Or maybe they were just confused or got their facts wrong or mistakenly accepted as fact what is in fact a biased interpretation or … who knows what. But by the standards they apply to the Bush Administration, they lied.
I refer to one of the central building blocks in the “Bush lied” edifice that the Democrats have been trying to rebuild and embellish for the past few weeks, the matter of the “aluminum tubes” that made up an important part of the evidence of Saddam’s nuclear intentions that Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Powell, Rice, et. al. pointed to on the road to war.
It subsequently was revealed that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and, in the U.S., the Dept. of Energy and the State Dept.’s Bureau of International and Research had doubts at the time, and the fact that these doubts were ignored or disregarded by administration officials is now widely regarded as proof of deception, manipulation, misrepresentation, or outright lying.
For example: David Shuster, of Hardball, on MSNBC’s “The Road To War” last week:
… at the United Nations, Bush discussed Iraq’s alleged nuclear ambitions. “Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” Bush continued, ” Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.”
The following week, Congress began debating a war resolution. While the Clinton administration and intelligence agencies around the world had suspected Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration was the first to argue Saddam posed a direct threat to the continental United States.
In early October, the president spoke again about Iraq’s efforts to buy aluminum tubes, echoing Condoleezza Rice, “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Four days later, the Senate and the House voted to allow President Bush to launch a war on Iraq if Saddam doesn’t disarm.
