Posted on 07/20/2004 10:03:47 AM PDT by quidnunc
When President Bush and Prime Minister Blair agreed to official investigations into the intelligence failures in the runup to the war, they did so reluctantly. They had to assume that there just might be something in the files that, once exposed, would damage them. In fact, the two reports — the Senate Intelligence Committee Report in the United States and the Butler Report in Britain — have rescued both leaders.
What tipped observers off to the fact that the Senate report would help Bush was that Democrats on the committee began undermining their own report as soon as it was published. They had signed unanimously onto two conclusions that exculpated the president. First, that all the other intelligence services, including the French and the Russian, had believed Saddam Hussein to be building a WMD arsenal. And, second, that the Bush administration had not put pressure on the intelligence services to conclude that Saddam had WMDs. Democrats, such as Illinois's Dick Durbin, attached notes to the report, effectively retracting the latter conclusion. They advanced such ingenious arguments as the administration's public statements on Saddam constituted pressure on the CIA in themselves. Or that the administration should have pressured the CIA — but been more skeptical of reports of Saddam's arms control violations!
These second thoughts, however, were too late. With the publication of the unanimous report, the Bush administration and the Senate Democrats were in the same boat. They had both voted for the war on intelligence that, even if it proved to be false, was the conventional wisdom of the entire intelligence world.
Following the Senate report, "Bush Lied" would have to be changed to the much less dramatic "Bush Was Sadly Misinformed (Just like Us.)" Even better news awaited Bush in the report of the senior British mandarin, Lord Butler, on the record of the British intelligence before the Iraq war. Butler's report is a typical British establishment product. It seems to exonerate everyone while making some extremely sharp criticisms under the mellifluous civil service prose.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
mark for later read
Thanks for posting.
Democrats lie, the truth dies.
Someone ought to tell the likes of Durbin that it is one thing to hava a legitimate beef with the President, but to knowingly and openly cover up information and conclusions that vindicate him from your trumped up charges is just viciously partisan.
I won't hold my breath waiting for the media (with the exception of the truly mainstream Fox News) to report this kind of Democrat garbage.
The country was not sadly misinformed. We had all the information we needed and no controlling legal authority to act on that information. Just think about that and weep.
I refer you to Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution:
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
That should end the BS.
The New York Times: (212) 556-7652
The New York Post: (212) 930-8000
ABC: 212-456-7777
CBS: 212-975-4321
NBC: 212-664-4444
CNN: 404-237-0234
Fox:1-888-369-4762
NY York Daily News (212) 210-NEWS
Bill O'Reily
E-mail: oreilly@foxnews.com
Sean Hannity
hannity@foxnews.com
Alan Colmes
colmes@foxnews.com
Phylis Schlafly
eagle@eagleforum.org
Oliver North
http://www.northamerican.com/-cybercall/pg-call.htm
Janet Parshall, conservative talk show host
(703) 276-8597
Fax: (703) 516-7212
E-Mail us at: info@jpamerica.com
Brit Hume
Special Report with Brit Hume
Special@foxnews.com
Hugh Hewitt (conservative talk show host/columnist)
http://www.hughhewitt.com/
Michael Medved (conservative talk show host/columnist)
http://www.michaelmedved.com/contact.shtml
I got these addresses from Media Research Center,
http://www.mediaresearch.org/MediaAddresses/mediaaddresses.asp#If%20the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
e-mail: conedit@ajc.com
Houston Chronicle
e-mail: viewpoints@chron.com
Miami Herald
e-mail: HeraldEd@herald.com
The New York Times
letters@nytimes.com
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
e-mail: letters@post-gazette.com
USA Today
e-mail: editor@usatoday.com
The Wall Street Journal
e-mail: letter.editor@edit.wsj.com
The Washington Post
e-mail: Letterstoed@washpost.com
The Washington Times
e-mail: wtnews@wt.infi.net
mellifluous? The Sun-Times certainly knows better than to let their editorialists write beyond 6th grade reading level.
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