What he said:

In Bob Graham's OpEd in the Washington Post, What I Knew Before the Invasion, he writes: (emp add)

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

That's a key argument against Bush. That there was no information about Iraq's alleged WMD threat (or al Qaeda threat), which had been "independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States." As Larry O'Donnel said over a year ago:

Since when do we go to war based on another country's intelligence?

It was worse than even that. Bush was making claims based, in many cases, not on a country's intelligence, but on reports from a rag-tag bunch of exiles.

In September 2003, Max Cleland wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

If you adopt the strategy of pre-emptive war, your intelligence must be not just "darn good," as the president has said; it must be "bulletproof," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed the administration's was against Saddam Hussein. Anything short of that saps credibility.

Since there was no "operative responsible to the United States" that could affirm any of the claims Bush made, the intelligence was not in any way, "bulletproof."

That's a charge that should be made against Bush. Not lying about the evidence. Not misleading the people (though he did that). But not having any solid evidence.


posted by Quiddity at 11/20/2005 09:42:00 AM