The Washington Post had an interesting item on the front page confirming what we’ve known for many months — Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address about Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium for a nuclear weapons program was completely bogus.
This time, the conclusion has been confirmed by the White House’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by the first President Bush’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft.
It appears, however, that the advisory board is willing to cut the White House (i.e., their bosses) an enormous amount of slack. The Post’s source explained that the advisory board believes that the White House was so anxious “to grab onto something affirmative” about Hussein’s nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable. The same board, however, believes there was “no deliberate effort to fabricate” the story.
Am I the only one who finds these two competing conclusions to be contradictory? This report suggests the advisory board realizes that Bush’s claim was bogus and the White House was “desperate” to find a shred of anything that would empower them to draw their own conclusions, even if that meant ignoring intelligence that showed just how bogus the claim was. Call me crazy, but that sounds like an intentional effort to “fabricate” a story and mislead the public.
But that wasn’t the only troubling part of the story. Four paragraphs down, the Post explained that “at the time of the State of the Union speech, there was no organized system at the White House to vet intelligence, and the informal system that was followed did not work in the case of that speech.”
Isn’t this a little bizarre? The Bush White House, over a year after the 9/11 attacks and just three months before starting another war, had no mechanism in place to review intelligence information before the president talked about these issues to Congress and the nation?
John DiIulio was right: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”