Bush Lied

There was no mistake, no inadvertence, no miscue, no stumbling about it. Bush and his cronies lied. And thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died because of those lies. It is truly shameful and incredible that George W. Bush still occupies the White House and is still threatening to kill more soldiers based on more lies (regarding Iran), but there he still sits.

What do we call someone who intentionally causes one death? A murderer.

Here’s Arianna Huffington’s summary ^[1] of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 200-page “Phase II” report on how the Bush administration used — and abused ^[2] — pre-war intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq:

A statement released by committee chairman Jay Rockefeller makes it clear that the administration “on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq…in making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

The report doesn’t use the word, but we all know what it’s called when someone presents something as fact that’s directly contradicted by the evidence. A lie. Not a mistake. A lie.

The conclusions of the Report are not surprising, but we have an extremely low bar for Congress these days, so it was with relief that we can now see these clear and direct conclusions in writing by a Senate sub-committee.

Here are some of the conclusions of committee chairman Jay Rockefeller’s statement regarding the Report (with Huffington’s emphasis):

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.

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