Some important writings on the lead up to war in Iraq appear today. Former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who once chaired the Intelligence Committee, writes in the Washington Post that the Bush Administration fudged the data on WMDs. There are a couple problems with Graham's version of events. First, as Powerline notes, why was he talking in late 2002 as if Iraq had WMDs, while the "real" intelligence suggested otherwise? If Graham had issues with the intelligence he and other Senators were being given, why did it take him three years to express any concern? Is he in therapy now and experiencing "recovered memory"? The second problem is similar. If Graham had such grave doubts about WMD intelligence in the run up to war, why could he convince so few of his colleagues to go along with him in voting against authorization for the war? This suggests that, like Tim "obvious fabrication" Johnson, either Graham is making up history, or, if his history is correct, that he was a spectacularly ineffective Senator. In Johnson's case, one has to believe that even though WMD intelligence was "obviously fabricated" it took him three years to figure out this obvious fabrication. In Graham's case, one has to believe that Graham, because of his privileged position on the Intelligence Committee, had special insight into the fact that the intelligence was bad and either a) never bothered to tell his colleagues, or b) he told his colleagues and he convinced hardly any of them.
Here is Michael Barone on the subject:
Bush, Cheney, and the administration have the truth on their side. Exhaustive and authoritative examinations of the prewar intelligence, by the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, by the Silberman-Robb commission in 2005, and by the British commission headed by Lord Butler, have established that U.S. intelligence agencies, and the intelligence organizations of leading countries like Britain, France, and Germany, believed that Saddam Hussein's regime was in possession of or developing weapons of mass destruction--chemical and biological weapons, which the regime had used before, and nuclear weapons, which it was working on in the 1980s.
To the charges that Bush "cherry-picked" intelligence, the commission cochaired by former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb found that the intelligence available to Bush but not to Congress was even more alarming than the intelligence Congress had. The Silberman-Robb panel also concluded, after a detailed investigation, that in no instance did Bush administration authorities pressure intelligence officials to alter their findings. Much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. But Bush didn't lie about it.
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