Senate Committee Concludes Bush Lied on Iraq

A recently released Senate Select Intelligence Committee report has accused President Bush and Vice President Cheney of knowingly making untrue statements leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

“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,” said committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va.

Among the reports conclusions:

• Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership “were not substantiated by the intelligence.”
• The president and vice president misrepresented what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities.
• Rumsfeld misrepresented what the intelligence community knew when he said Iraq’s weapons productions facilities were buried deeply underground.
• Cheney’s claim that the intelligence community had confirmed that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 was not true.

Curiously, although the report does mention Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities, it does not appear to say anything with regard to their nuclear capabilities which were of much more concern. I can only assume that Rockefeller left this out of the report to avoid having to answer for his own comments made on October 10, 2002:

“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years … We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.”

It is true what they say that hindsight is always 20/20, but I believe if Senator Rockefeller wishes to condemn the Bush administration for making statements that were not supported by intelligence, he must also explain why he chose the words “unmistakable evidence” although there clearly was not.

Ed Morrissey has more on the claims laid out by the committee, most notably on the meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001.

The last claim comes from Czech intelligence, which they have repeatedly defended. The 9/11 Commission reported concluded that it was unlikely, given the pattern of use from Atta’s cell phone, but (a) no one can put Atta in the US outside of that data, and (b) it ignores the possibility that Atta loaned his phone to an associate while he traveled abroad. With the Czechs standing behind that intelligence before and during the war, it’s nothing more than a political cheap shot to call it a “deception”.

The article he references had this to say:

The CIA is convinced that Atta’s terrorist group must have been led by professionals from an intelligence service, perhaps Iraq’s. U.S. experts believe that during the two aforementioned Prague visits, the execution of the terrorist action was to be confirmed. Atta was to visit Prague a third time in April 2001. The Czech secret service received from one of its informers a warning that Al-Ani, the Iraqi consul, was to meet with a “distinguished Arab student” from Hamburg—this is information that up until now was top secret. BIS monitored the meeting: The men met in a Prague restaurant on the evening of April 8. To this day, it remains unclear whether this “Hamburg student” was Atta. Yet again, three days after that meeting, $100,000 arrived in Atta’s Florida account.

Responding to the conclusion of this report that “Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership “were not substantiated by the intelligence”, Captain Ed reminds us of a Pentagon report release just 3 months ago the Senate Committee must have overlooked. The New York Sun wrote about the report:

A Pentagon review of about 600,000 documents captured in the Iraq war attests to Saddam Hussein’s willingness to use terrorism to target Americans and work closely with jihadist organizations throughout the Middle East

The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no “smoking gun” linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.

The report concludes that Saddam until the final months of his regime was willing to attack America. Its conclusion asks “Is there anything in the captured archives to indicate that Saddam had the will to use his terrorist capabilities directly against the United States?” It goes on, “Judging from Saddam’s statements before the 1991 Gulf War with the United States, the answer is yes.”

It is also important to remember that it was not Bush or Cheney who first made the connection of Al Qaeda and Iraq. As early as 1998 the Clinton administration was making those same assertions:

The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s regime to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements.

In fact, during President Clinton’s eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton’s defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

While it is true that intelligence was flawed leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the intelligence appears to be less flawed than this Senate report.