Conason: It's all the CIA's fault

[kskiska]

What a surprise -- Bush's Iraq commission absolves his administration of rushing to war on false pretenses that Saddam Hussein had WMD.

For anyone who was astonished when George W. Bush decorated George Tenet with the Medal of Freedom, an explanation has arrived at last. With yesterday's release of the final report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, the former CIA director and his loyal subordinates have been permanently designated official scapegoats for the falsifications that led to war in Iraq two years ago.

Tenet and his colleagues have remained publicly silent about the political atmosphere within the Bush administration, which encouraged them to distort and exaggerate evidence of an imminent threat. Their silence implicitly endorses the commission's assertion that there was "no political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessment's of Iraq's weapons programs" –- despite repeated and credible press reports about the intense pressures emanating from the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Iraq intelligence commission has done exactly what was expected of it: exonerate the politicians while blaming the intelligence community.

By now, of course, Americans who obtain their information from sources other than Fox News know that all the warnings about Saddam Hussein's fearsome weapons were "dead wrong," as the commission noted in transmitting its report to the president. Indeed, the world has known for many months that all of the confident assertions from the White House about mushroom clouds, aluminum tubes, uranium shipments, mobile biowarfare laboratories, flying drones and stockpiles of poison gas were mythological.

To blame the intelligence community for those blatant falsehoods is to absolve the rest of the Bush administration of any responsibility for the disasters that followed. Appointed a year ago by Bush, the intelligence panel's conclusions were hardly unexpected. Unlike the 9/11 Commission, this panel was a creature of the president rather than Congress. It was placed under the control of Judge Laurence H. Silberman, a reliable, aggressive and determined Bush advocate.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/04/02/absolve/index.html

[Jack Rabbit]

1. Tenet may be the first person in history to receive a high honor

by having it rammed up his ass with a shaft.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Ouch..What an image.....but I had to laugh anyway.

[roguevalley]

3. I would like to see the other half of the report that tells how this

stuff was twisted and turned.

[dbeach]

4. Why was dickie cheney at Lanley for many mornings in "02???

Hw was most likely not reading from the good book.

Whatever happened to his energy task force??