According to a White House spokesperson,
”
the President is not a fact-checker.
”
That may be the most truthful statement to emanate from the
Administration in a year.
According to a White House spokesperson, “the President is not a fact-checker.” That may be the most truthful statement to emanate from the Administration in a year.
In an attempt to defuse criticism of the way Dubya translated the intelligence information he was given into the case for war he made to the world, the Administration has declassified a portion of the National Intelligence Estimate, a periodic compendium of data from numerous intelligence agencies intended to give the President and his advisors a comprehensive picture of what’s going on in the world at any given time. Why anybody in Bushville thought the release would defuse anything is not immediately apparent.
Now, mind you, this document is prepared specifically for the President, presumably on the assumption that he will read it, being as how he’s responsible for foreign policy and wars and stuff like that, and he should have the best information our intelligence-gatherers can provide. And Dubya’s been taking a fair amount of heat lately for his innocent little slip of the tongue involving a threat of “nucular” weapons that turned out to have been invented and marketed by a low-level African embassy staffer to try to make a little money on the side. Gee, says Dubya, it was only a sentence in a big long speech – anybody can make one mistake.
Uh-huh. But he also said on Oct. 7, during the period when nearly every day the White House released new assurances of Saddam’s proven threat to the world, that “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.” However, the NIE portion he must have lifted that from actually says that in it’s judgment Iraq would provide weapons to terrorists “only if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable.”
For example, if Bush started a war. The NIE further stated that the intelligence services which contributed to the report were much more worried that Saddam might take the extreme step of assisting Al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it “would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.”
On May 1, in his mother-of-all-photo-opps speech aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, Dubya proclaimed with the confidence of a man who knew what he was talking about, “We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda. No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime.”
Well, let’s see, everyone now agrees that Saddam is still alive and at large; we haven’t found any of the stockpiles of weapons the administration keeps claiming are there somewhere; if they’re there, Saddam knows where to find them and who to give them to; and he is now in that desperate situation the NIE warned about way back last Fall.
Now a senior administration official, in response to being questioned whether Saddam would use any weapons he might control against us today, admits “We would not put that past him to do whatever makes our lives miserable.” He also says that the NIE opinion that a desperate, on-the-run Saddam could turn to Al Qaeda remains valid.
One mistake? One piece of bad intelligence? One sentence in a big long speech? I don’t think so. But one thing is beyond dispute: The President is not a fact-checker. Or user.
