Bush lied? LOL

Bush's defensive and slippery readings of how he used intelligence leading up to the war have gotten an obsequious hearing here on RL; they've been cited repeatedly and heatedly as fact. Here they are debunked, by an organ--the NYT editorial page--that has been (despite its caricature on Fox and in right-wing blogs) extremely receptive to Bush's agenda re: Iraq. You may think, pace Bush, that you are being patriotic by believing and repeating such official non-sense (I remove Paul Hue at least partially from this charge). I disagree.

"Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics."