Old subject....Saddam and WMD.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by scaeagles

To say he actually had actual nukes?

Hmm, see, I don't see him as saying that. This may be a simply matter of poor wording. He said there was evidence he had nukes.

Go back to what he said earlier..."I believe the intelligence community. The intelligence community then provided some distorted intelligence on a lot of things. But, that's not what the issue is that I raise this weekend."

I think in the final quote, he was just coming back to that. He was drawing a distinction between two different screwups. One was the faulty evidence provided to the administration/congress. The other was the adinisrtation's willful spinning of that and other intelligence to their own end. I think his final quote would be more clearly worded as, "I'm not saying we didn't see evidence that Sadaam had nukes/nuclear capabilities, even if it was faulty. That's how I got suckered into agreeing with the whole war thing. But on top of that, the administration used intelligence in questionable and misleading ways." At least that's how I read it.

[Gemini Cricket]

It is my belief that the people who followed what the administration said can't be solely blamed for the problems in Iraq. There was a trust there that was violated by our president. People voted to go to war because of what his administration said was going on in Iraq. Yes, there should have been questions asked and yes they rushed into it too quickly. But to blame the people who rallied behind the president for going to war is wrong. Bush wanted the support, he got it and now he's blaming his supporters.

The error lies with the Bush administration.

I agree with today's Post:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

Source The emphasis in the quote is mine.