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November 20, 2005

Fact checking FactCheck.org

The emminent braintrust at FactCheck.org appears to have dropped the ball.

Their latest tome seems fundamentally flawed:

The President says Democrats in Congress "had access to the same intelligence" he did before the Iraq war, but some Democrats deny it."That was not true," says Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. "He withheld some intelligence. . . . The intelligence was corrupted."

Neither side is giving the whole story in this continuing dispute.

The President's main point is correct: the CIA and most other US intelligence agencies believed before the war that Saddam had stocks of biological and chemical weapons, was actively working on nuclear weapons and "probably" would have a nuclear weapon before the end of this decade. That faulty intelligence was shared with Congress – along with multiple mentions of some doubts within the intelligence community – in a formal National Intelligence Estimate just prior to the Senate and House votes to authorize the use of force against Iraq.

No hard evidence has surfaced to support claims that Bush somehow manipulated the findings of intelligence analysts. In fact, two bipartisan investigations probed for such evidence and said they found none. So Dean's claim that intelligence was "corrupted" is unsupported.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzt. Wrong. No investigation regarding the Administration's use of intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion and occupation has taken place.

The two investigations referred to by FactCheck.org are the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC) investigation and the Silberman-Robb Commission.

Neither the SIC or Silberman-Robb were authorized to look into how the Administration used the intelligence on Iraq. In fact the Silberman-Robb report specifically states that it wasn't:

"We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgements about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information.

No such review has ever taken place.

And while the GOP is busy dithering hither and yon over John Murtha and how they can get that gasbag Jean Schmidt to pretend she knows anything about being in the military (let alone the Marine Corps), German Intelligence is saying that Bush exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq from the source known as Curveball.

Perhaps the collective mental energies of FactCheck.org might take a few minutes to pool their resources and actually do what they get paid to do: real research. How is it that a nonpaid layperson like myself can easily find out that none of the investigatory bodies have been authorized to look into how the Administration used intelligence...and these guys can't?

Posted by Carla at November 20, 2005 04:36 PM