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The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed "Bush lied. People died." This accusation itself is a lie. It's time to put it to rest.
The fact is that President Bush (and I as press secretary) faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded.
The CIA, along with the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD. We all turned out to be wrong. That is very different from lying.
After the war, a bipartisan group was created to determine what went wrong, particularly why the intelligence community's conclusions about Iraq were so different from what was found on the ground after the war.
The group of experts was named the Robb-Silberman commission. It's report was issued in March 2005. It can be found in full here: govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/rep…
The group of experts was named the Robb-Silberman commission. Its report was issued in March 2005. It can be found in full here: govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/rep…
Its key finding was that that a "major intelligence failure" took place. It also stated that no intelligence service was pressured by the Bush Administration to conclude that Saddam had WMDs.
Here are the key quotes from their report: "Overall Commission Finding: The Intelligence Community's performance in assessing Iraq's pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure.
Nuclear Weapons Summary Finding: The Intelligence Community seriously misjudged the status of Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program in the 2002 NIE and other pre-Iraq war intelligence products.
This misjudgment stemmed chiefly from the Community's failure to analyze correctly Iraq's reasons for attempting to procure high-strength aluminum tubes.
Biological Warfare Summary Finding: The Intelligence Community seriously misjudged the status of Iraq's biological weapons program in the 2002 NIE and other pre-war intelligence products.
The primary reason for this misjudgment was the Intelligence Community's heavy reliance on a human source--codenamed "Curveball"--whose information later proved to be unreliable.
Chemical Warfare Summary Finding: The Intelligence Community erred in its 2002 NIE assessment of Iraq's alleged chemical warfare program.
The Community's substantial overestimation of Iraq's chemical warfare program was due chiefly to flaws in analysis and the paucity of quality information collected.
In the case of Iraq, collectors of intelligence absorbed the prevailing analytic consensus and tended to reject or ignore contrary information. The result was "tunnel vision" focusing on the Intelligence Community's existing assumptions.
The Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion, but the pervasive conventional wisdom that Saddam retained WMD affected the analytic process.
The CIA took too long to admit error in Iraq, and its Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center actively discouraged analysts from investigating errors.
Finally, we closely examined the possibility that intelligence analysts were pressured by policymakers to change their judgments about Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs.
The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
That is what the investigators reported, after been given full access to people throughout the intelligence community.
Which leads me to conclude that there was a liar and his name was Saddam Hussein. He created an elaborate system of lies to fool western intelligence services and he succeeded. He wanted us to believe he had WMDs.
The allegaton that "Bush lied. People died" is a liberal myth created to politically target President Bush. I understand the anger that was felt after no WMDs were found.
But that doesn't justify calling the President a liar. I can only hope that serious historians and other experts do their homework and resist falling for this myth.
