A new Senate report says that the White House wasn’t exactly candid when it came to the true extent of the threat that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed in 2002-03:
President Bush and his top aides repeatedly exaggerated what they knew about the threat from Iraqi nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as the administration pressed its case for war against Iraq, the Senate intelligence committee said today in a long-awaited report.
While most of the administration’s pre-war claims about Iraq reflected now-discredited U.S. intelligence reports, the White House crossed a line by conveying certainty about Saddam Hussein’s ability to threaten the United States with weapons of mass destruction, according to the report approved by the committee’s Democratic leaders and a handful of Republicans.
“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even non-existent,” Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee chairman, said at a news conference. “As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
History, at least in the short term, is not being kind to the Bush Administration.
June 5th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Doug,
If this Senate report is true (I’m generally skeptical of any Congressional investigation) and Bush did deliberately lie to the American people about how much of a threat Iraq was, would this be impeachable because at the very least because at best this is malfeasance in office and at very worst, guilty of waging an unprovoked war of aggression which is a war crime?
(Note: I’m not calling for the impeachment or war crimes charges against President Bush based on the Senate report alone, there’s not enough evidence to justify either one; this is an academic exercise.)