corrente

The editorial board of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune opines... Heck, it's all good. I'll print the whole thing, highlighting the lies. Man, if I had a little WhiteWash icon...

President Bush's effort to defend the war in Iraq on NBC's "Meet the Press" wasn't persuasive. In numerous instances he fudged the facts. And he made clear that the investigation of prewar intelligence won't go near the issue of how the administration used the intelligence it got. It must.

Certainly there is reason for a thorough review of U.S. intelligence capabilities. Failure to anticipate the attacks of Sept. 11 and the obvious errors in prewar information on Iraq make that review essential. The gap between what U.S. intelligence believed was in Iraq and what has been found should indeed be explored.

But that gap isn't nearly as large as many people think, nor is it the only one. When CIA Director George Tenet spoke last week at Georgetown University, he outlined the qualifications, doubts and disagreements which were attached to the prewar intelligence. "Analysts differed on several important aspects of [Iraq's WMD] programs," he said, "and those debates were spelled out in the estimate. They never said there was an imminent threat."

No, but the White House did. Statements from Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condollezza Rice and others were laced with words like "grave threat,"mortal threat,"urgent threat" and "immediate threat." They clearly conveyed the idea that the United States had to act immediately.

To arrive at that argument, the Bush administration, as NBC's Tim Russert said, took ambiguous intelligence and "molded it and shaped it -- your opponents have said 'hyped' it -- and rushed to war." That's an intelligence gap which also deserves close scrutiny, before the fall election. But it will get none. Bush said, and the executive order creating the intelligence review commission confirms, that the commission will look solely at how the intelligence was gathered and analyzed, not at how it was used.

YABL #1 Bush also continues to imply that the only choices were invading Iraq immediately or doing nothing. That's not true. The reason the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 was because members agreed with the United States that Iraq posed a threat and had not complied with numerous U.N. resolutions. No one wanted simply to walk away from Iraq. Instead, they believed war wasn't the only option; they preferred to give weapons inspectors more time to work in Iraq and to squeeze Saddam Hussein even harder through sanctions.

YABL #2 Bush asserted to Russert that "containment doesn't work with a man who is a madman." In fact, containment had worked extremely well. David Kay, former head of the WMD search team, reported, for example, that Iraq's capability to make chemical munitions "was reduced -- if not entirely destroyed -- during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections."

YABL #3 Bush also said Kay "has found the capacity to produce weapons." In his testimony to Congress, at least, Kay said no such thing. He did say Saddam had an interest in nuclear weapons and might have restarted his program at some point, and that he had some clandestine research and development efforts on chemical and biological weapons.

YABL #4 Finally, Bush said Kay pronounced Iraq in many ways "more dangerous than we thought." Again, in his congressional testimony, he certainty did not.

In this "Meet the Press" appearance and in the way he set up the new intelligence review commission, Bush continues a strategy of deception -- designed to deflect attention from the administration's record on Iraq. With good reason: It has become quite clear that the Bush administration either committed serious errors of judgment before the war, or it used false pretenses to conduct a war it wanted anyway but knew the American people would never buy -- unless Saddam Hussein was portrayed as an urgent threat. Neither alternative flatters Bush.

One of the lessons the SCLM coverage is that media companies with no Washington property (e.g., Knight-Ridder) actually did some journalism, as opposed to Pravda on the Potomac and Isvestia on the Hudson, who seemed as fully invested in the drive to war as their sources in the administration.

Here we see a regional (Minneapolis) paper saying: The Boy Emperor has no clothes!

Will the Newspapers of Record (not!) follow?