They really didn’t see the same intelligence

December 16, 2005

The most annoying facet to the White House talking point on congressional Dems seeing the same pre-war intelligence as the president is not just its inaccuracy, but also its repetition. Searching the White House website, Bush, Cheney, McClellan and the rest of the Bush gang have used the talking point at least 171 times.

It’s one thing if Bush said this as some off-hand comment in an interview, but the White House has repeated it, over and over again, for over a year. Indeed, the president even included it as recently as Wednesday’s speech on Iraq. It’s never been true, but now the evidence highlighting its inaccuracy is piling up.

President Bush and top administration officials have access to a much broader ranger of intelligence reports than members of Congress do, a nonpartisan congressional research agency said in a report Thursday, raising questions about recent assertions by the president. […]

The Congressional Research Service, by contrast, said: “The president, and a small number of presidentially designated Cabinet-level officials, including the vice president … have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods.”

Unlike members of Congress, the president and his top officials also have the authority to ask U.S. intelligence agencies more extensively for follow-up information, the report said. “As a result, the president and his most senior advisers arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the … intelligence more accurately than is Congress.”

The CRS report identified nine key U.S. intelligence “products” that aren’t generally shared with Congress. These include the President’s Daily Brief, a compilation of analyses that’s given only to the president and a handful of top aides, and a daily digest on terrorism-related matters.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Granted, this isn’t exactly a new revelation; the idea has been discredited before. In fact, when the Bush 2004 campaign started harping on this point 14 months ago, it was immediately debunked. But instead of adjusting for accuracy, the White House started using the talking point more frequently.

Confronted with the truth, they “didn’t respond to a request for comment.” What a shock.

Everyone re-read “On Bullshit.” It’s not that they think about the truth and deliberately lie, it’s that they don’t care what the truth is, they’re only interested in what works. Bullshit is more corrosive to the public discourse than lying.

  • This is how the White House operates on every issue–whether lies are necessary or not. They stick to their stories and, quite frankly, this strategy works every time and there’s no reason for them to change it. To this day, the majority of Americans still think Saddam was involved in the 9-11 attack. The faithful readily accept lies as it’s reassuring and repetition makes them seem all the more true. And the supine press, if they bother to refute them all, can be counted on to quickly get tired and move on to something else. This is what creating your own reality is all about. We’re truly in a shameless Orwellian age and I don’t know how or if we’ll ever get back to nonfiction reporting of the news and consequences, other than reward, for outright lies.

  • I thought that the big bad bogeyman of Communism was defeated back in the 1980’s.

    How is it that America now has a government that lies to its citizenry, spies on its own people, conducts torture in secret prisons and winks at its own democratic principles while subverting them at every turn???

    The Evil Empire lives…

  • And there you have it, Gridlock. Our beloved constitutional republic is right now in a persistent vegetative state, only requiring someone to pull the plug or the feeding tube to remove the last illusion that it lives.

    For a few decades after Truman, American institutions were able to resist the decay into totalitarianism, but for whatever reason they’ve all failed now. All that’s left is the Internet.

  • Feinstein has made it available

    http://feinstein.senate.gov/crs-intel.htm

    snip “….As a result, the President, and a small number of presidentially-designated Cabinet-level officials, including the Vice President (3) – in contrast to Members of Congress (4) – have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods. They, unlike Members of Congress, also have the authority to more extensively task the Intelligence Community, and its extensive cadre of analysts, for follow-up information. As a result, the President and his most senior advisors arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the Community’s intelligence more accurately than is Congress. (5) ….”

  • Dubya’s White House: “Home of the Whopper” (or the “Big Lie” in cowboy boots), served up daily…

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