(NOTE: This entry guest blogged by Johnhp)
"I think the intelligent I get is darn good intelligence and the speeches
I have given are backed by good intelligence"
You can see the quote in this story from faux news.
Although the story has Bush saying intelligence the video makes it clear he said intelligent. i know that is a picky point but i think the press has been covering the man's idiocy too often. That, however, is a minor point. The larger point is that this is one occasion that Bush was being truthful; i.e., that he had good intelligence on WMD in Iraq. The evidence, however, points to the opposite conclusion than the one drawn by the Administration. This is especially interesting because of the neandercons recent defense of Bush by claiming that the UN thought the same thing.
Let's look at what was known:
In fact, Bush was so much in denial about the UN that he actually denied that iraq had let UN inspectors return to Iraq:
"The larger point is did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."
The source is this extremely right wing website. Now i think they can't be trusted to tell the truth but the Neandercons do.
In sum, they knew the intelligence was, to quote LBJ, "thin as piss on a rock" but never passed along that tidbit. Hell they even allowed the military to stumble upon and look through crates of uranium we actually knew about.
Investigators Tuesday discovered that Al-Tuwaitha hides another city. This underground nexus of labs, warehouses, and bomb-proof offices was hidden from the public and, perhaps, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors who combed the site just two months ago, until the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Engineers discovered it three days ago.
Yes the right wing's right wing went absolutely nuts over this tidbit. It turned out, however, that the site was known to inspectors and the uranium was under UN seal. More importantly our government knew about it before the invasion.
Again, faux news.
They KNEW the intel was partial. The fault is not with the intel; it is with the politicians who chose to ignore the partial nature of the claims and pass them on as if the were certain and, to quote one official, "exact." The fact is, as with the al Tuwaitha facility, they couldn't care less.