It's not like there's a whole lot of entertainment value left in slapping the crap out of pathological liar Bill Strong but ... what the hell, I'm here so let's do it.
Over here, Strong quotes approvingly from a piece of swill from right-wing media mouthpiece National Ledger about the Robb-Silberman Commission:
The Silberman-Robb [sic] panel also concluded, after a detailed investigation, that in no instance did Bush administration authorities pressure intelligence officials to alter their findings.
Um ... no. No, the Robb-Silberman Commission most emphatically did not exonerate the Bush administration on that score for a very simple reason -- they were never tasked to even investigate that particular issue.
As MediaMatters notes here:
On the November 14 edition of CNN's Paula Zahn Now, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund falsely claimed that former "Democratic Senator Chuck Robb [VA] headed a commission which looked into whether or not the president misled and manipulated the intelligence data" relating to Iraq. According to Fund, the commission concluded that "it didn't happen."...
Fund's assertion that the Robb-Silberman Commission found that the Bush administration had not "misled" is false. In its March report to President Bush, the commission noted: "[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community." Indeed, Bush's February 6, 2004, executive order establishing the commission limited the scope of its investigation to the production of intelligence:
[T]he Commission shall specifically examine the Intelligence Community's intelligence prior to the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom and compare it with the findings of the Iraq Survey Group and other relevant agencies or organizations concerning the capabilities, intentions, and activities of Iraq relating to the design, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, proliferation, transfer, testing, potential or threatened use, or use of Weapons of Mass Destruction and related means of delivery.
Ergo, since the commission was not even authorized to examine the issue of whether intelligence was manipulated, it could not possibly have concluded that it wasn't. Now, is there any part of that that confuses any one of you?
I'm starting to figure that Bill Strong and the Blogging Tories really deserve one another.
1 comment:
Slowly waking from my years-long Mulroney-induced apathetic coma, I'm experiencing genuine anxiety over the notion that Canadian conservatives share any attributes with American conservatives.
I've followed the events leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and never for a moment did I believe George W. Bush was telling the truth. He's been caught in so many lies -- and dredging up all the lies Bill Clinton told somehow doesn't make Bush a more honest man.
The war in Iraq is a fraud. Most of the American public knows it. Much of the military knows it (and I personally correspond with soldiers who are there right now). And the rest of the world seems to know it. All except this shrinking cadre of American Christian conservatives, who somehow believe blowing up other countries brings them closer to Jesus.
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