Bush goes Orwellian

[RPankn]

Bush Forcefully Attacks Iraq Critics

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

TOBYHANNA, Pa. - President Bush forcefully attacked critics of the war in Iraq on Friday, accusing them of trying to rewrite history and saying they are undercutting American forces on the front lines.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," the president said in his combative Veterans Day speech.

Defending the march to war, Bush said that foreign intelligence services and Democrats and Republicans alike were convinced at the time that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and mislead the American people about why we went to war," Bush said.

He said those critics have made those allegations although they know that a Senate investigation "found no evidence" of political pressure to change the intelligence community's assessments related to Saddam's weapons program.

He said they also know that the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing Saddam's development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. [I thought there was only 2 or 3 UNSC resolutions on this. But if he wants to talk dozens of resolutions, he should be speaking with Sharon.]

"More than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," Bush said.

The president's remarks at the Tobyhanna Army Depot were part of the administration's effort to bolster waning U.S. public support for the war in which at least 2,059 U.S. troops have died. Bush offered a forceful defense of the war in Iraq, saying it is the central front in the war on terror and that extremists are trying to establish a radical Muslim empire extending from Spain to Indonesia. [I was too young to really be paying attention back then, but this sounds like the anti-Communist propaganda in the 70s and 80s.]

"We will never back down. We will never give in. We will never accept anything less than complete victory," he said Friday.

Bush said the United States and its allies are determined to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of extremists and prevent them from gaining control of any country.

Bush singled out Syria for particular criticism, saying its government had taken "two disturbing steps" in recent days. He cited the arrest of Syria pro-democracy activist Kamal Labwani and a "strident speech" by President Bashar Assad. In that speech, Assad said his government would cooperate with a U.N. investigation that implicated Syrian officials in the killing of a Lebanese leader, but warned he would no longer "play their game" if Syria "is going to be harmed."

Bush said Syria "must stop exporting violence and start importing democracy." [Projection.]


news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051111/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_8

[RPankn]

Bush Aide Fires Back at Critics On Justification for War in Iraq

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 11, 2005; Page A01

The White House went on the offensive in the debate over the Iraq war yesterday, insisting that U.S. intelligence had compiled a "very strong case" that Saddam Hussein harbored banned weapons and accusing congressional critics of hypocrisy because many of them voted for force three years ago.

Bristling from fresh assaults on its justification for war, the White House dispatched national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to the briefing room to issue a rebuttal to "the notion that somehow the administration manipulated prewar intelligence about Iraq." The administration's judgment on the threat posed by Iraq, he said, "represented the collective view of the intelligence community" and was "shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

"Some of the critics today," Hadley added, "believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people. For those critics to ignore their own past statements exposes the hollowness of their current attacks."

The unusually combative statement by the normally mild-mannered Hadley underscored how the issue has inflamed political dialogue in Washington in the days since a senior White House official was indicted in the CIA leak case. Democratic leaders have seized on the indictment to refocus attention on the broader question of how President Bush led the nation to war.

For the Bush team, the Iraq war has evolved into the most damaging political liability at a time of multiple setbacks, and the president's advisers do not want Democrats writing the history of how the war began. The White House decided to respond aggressively in hopes of convincing the American people that Bush relied in good faith on intelligence that proved wrong in an effort to protect them -- rather than skewing the data to rationalize a war he was already determined to wage, as many Democrats contend.

Successive investigations have documented the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to correctly judge Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs before the war, including a commission appointed by Bush that concluded that the intelligence was "dead wrong." The government relied on lying sources, fragmentary information and unwarranted analysis, the commission found, resulting in one of the "most damaging intelligence failures in American history."

Democrats immediately took issue with Hadley's account. Within minutes of his briefing, the Senate Democratic caucus issued a statement saying the responsibility did not fall on lawmakers who voted to authorize use of force: "Some critics of how the administration misused intelligence did believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. What these critics object to is the hyping of the intelligence by the Bush administration."

In a separate statement earlier in the day, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) recounted the various urgent warnings about supposed Iraqi weapons delivered by Bush and his advisers in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion -- warnings that all proved overstated if not flatly wrong.

"In his march to war, President Bush exaggerated the threat to the American people," Kennedy said. "It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear weapons to al Qaeda justified immediate war."

Hadley yesterday offered no direct critique of the prewar intelligence and instead said that at the time it was compelling evidence that also convinced the Clinton administration and other governments.

"The intelligence was clear in terms of the weapons of mass destruction," Hadley said, citing a National Intelligence Estimate provided to Bush. "The case that was brought to him, in terms of the NIE, and parts of which have been made public, was a very strong case."

Hadley noted that the presidential commission, led by retired judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), said it found no evidence that administration officials manipulated intelligence. But the panel was not allowed to examine how policymakers used the information.

By forcing a rare closed-door session last week, Senate Democrats successfully pressured the chamber's Republican leadership to promise to speed up an inquiry into the Bush administration's handling of prewar intelligence. But a House Republican leader declined any additional inquiry by his body's intelligence committee.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the House intelligence chairman, instead said his panel would expand an inquiry into the leaking of classified information to include three new matters -- the revelation of secret CIA prisons abroad, the disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation and the inadvertent release last week of the nation's intelligence budget by the deputy director of national intelligence.

Staff writer Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.


www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/10/AR2005111002402.html

[Moses]

Neocon LIE formula: accuse your target of what you yourself are guilty.

accusing them of trying to rewrite history

[Moses]

Milbank & Pincus frame on Bush Big Lies (they aren't BIG Lies-- just exclude a few important nuances)

Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 12, 2005; A01


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.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Even within the Bush administration, not everybody consistently viewed Iraq as what Hadley called "an enormous threat." In a news conference in February 2001 in Egypt, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said of the economic sanctions against Hussein's Iraq: "Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce "all relevant Security Council resolutions," and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend "against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

Hadley, in his remarks, went further. "Congress, in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," he said. "And, as you know, the Clinton administration took some action."

But the 1998 legislation gave the president authority "to support efforts to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein" by providing assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including arms, humanitarian aid and broadcasting facilities.

President Bill Clinton ordered four days of bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998, under the 1991 resolution authorizing military force in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Describing that event in an interview with CBS News yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: "We went to war in 1998 because of concerns about his weapons of mass destruction."