By Johnhp on 8/5/2004, 11:58am PT  

(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:

Bush's 16 words, it is now claimed were justified by the Bulter report. What did the report actually say about the yellowcake claim and WMD claims?

"seriously flawed" "open to doubt" "unreliable or questionable"

"Language in the dossier may have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgments than was the case. Our view, having reviewed all of the material, is that the judgments in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available.

"The prime minister's description, in his statement to the House of Commons on the day of publication of the dossier, of the picture painted by the intelligence services in the dossier as 'extensive, detailed and authoritative' may have reinforced this impression."

Each report, said Butler, mentioned these flaws but Blair and Bush failed to pass them on. This misled the actual state of intelligence allowing the public to assume it was more accurate than it was.

They also relied on UN evidence from 1998. Then chose to ignore evidence from UN folks on the ground in 2003 even though the UN inspectors visited every site supplied by American and british intelligence.

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.

"But an expert familiar with U.N. nuclear inspections told The Associated Press that it was implausible to believe that U.S. forces had uncovered anything new at the site. Instead, the official said, the Marines apparently broke U.N. seals designed to ensure the materials aren't diverted for weapons use --- or end up in the wrong hands."

"What happened apparently was that they broke IAEA seals, which is very unfortunate because those seals are integral to ensuring that nuclear material doesn't get diverted," the expert said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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.

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