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Los Angeles Times: Bush Never Lied to Us About Iraq (6/16/08) by James Kirchick
In another corporate media attempt to claim the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence exonerated George W. Bush, New Republic editor Kirchick's trick is to take just one set of charges to show that the report didn't demonstrate any Bush lying. Kirchick writes of its authors'charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al-Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq/Al-Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information."
Well, no, that's not actually what the report found. Read the report for yourself:
Conclusion 12: Statements and implications by the president and secretary of state suggesting that Iraq and Al-Qaeda had a partnership, or that Iraq provided Al-Qaeda with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
The report does state that claims of contacts between Iraq and Al-Qaeda were substantiated by intelligence--which seems to be the source for Kirchick's assertion--but that
policymakers' statements did not accurately convey the intelligence assessments of the nature of these contacts, and left the impression that the contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation of support of Al-Qaeda.
In other words, the administration selectively cited information in order to give a misleading impression--exactly as Kirchick does in defending the administration.
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