Senate report on use of prewar intelligence

LA Times:

After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.

The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.

Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional official familiar with the document said: "The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be happy."

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Not so quick there LA Times. The conclusions of the report seem consistent with what this war supporting blog has said all along. While it is clear that the left will be unhappy they deserve it. Their bogus assertion that the President "lied us into war" have been shown to be unsupported by the facts. They made that assertion by rewriting the definition of the word lie. It was a very childish argument and they deserve to be discredited on it.

I also don't see any additional discomfort to the White House that the authors see. The President has already taken the hit on this issue and this report is not going to effect public opinion much anyway.

The report apparently ignored the statement by members of Congress that were consistent with the President's. It probably also ignored reports by the Clinton administration that were also consistent with the President's. By doing so it shows the bad faith of the Democrats on the panel who wanted to use the study as a political weapon rather than a search for the facts.