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January 29, 2005

The search for intellectual honesty in the universe

Yesterday in comments, our good friend Tom Carter echoed a point I've often heard from others:

In the same vein, saying Bush is a liar because of the WMD business is, at best, intellectually dishonest. He, his Administration, the Democrats, all serious intelligence services, and other world leaders believed Saddam had them, and he acted based on what he knew. Criticize him, fine, but don't call him a liar. It demeans the validity of the rest of the argument.

I agree that many people believed that Saddam had WMD. But Bush made very specific claims that were known by the Administration to be untrue (or at best a very big stretch) when they were made.

"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" -- his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." (Cincinnati, Ohio speech, October 7, 2002)

The information on the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) was mixed at best. The CIA and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency did believe the UAVs could be used for dispersing chemicals. But the Air Force (the US entity which controls most of America's fleet of UAVs) didn't agree. Further, the Air Force view was widely accepted at the Pentagon Missile Defense Agency. This very obvious cherry picking of intelligence is a lie of omission, at least.

Then there's the aluminum tubes that Bush claimed were used "to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons". He had Powell giving that same claim to the UN. But the UN weapons inspectors had already undercut that claim during their latest round of inspections.

Factcheck.org has a gracious piece about Bush being "misinformed" on the yellowcake uranium/Niger statement from the 2003 State of the Union Address. However, they go on to say that the claims were known to be bogus and someone inserted them into Bush's speech. So if Bush himself was "misinformed", someone on his team was lying.

That was two years ago. None of Bush's team has been held accountable for this lie, that I'm aware of. The only person so far who's had their feet held to the fire on this is Joseph Wilson, who outed it.

These claims are, as I said, at best lies of omission. It's entirely possible that Bush himself didn't know that there were many things that contradicted the claims he was making. If that's so...then he's a puppet being used by a whole bunch of other liars. In looking at this from an intellectually honest place, I can't see how that's significantly better than Bush knowing that items in his speech were false.

Posted by Carla at January 29, 2005 10:20 AM