Bush Legacy Tour

It's been more than five years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, but new light continues to shine on the dishonest way the Bush Administration sold the war to the American people.

This month the Senate Intelligence Committee released the final [two] [sections] of its comprehensive examination of the Bush Administration's use of pre-war intelligence. It's been known for a while now that Bush and his fellow hawks misled the American people, but the Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information clearly illustrates exactly how they did it.

As Committee Chair and report author Sen. Jay Rockefeller [said],

Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence. In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.

The report lists the specific instances in which public statements by Bush, Cheney, and other officials did not accurately reflect intelligence findings. Some examples:

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remarked on the findings:

As we have seen in the ensuing six years, this coordinated propaganda campaign is among a series of profound misjudgments by the Bush administration and its Republican enablers, who have collected a long and shameful track record of mismanagement that has gravely damaged U.S. national security.

War should always be a last resort. But this report makes it undeniably clear that the Iraq War -- with more than 4,000 American casualties, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent -- was not a last resort. It was a war of choice by George Bush, Dick Cheney, other Administration officials, and their backers in Congress.

That's a legacy no one can be proud of.