying to defend his president’s credibility problem. There was a reason why Bush refused to offer testimony under oath when it came to the 9-11 commission. And a reason why Cheney had to come along.
here is what framone wrote
“ all the congresscritters had the classified memo available.
Care to give us the link to this information? ”
Link given
Again you attempt to parse this down. How many other members saw the mysterious “Graham version”. How many democrats? If Graham felt so strongly, why not demand further classified info be given to congress? You mean to tell me that graham is so ethically challenged that he couldn’t develop the stones to do that?
The mysterious Graham version? What are you talking about?
Second, Graham is on the record as saying that he had access to more intelligence than his colleagues. And he did demand that more information be made available. Did you even read his article? Are you also calling him a liar?
Indeed, Dr. Pedro, if Graham hadn’t asked for it, there would never have been an NIE in the first place:
“At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.
Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein’s capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.”
Idiot.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/18/AR2005111802397.html
……which was then distributed to the aforementioned congresscritters who then voted to give the President the authority to invade Iraq…..
Q.E.D.
Again, Graham having access to a bunch of data that say that some specific Mohamed told some specific Farah about a bomb in the Cazbah …..doesn’t suggest that he had any extra USEFUL intel. And if he DID have extra useful intel, why didn’t he force it’s distribution to congress?
“& & which was then distributed to the aforementioned congresscritters who then voted to give the President the authority to invade Iraq& ”
Not in its entirety according to Graham: I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.
The Factcheck.org post only knows what was in the portion of the NIE released by the Bush administration. There were 93 pages almost entirely redacted. It doesn’t have the full picture.
No, he never states Congress did not have access to the classified NIE. He only complains about the edited unclassified “public” version.
Is Graham “lying” by leading you to believe that Congress did not have access to the version with dissenting opinions?
Graham also reports that Tenet confirmed under questioning that none of the information in the NIE came from sources inside Iraq: “Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States’ removing Hussein, by force if necessary.”
Graham further confirms the point that the unclassified NIE released by the CIA only days before the Iraq vote bore little resemblance to the fully caveated classified version. But we, the public, of course did not know that.
So why didn’t those could have known call the administration on it? Is it because no more than six senators and a handful of House members bothered reading past the 5-page executive summary of the NIE before casting what may have been the most important vote of their congressional careers?
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/20/95014/004
Senator Bob Graham, in his book, recounts a Sept 5, 2002 meeting he and Senators Durbin and Levin had with then CIA director George Tenet and his staff. Though the administration had long before decided on invasion, to the senators’ amazement no National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq had yet been produced. Graham, Durbin and Levin demanded to see one, and three weeks later Tenet produced a 90-page document rife with caveats and qualifications (though these were buried in footnotes) about what we knew–or didn’t know–about WMD in Iraq.
That report was classified, and as such was available only to those on the House and Senate intelligence committees. Graham pressed for it to be declassified, and got what he asked for on Oct 4–less than a week before Congress was to vote on the use of force. However, this declassified version was more like a marketing brochure: 20 pages in length, slickly produced with splashy grahics and maps, and with none of the caveats contained in the original. Graham described it later as “a vivid and terrifying case for war.”
This 20-page, unqualified summary was presented to our senators and representatives as the best information on Iraq’s WMDs, and it was provided to them one week before the vote on the use of force. The intelligence material Congress had was what the administration was willing to give them, namely a promotional piece whose lies of omission outweighed what was included.
http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/realitycheck.html
Well, it seems the WaPo is offering a different version from Graham because Graham makes it quite clear that the NIE version made available to the entire Congress was not the same one that the Intelligence committee saw. Earlier in the WaPo article it even says that the version released to the Congress omitted all the caveats, and then only added some mention of doubt one day before the Senate vote. If that’s true then it’s no wonder that only five Senators read the whole thing when they were being railroaded by the Administration like a used car salesman. But I think Graham is right and the WaPo is wrong. The full Congress only saw the slicked out 20-page heavily redacted NIE, not the 92 page classified version.
Frameone,
Either you are misreading Graham or Graham is lying. Here is another source that thinks the entire Congress had access to the classified version…
From the WaPo (11/12/05):
There are two angles to argue:
1) Did the Bush administration mislead Congress by withholding information? The demonstratable answer is NO based on what was contained in the NIE available to Congress. Therefore, the main point of this thread by OW is fatally flawed.
2) Did the Bush administration mislead the public by withholding information? The demonstratable answer is YES based on the certainty with which they told everyone that there were WMD. Therefore, OW should change his focus from a misled Congress to a misled public (IMHO).
You should also reread what Graham is trying to argue.
…on the other hand, it is Milbank. Not someone who gets stuff like that wrong very often…
Then you sort it out…
Here is what Graham argues:
That seems to imply that all members of Congress had access to the classified NIE.
This states that the unclassified version was for the public, not for Congress. Why wouldn’t he directly say that Congress “needed to know these reservations” as well? Because they had access to the full NIE that “contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information” (Graham’s words about the NIE).
This is Graham’s closing paragraph. His last sentence is the only indication that Congress did not have access to the full NIE. But that is contradicted by all his previous statements in the same article.
Therefore, Graham does NOT make “it quite clear that the NIE version made available to the entire Congress was not the same one that the Intelligence committee saw.”
Graham’s closing is nothing more than a diversion from his entire article. He tries to imply that the poor, underinformed Congress never had a chance to know the truth (after saying just the opposite in the middle of the article) when his real argument is that the public was underinformed.