Bush Owns the OSP and the Broken Iraqi Pottery

by Ahmed Amr
After two long years of dodging and weaving, the Bush administration is finally being held to account for fixing, twisting, exaggerating and cherry picking pre-war WMD intelligence. So far, the White House has responded to these charges with pleas of innocence and assertions that hostilities were initiated only as a last resort and based on the best information available at the time. Since the Libby indictment, the administration and its media cronies have launched an aggressive campaign to convince an increasingly skeptical public that Bush honestly believed that Saddam possessed WMD stockpiles and was behind the 9/11 atrocities.

One positive aspect of this new White House strategy is that Dick Cheney is no longer free to insinuate that Iraq had lethal arsenals of unconventional weapons. Until very recently, Cheney continued to propagate the ridiculous notion that Saddam was involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 terrorist assaults. This is no small retreat for a man who claimed that “It's been pretty well confirmed that did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.” This, after all, is the very same Cheney who told us on Aug. 26, 2002 that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

We should all be thankful for small favors but there remains the single most important question: did the administration get the intelligence wrong or did they deliberately and systematically cook the books?

When George Bush claims both ignorance and naiveté – who amongst us can provide convincing evidence to prove a contrarian thesis? To make a case that Bush and Cheney systematically lied us into a war of choice, one has to provide iron clad proof that the pre-war intelligence was fabricated, manipulated and distorted and that both men were fully aware of the cherry picking operation going on in their front yard.

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