If there has been a bigger bunch of liars assembled, I would like to know when and where? Read their comments! They are so adept, so slick, so fucking sickening!
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/06/opinion/06FRI1.html<snip>
The saddest spectacle was Mr. Powell, who had argued the case for using force against Iraq before the United Nations, based largely on intelligence that now appears to have been wrong. In an interview with The Washington Post on Monday, Mr. Powell said he was not sure that he would have recommended an invasion had he known Iraq did not have stockpiles of banned weapons. The next day, in remarks coordinated with the White House, he quickly retreated and said, "The President made the right decision." We have seen Mr. Powell do this before. He does not make himself look better by dropping hints about his true feelings and then scurrying back to the loyal soldier's position when scolded by the White House.
Mr. Rumsfeld, whose department was one of the most hawkish proponents of the invasion, took refuge in the hope that banned weapons might yet be found in Iraq, a large nation with lots of potential hiding places. Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress that it was "possible, but not likely" that Iraq had not had weapons of mass destruction at the start of the war. He suggested that weapons might have been shipped to another country, destroyed just before the invasion or buried somewhere in Iraq. Those possibilities have largely been discounted by Dr. Kay. They are precisely the kind of unfounded speculation that got us into this intelligence mess. About all Mr. Rumsfeld conceded was misspeaking when he said before the war that "we know" where Iraq's banned weapons were stored. He needs to admit that we don't know that there ever were any weapons.
In the most ballyhooed presentation of all, Mr. Tenet made a spirited but ultimately inadequate defense of the prewar intelligence estimates in a hurriedly arranged appearance at Georgetown University yesterday. He argued that intelligence is almost never completely right or wrong. Mr. Tenet said his provisional assessment was that the consensus intelligence report before the war had mostly been right about Iraq's missile programs but might have overestimated Iraq's progress on nuclear weapons. He acknowledged that nothing had been found to support the intelligence agencies' predictions about biological and chemical weapons, but argued for more time to look. In other words, the intelligence may well turn out to have been mostly wrong.
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Finally, Mr. Bush acknowledged yesterday that "we have not yet found the stockpiles of weapons that we thought were there," but he insisted that "America did the right thing in Iraq" because Mr. Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction in the past and had been intent on making more. "We cannot wait to confront the threats of the world," he said, pledging to "protect and defend this country by taking the fight to the enemy." After everything the public has learned in the last week, it's unnerving to hear the president continue to defend the idea of pre-emptive strikes based on unverified suppositions.
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