You'd think the latest public-relations campaign emanating from the White House addressing critics of the Iraq war would be grounded in fact. A recent poll found 57 percent of Americans think Bush deliberately misled the nation into the Iraq war, and only 33 percent categorized him as honest. In response to this perception, Republican spinsters should have been truthful in defense of pre-war intelligence.
But the truth isn't on their side, so it plays a minimal role in their argument.
In defending his administration's zeal in waging preemptive war on Iraq, Bush's Veterans Day speech declared, "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began." He was referring to over 100 Congressional Democrats who voted to use force in order to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Later, he mentioned bi-partisan commissions that determined his administration didn't misrepresent intelligence in the run up to the war, to reinforce his point.
But Bush is the one attempting to "re-write" history. Almost no one in Congress knew what Bush knew. They saw intelligence filtered by the administration and were dependent on the White House for providing crucial information. They knew what Bush wanted them to know. Furthermore, the commissions Bush alluded to weren't even charged with exploring the administrations' handling of the intelligence evidence. There's been no determination regarding the administration's use - or misuse - of pre-war intelligence because no one has looked into it yet.
In fact, Democrats shut down the Senate two weeks ago in protest of the delayed investigation promised on this topic, which Republicans have repeatedly stalled. The Silberman committee, which Bush created through an executive order to investigate pre-war intelligence failures, was not "directed" to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers. In other words, they weren't allowed to investigate the administration's role in the use of faulty intelligence.
Bush's rebuke to his critics didn't mention the Office of Special Plans (OSP) that was set up in the depths of the Pentagon to cherry-pick intelligence in the push for war. According to former officials, Donald Rumsfeld created a shadow intelligence agency of Pentagon analysts comprised of ideological zealots to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Their task: find any evidence that justified an invasion of Iraq.
The OSP second-guessed CIA dissenting information pertaining to Iraq's WMD and operated under the patronage of hard-line right-wing conservatives in the upper echelons of the administration, including Dick Cheney. Beyond Congressional oversight, the OSP proved the administration's ace-in-the-hole in the intelligence debate leading up to the war, and its view prevailed over that of the State Department and the CIA.
White House half-truths presented as fact are standard operating procedure for the Rove-led Bush administration. But as U.S. troops in Iraq face rising death tolls and the country's slide into civil war seems assured, the stakes are too high for Bush's minions' serial dishonesty to not be called out. Otherwise, they'll continue with this tact until forced to stop. We need to stop them now.
