Standard reversal: Who’s Rewriting History Here?

True Majority has put together a little film that shows who’s “rewriting the history” of the Iraq War. It’s the same speech, but now with a running bar of corrections across the bottom..

http://www.truemajority.org/bushspeech.asx

The latest Progress Report (get on their update list) addresses the three basic … um, historical revisions:

1) Claim: Congress had access to the same intelligence as the White House prior to the war.

Congress did not have access to the “the same intelligence” as the White House.

According to the Washington Post, Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. For instance, in the lead up to war, the Bush administration argued that Iraq had made several attempts to “buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.” The White House sent 15 intelligence assessments to Congress supporting this notion, but according to the New York Times, “not one of them” informed readers that experts within the Energy Department believed the tubes could not be used to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. Even Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) — who has led efforts to delay and downplay the need for investigating prewar intelligence — confirmed this broader point yesterday. Asked whether the differences between the intelligence available to the White House and to Congress was a “legitimate concern,” Roberts acknowledged that it may be a concern to some extent.

2) Claim: The bipartisan Senate investigation found that the Bush administration did not misrepresent prewar intelligence.

Political pressure claims have not been investigated, and the Senate intelligence report showed at least some manipulation of evidence.

The Senate Intelligence Report showed that there was manipulation of the evidence. President Bush claimed that “a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.” That argument is wrong on at least two counts. First, “the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions.” The so-called Phase II of the pre-war intel investigation is not expected to be completed this year. Second, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Phase I report found, according to the Los Angeles Times (7/10/04), that the unclassified public version of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was manipulated. “[C]arefully qualified conclusions [in the classified NIE] were turned into blunt assertions of fact.” For example, the classified version of the NIE said, “Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons” of certain poisons. The phrase “although we have little specific information” was deleted from the unclassified version. Instead, the public report said, “Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents.”

3) Claim: Intelligence agencies around the world agreed with the Bush administration’s assessment of the Iraqi threat.

The world was not in agreement with the Bush administration.

One frequent talking point of Bush’s defenders is that the pre-war intelligence failure was a global failure. “Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French…all reached the same conclusion,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Similarly, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) claimed, “This was a worldwide intelligence failure,” citing the French and Russians, among others. In fact, many of our friends and allies believed that, based on the intelligence they had, the threat of Iraq did not rise to the level of justifying immediate force. French President Jacques Chirac said, “[W]e just feel that there is another option, another way, a less dramatic way than war.” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said he did not believe the threat rose to the level requiring the “‘ultima ratio,’ the very last resort.” And Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said, “It is our deep conviction that the possibilities for disarming Iraq through political means do exist.”