Side note, as a language-lover it's distressing to me to see the way "lying" has been re-defined since 2003. There is such a thing as a sincere, well-intentioned statement that you *later* find out is untrue. That is not the same thing as lying, which means you're knowingly speaking an untruth with the intent to deceive.
Agreed. And it's the latter that I'm claiming. Intelligence reports said there were no WMDs. Except the ones that cherry-picked facts, relied on untrustworthy sources, took stuff out of context... He pressured people into saying it was a "slam dunk" even when they knew better. There was no reason to go to Iraq except that Bush wanted to. He implied a connection to 9/11 that wasn't there and claimed he had surefire evidence of WMDs. And if he didn't know better (and I think he did), it's because he chose not to hear it from people who did. That's lying.
Except that was false. President Bush's opponents wanted to cover their votes on approval of the use of force after public opinion began to turn, claiming that President Bush had access to information they didn't. A bipartisan commission looked at those Presidential Daily Briefs and concluded that the information within them was not significantly different than that provided to the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress. They were merely organized differently.
The lie was on the part of the Democratic Congressmen who had to justify the votes to their anti-war constituents by claiming the president had lied to them. That simply didn't pan out. Even Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Democratic Representative Jane Harman, the senior minority members of their respective Intelligence committees disputed that the president had lied.
Even if you don't believe President Bush, name one intelligence service in the entire world that thought Iraq had no WMD's. There weren't any. Even the finest intelligence service in the world, Israel's Mossad, believed it as did all of America's principal allies: France, Germany, Russia, and Great Britain. You can fool a few Congressmen, but how do you fool the intelligence services all over the world? George Tenant wasn't that good.
Oh, and on hinting that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11, every time they were asked by the press, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney would deny it. This was just another story concocted by the anti-war crowd in their attempts to rewrite history. It was basically a hatchet job to try to get the president's poll numbers down as far as they could get them. Pure politics in action.
-- Roger
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." -- Benjamin Franklin
