Ignoring intelligence

/ 28 May 2008

I’ve long argued that there was nothing seriously wrong with our national intelligence services leading up to the war with Iraq. My view is that the Bush administration got the intelligence and decided to warp and change it in the White House. Well, confirmation this week from an unexpected source, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan:

The president’s real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because “Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions purpose of transforming the Middle East,” McClellan wrote.

“Rather than open this Pandora’s Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth,” he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used “innuendo and implication” and “intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.”

Bush lied about his reasons for invading Iraq (and continues to lie to this day, repeatedly tying the invasion to the unrelated attacks on 9/11) and lied about the state of our intelligence agencies (throwing them into turmoil and demoralizing them to the degree that now we do have a serious problem with our national intelligence).

Why is this man still in office? What kind of cowards sit in congress to let such things pass without action?

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