-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Progress Report: Bush's Reverse Slam Dunk
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 08:05:53 -0800
From: American Progress Action Fund <progress@americanprogressaction.org>
Reply-To: progress@americanprogressaction.org
To: xxxxx
by Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney
Amanda Terkel, Payson Schwin and Christy Harvey
November 14, 2005
IRAQ
Bush's Reverse Slam Dunk
On Friday, President Bush skipped the traditional Veterans Day wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in order to deliver a promised "hit back" against those calling for a strategy for success in Iraq. One senior administration official described the speech as the "most direct refutation" of Iraq critics "you've seen probably since the election," and said it marked the first stage of a coordinated "offensive" that "will play out over several weeks." (The offensive continued this weekend with remarks by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Ken Mehlman, former White House deputy to Karl Rove.) Before the war, the Bush administration presented its pre-war intelligence as a "slam dunk"; now it wants to engage in revisionist history. President Bush's latest case (which is notably similar to past efforts) is based upon three fundamentally flawed arguments: 1) that Congress had access to the same intelligence as the White House prior to the war; 2) that the bipartisan Senate investigation found that the Bush administration did not misrepresent prewar intelligence; and 3) that intelligence agencies around the world agreed with the Bush administration's assessment of the Iraqi threat. Bush is entitled to his own opinion as to how the administration got it so wrong on Iraq; however, he is not entitled to his own facts.
FACT: CONGRESS DID NOT HAVE THE "SAME INTELLIGENCE" AS THE WHITE HOUSE: In his speech, President Bush claimed that members of Congress who voted for the 2002 Iraq war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" as his administration. This is false. As the Washington Post pointed out Saturday, "Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material." For instance, in the lead up to war, the Bush administration argued that Iraq had made several attempts to "buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." The White House sent 15 intelligence assessments to Congress supporting this notion, but according to the New York Times, "not one of them" informed readers that experts within the Energy Department believed the tubes could not be used to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. Even Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) -- who has led efforts to delay and downplay the need for investigating prewar intelligence -- confirmed this broader point yesterday. Asked whether the differences between the intelligence available to the White House and to Congress was a "legitimate concern," Roberts acknowledged that it "may be a concern to some extent."
FACT: SENATE INTEL REPORT SHOWED MANIPULATION OF THE EVIDENCE: Bush claimed that "a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs." That argument is wrong on at least two counts. First, "the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions." The so-called Phase II of the pre-war intel investigation is not expected to be completed this year. Second, the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase I report found, according to the Los Angeles Times (7/10/04), that the unclassified public version of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was manipulated. "
arefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact." For example, the classified version of the NIE said, "Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of certain poisons. The phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted from the unclassified version. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."
FACT: THE WORLD WAS NOT IN AGREEMENT WITH BUSH: One frequent talking point of Bush's defenders is that the pre-war intelligence failure was a global failure. "Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French...all reached the same conclusion," Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on CBS's "Face the Nation." Similarly, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) claimed, "This was a worldwide intelligence failure," citing the French and Russians, among others. In fact, many of our friends and allies believed that, based on the intelligence they had, the threat of Iraq did not rise to the level of justifying immediate force. French President Jacques Chirac said, "e just feel that there is another option, another way, a less dramatic way than war." German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said he did not believe the threat rose to the level requiring the "'ultima ratio,' the very last resort." And Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said, "It is our deep conviction that the possibilities for disarming Iraq through political means do exist."
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