Yesterday’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the White House’s deliberate deceptions before the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not exactly blockbuster news. That doesn’t come as a surprise — Bush and his team lied about Iraq? Deliberately shoveling talking points that they knew to be false at the time? You don’t say.<\/p>\n
But let’s not brush past this too quickly. Dan Froomkin had a good summary<\/a> of what we learned from the new report.<\/p>\n Yesterday’s long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report further solidifies the argument that the Bush administration’s most blatant appeals to fear in its campaign to sell the Iraq war were flatly unsupported.<\/p>\n Some of what President Bush and others said about Iraq was corroborated by what later turned out to be inaccurate intelligence. But their most compelling and gut-wrenching allegations — for instance, that Saddam Hussein was ready to supply his friends in al-Qaeda with nuclear weapons — were simply made up.<\/p>\n In an accident of timing, the report also validates former press secretary Scott McClellan’s conclusion in his new book that the White House pursued a “political propaganda campaign” to market the war.<\/p>\n The White House response? That officials in Congress and elsewhere were saying the same things about Iraq. Or in other words, that other people bought the administration line. It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you’ve engaged in a propaganda campaign by noting that it worked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Quite right. For all the talk, which goes back years, that the White House relied on intelligence that turned out to be wrong, the report released yesterday highlights a different problem altogether: White House officials, including the president, said things they knew to be false.<\/p>\n As Intelligence Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) said, “There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”<\/p>\n This may seem like a bit of a stretch, but all of this reminds me a bit of Ken Starr. After he laid out the “narrative” of Clinton’s alleged transgressions, Starr wrote a section he called “Grounds<\/a>.” In it, Starr details what he described as “acts that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.” There were 11 in all, most of which dealt with Clinton’s grand jury testimony and remarks during a deposition in Paula Jones’ civil suit. But the last of the grounds for impeachment went a little further<\/a>.<\/p>\n * Beginning on January 21, 1998, the President misled the American people and Congress regarding the truth of his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. […]<\/p>\n The President himself spoke publicly about the matter several times in the initial days after the story broke. On January 26, the President was definitive: “I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false.”<\/p>\n The President’s emphatic denial to the American people was false. And his statement was not an impromptu comment in the heat of a press conference. To the contrary, it was an intentional and calculated falsehood to deceive the Congress and the American people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Don’t forget, when Clinton made the remarks about “sexual relations with that woman,” he wasn’t under oath; he was answering a reporter’s question. For Starr, it didn’t matter. Here was a constitutional officer lying to the country, on national television, about a subject of national significance.<\/p>\n Starr insisted that this was, quite literally, an impeachable offense.<\/p>\n Anyone else see any similarities here? As I recall, back in 1998, there weren’t any Republicans criticizing the Starr standard, insisting that regular ol’ lies from a president, during a press conference, not made under oath, couldn’t possibly rise to the level of impeachable offenses.<\/p>\n Just sayin’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the White House’s deliberate deceptions before the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not exactly blockbuster news. That doesn’t come as a surprise — Bush and his team lied about Iraq? Deliberately shoveling talking points that they knew to be false at the time? You don’t say. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nA decade ago, Starr prepared a lurid report for Congress detailing his case against Bill Clinton. At first blush, this wouldn’t necessarily have any relevance to the war in Iraq, but something occurred to me today.<\/p>\n