Posted on 06/05/2008 9:35:49 AM PDT by tobyhill
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration misused intelligence to build a case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report issued Thursday.
The White House exploited its ability to declassify intelligence selectively to bolster its case for war, the committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, said in the report.
Senior officials disclosed and discussed sensitive intelligence reports that supported the administration's policy objectives and kept out of public discourse information that did not, he said.
The report also found that the administration misled the American people about contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
"Policymakers' statements did not accurately convey the intelligence assessments" about contacts between the then-Iraqi leader and Osama bin Laden's group, "and left the impression that the contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation or support of al Qaeda," the report said.
"Statements and implications by the president and secretary of state suggesting that Iraq and al Qaeda had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al Qaeda with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence," according to the committee's exhaustive report on prewar intelligence.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
10-5 bipartisan vote-——that means 2 bozo RINOS voted with this ridiculous travesty.
Do you know who they are?
Oh, OK, so the Iraqis were training flight attendants at Salman Pak.
And yet the Senate Intelligence Committee had access to the full range of it and....voted for everything. Including authorizing the President to go to war.
The partnership is quite clear. Of course, Rockefeller can’t admit to anything because he went over and told Saddam and Syria that the attack was coming, giving them plenty of time to hide the WMDs.
Well, there are 3 suspect RINOs on the list:
John Warner, Virginia
Chuck Hagel, Nebraska
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
Exactly but their excuse will be that they “trusted” what the President said so they didn’t find a need to read the intelligence.
If President Bush was able to sell the war to congress based on such “flimsy” evidence as the congress claims then it’s not the President that’s the idiot.
And looking at it, it could have been all 3. Bill Nelson is on this one—one of the few sane Democrats.
As they gain power, their attempts at historical revisionism will continue. The fantasy that the Bush administration was able to pull the rug over everyone’s eyes is just that, pure fantasy. They made a case, a worst case scenerio, perhaps, but a good case for going into Iraq. No one really challenged it, the Democrats all jumped on board. This is simply a historical CYA by the Democrats over what is currently viewed as a failure (Iraq). There is that old saying, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan”.
Uh huh. So how many who are on the Senate Intelligence Committee now were on then? The Committee had access to the same intelligence the President saw. Why did the Dems on the Committee not say something at the time?
Oh, that's right - because Bush DID NOT misuse the intelligence.
Now that we are so definitely winning there the lib media has to do soemthing to change the focus. I can’t see a single new point being made here. It is simply a rehash of the same thing they have been saying since they showed again their cowardice by disavowing their vote to go to war when the winds changed.
Does anybody have a copy of the infamous Rockefeller letter outlining the Democrats’ plans to defeat Bush through Iraq?
Bush's ability to control public information flow through the mechanism of declassification has very little to do with Congress, whose members enjoy an access to intelligence information quite a bit deeper than the public and certain members of which (the intelligence oversight committee, for one) see essentially everything the President does. In short, this is a CYA that plays well in the media but not very well to anyone who actually remembers what happened or knows how this sort of thing actually works.
I still don't understand why he has not faced a firing squad for that.
There were three: Bill Nelson (RINO-FL), Chuck Hagel (ASSHAT-NE), Olympia Snowe (RINO-People's Republic of Maine).
Senate Intelligence Committee = Democrat Unintelligent Pigsty.
They’re all just a bunch of meatheaded lying pigs, with forgone “conclusions” that they picked through the facts to “fit”.
Not one of them deserves better than to have their lying faces spat in.
My question for the libs: doesn’t this start to get old even with you? Administration “ginned up”, “left the impression”, “suggested”, etc, etc, without a single example of an actual falsehood or deception. Doesn’t it get old?
Bill Nelson (D-FL) is not a RINO, he’s a full-fledged Demagogue (I know that many times the difference can be hard to detect).
I’m sure that Hagel and Snowe feel proud of joining with the moonbats in this travesty — the Demagogues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have been acting in this depraved manner for years.
Anyone think it’s mere coincidence that this contemptible report comes out within a week of the McClellan book? I don’t — I sense the coordinating hands of Soros-type scumbags in and out of Congress. Remember that staff memo for Jay Rockefeller back in 2003 that was accidentally revealed — it outlined a vicious political campaign of using this committee’s resources to build the attack on Pres. Bush in the run-up to the 2004 elections.
For some reason, I thought Nelson was a Republican. Of course, it is getting hard to tell the difference these days. Either way, the report is a politically-motivated hit on the Bush Administration rather than an honest effort to get at the truth. There are a couple of minority reports attached to the main document which I skimmed over briefly. The main thrust seems to be that the conclusions reached by the majority were unwarranted based upon the evidence, and that they just “cherry-picked” facts to fit their thesis.... which is kinda sorta what they’ve accused Bush of doing. And just in case it’s not clear, Chuck Hagel is a back-stabbing putrid turd who cannot be flushed from Congress soon enough. Other than that, he’s a swell guy.
That is odd, because I was alive before the war, and I don't remember anybody telling me that Saddam had anything to do with Al Qaeda. I do remember some Democrats telling me that he had WMD.
In fact, I remember Charlie Rangel, on C-SPAN telling the audience that we should not invade Iraq because if we did, Saddam would use chemical weapons on us, and would be justified in doing so since we would be invading HIS country.
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