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Jewish World Review Nov. 7, 2005 / 5 Mar-Cheshvan, 5766 About that Iraq ‘deception’ By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The president went on television to announce: "Earlier today, I ordered
America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq.
Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors."
"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively
to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the
next five years," the vice chairman of the Intelligence committee told the
senate.
The president was Bill Clinton (Dec. 16th, 1998). The senator was Jay
Rockefeller (Oct. 10th, 2002).
These statements should be kept in mind when assessing the hissy fit Senate
Democratic Leader Harry Reid threw last Tuesday when he called the senate into
secret session to discuss whether Bush administration officials had
exaggerated prewar intelligence about Iraq.
Mr. Reid claimed his action was prompted by the indictment of I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for allegedly
lying to a federal grand jury about from whom he learned that Valerie Plame,
the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA.
"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about,
how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order
to sell the war in Iraq," Sen. Reid said.
But Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had made it clear that that was
not what the Libby indictment was about. "This indictment is not about the
war," he said. "This indictment will not seek to prove the war was
justified or unjustified."
The Iraq Survey Group found no large stockpiles of chemical or biological
weapons in Iraq. This could be because no such weapons actually existed.
Or it could be because they were moved to another country between the time
Congress authorized the use of force against Iraq and when the war actually
began.
"We've had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into
Syria before the war," a senior administration official told reporter
Kenneth Timmerman.
Or it could be the Iraq Survey Group had an unusually restrictive definition
of what constitutes a WMD stockpile.
The 4th Infantry Division discovered in an ammo dump near the town of Baiji
55 gallon drums of chemicals which, when mixed together, form nerve gas.
They were stored next to surface to surface missiles which had been
configured to carry a liquid payload.
If prewar intelligence was faulty, the fault lies with the CIA which
supplied the erroneous information, not with the political leaders,
Democratic and Republican, who relied upon it.
But Democrats who had access to the same intelligence President Bush had,
and who because of it voted to authorize war with Iraq, are charging now
that Bush deliberately deceived the nation into war.
The slender reed on which this weighty charge is hung is the credibility of
Mr. Wilson, who the CIA had sent to Niger in 2002 to determine if Saddam had
tried to buy uranium there.
The Senate Intelligence committee snapped that reed when it issued its
report on prewar intelligence in July of last year. The committee found
unanimously that Wilson lied when he said Mr. Cheney had sent him on the
mission; lied when he denied his wife had recommended him for it, and lied
when he said he'd found no evidence Saddam had tried to buy uranium from
Niger.
Journalists who interview Mr. Wilson — who's been enjoying a second 15
minutes of fame in the wake of the indictment of Mr. Libby — rarely bring
this up. Most think it best to ignore facts that get in the way of the
story they want to tell.
The press' amnesia has convinced Democrats they can regain power by lying
about prewar intelligence. But facts are stubborn things.
"The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials
attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their
judgments," said the Senate Intelligence committee.
"We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical
tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate
pre-war intelligence assessments," said the Robb-Silberman report on WMD
intelligence, issued in March.
Thanks to really lousy reporting, most Americans are unaware of how much
evidence there is of Saddam's WMD programs and his ties to international
terror groups. This is a debate Republicans should welcome.
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© 2005, Jack Kelly |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
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