Lies and the lying... you know the rest

I remember some years ago hearing about a marriage counselor who reported that the wife of one couple "selectively disattended" what her husband said. What that meant, of course, is that she heard only what she wanted to hear. Sidney Blumenthal had a good piece in the February 5 Guardian about the White House's prewar policy of selectively disattending intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities. The whole thing is worth reading but I'm going to pluck out two passages.

Before he departed on his quest for Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction last June, David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, told friends that he expected promptly to locate the cause of the pre-emptive war. On January 28, Kay appeared before the Senate to testify that there were no WMDs. "It turns out that we were all wrong," he said. President Bush, he added helpfully, was misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay, made assumptions that turned out to be false.

Within days, Bush declared that he would, after all, appoint a commission to investigate; significantly, it would report its findings only after the presidential election.

Kay's testimony was the catalyst for this u-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: that he was wrong.

The actual situation can be summed up in one quote:

Greg Thielman, chief of the INR [the Intelligence and Research bureau at the State Department] at the time, told me: "Everyone in the intelligence community knew that the White House couldn't care less about any information suggesting that there were no WMDs or that the UN inspectors were very effective."

The Bushites, as usual, want to rewrite history where they can't rewrite reality. Unable to by sheer force of will to create weapons where there were none, they now want to make us think that they were stampeded by faulty intelligence from the CIA, DIA, and INR.

The truth is, as has been known for several months at least, that the intelligence given to the White House was full of questions and acknowledgements of limitations. But every caveat was ignored, every "probably" and "could be" was turned into "is." On balance, the intelligence community did believe Saddam had banned weapons, but it was the true believers and manipulators in the White House who made it into an assertion of absolute fact. They did it for the purpose of deceiving us, misleading us, because they knew if they told the truth, included the doubts and unsures, we would not be pushed into war. That is, they lied to us. Staightfaced and through their teeth. The fact that not all of us fell for it doesn't change the fact that the lies were told. And we can't let them or anyone else forget it.