Friday, July 18, 2003

Fool me once ...

John J. Lumpkin of the AP writes:

Mounting a campaign to counter criticism that it used flawed intelligence to justify war with Iraq, the White House made public excerpts of the intelligence community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. That report helped shaped now-challenged comments by President Bush in his State of the Union address that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa.


But we already know that the National Intelligence Estimates, once the "gold standard," have been so politicized by Cheney (copy) as to be worthless.

So when are we going to stop hearing this "flawed intelligence" thing? The issue is that the administration was going to have its war, no matter what. ("Sentence first, verdict afterwards" is the motto of this down-the-rabbit-hole administration.)

Lumpkin goes on to write:

On Thursday, U.S. officials offered new information which suggested a disconnect between the CIA and the State Department over the handling of what turned out to be a crucial but faulty piece of intelligence - the forged documents - used to make the Bush administration's case for war.

Officials acknowledged that had U.S. intelligence analyzed the documents sooner, they could have discovered the forgeries before the information was used as fodder for Bush administration statements vilifying Iraq.

Pretty vivid language for the slow-moving, mainstream AP, eh?

UPDATE: Derrick Z. Jackson of the Glob editorializes on the GOP's double standard on presidential lies (thanks to alert reader Shaw Kenawe.)