According to the WaPo, Bush didn't lie.
REMEMBER THE affair of "the sixteen words"?
I'll hazard a guess that regular readers of this site do...
Excerpts from the WaPo are below. We also note that USA Today has a new article on the 16 Words, and we extract this nugget:
Bush joined the fray Tuesday when an audience member at a political rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, asked him, "Did Ambassador Wilson lie?"
"Well, you need to ask the press that question," Bush replied.
The press is stirring.
Finally, Joe Wilson made it onto PBS Newshour, and a blogger was there! (Well, in front of his television, anyway) [UPDATE: Transcript].
A year ago this month official Washington was convulsed by a controversy over whether President Bush had knowingly twisted the truth about Iraq to persuade the country to go to war. A former U.S. ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, made that charge.
...Amid the subsequent uproar, we suggested that if Mr. Bush had indeed falsified the case for war, his offense would be a grave one -- but we cautioned that all the facts were not known. We still don't have all those facts -- and some of the investigations of them, unfortunately, will not be completed before the November election.
...What is to be learned from these findings? Not necessarily that Mr. Bush and his top aides are innocent of distorting the facts on Iraq. As we have said, we believe the record shows that they sometimes exaggerated intelligence reports that were themselves flawed.... But, as both the new reports underlined, no evidence has been presented that intelligence on Iraq was deliberately falsified for political purposes.
Mr. Wilson chose to emphasize the latter point, that no deal was likely -- but that does not negate the one Mr. Bush made in his speech, which was that Iraq was looking for bomb material. This suggests another caution: Some of those who now fairly condemn the administration's "slam-dunk" approach to judging the intelligence about Iraq risk making the same error themselves. The failure to find significant stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons or an active nuclear program in Iraq has caused some war opponents to claim that Iraq was never much to worry about. The Niger story indicates otherwise. Like the reporting of postwar weapons investigator David Kay, it suggests that Saddam Hussein never gave up his intention to develop weapons of mass destruction and continued clandestine programs he would have accelerated when U.N. sanctions were lifted. No, the evidence is not conclusive. But neither did President Bush invent it.
K-Lo feels their pain.
What thin silly broth from a bunch of Beltway lightweights. Neither Wilson's op-ed nor comments gave any reason to believe the Africa/uranium issues had been distorted or presented with any sort of bad faith, much less that lying had occurred. Didn't Wilson somewhere this week, in his frenzy of repositioning blurt out that he never claimed the Sixteen Words contained a lie?
This was an IQ test for the elite media (and others) -- and the scores have indicated that Johnny has "special needs" and can no longer be schooled with the rest of the kids. A little understanding of the world and 15 minutes with Google and a broadband connection, salted with at least some understanding of intel, sufficed to conclude that Wilson had little of interest to add (as the CIA apparently instantly concluded). That was BEFORE the Brits confirmed their confidence in the assessment and explained no forged documents were available to them in making it, and BEFORE various parliamentary groups took a look and pronounced the assessment reasonable.
I love the Post's slimy and desperate little dig, which is very common these days, that though the Wilson affair proved to be about nothing (the Seinfeld Crisis as I've called it since the outset), there were of course cases where the administration "exaggerated intelligence reports that were themselves flawed". Examples, please? Oh, and the inability to think rigorously shines through again; if an intelligence report proves flawed, that's a post-hoc reality, and is not relevant to the sincerity or precision of a statement based on it before its accuracy can be determined.
As I think Keegan put it, the big intelligence failure has been in the media, the "public intelligence system."
Posted by: IceCold | July 21, 2004 at 09:12 AM
I still think the disingenuous, "Valerie had nothing to do with it" misstatement is huge. And that those like Max Sawicky and Bob Somerby who are peddling it as trivial know how damaging it is the question of whether her "outing" was criminal. For Wilson's outrage to be genuine he had to have been LITERALLY correct. If she was part of the story, then his claim that the Admin. officials were punishing her doesn't stand up.
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan | July 21, 2004 at 11:05 AM