President Bush Can't Rewrite History

Floor Speech

Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, beginning on Veterans Day, President Bush has begun a series of attacks against his critics on the war in Iraq. He has been supported by a well-orchestrated set of groupies of conservative policymakers, Members of Congress and talking heads all spouting the same line, that the Bush Administration was not alone in believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Everyone thought so. And the administration certainly did not manipulate or misrepresent any intelligence to Congress, the American people or to the international community.

Mr. Speaker, this is just one more false claim in a history of falsehoods put forward by this administration in its effort to cover up its failures in Iraq. Today's New York Times editorial attempts to set the record straight on the Bush coverup of the truth.

On Veterans Day, President Bush claimed that Congress had access to the same intelligence as his administration. This is patently false. According to the Washington Post and The New York Times, President Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who are dependent on his administration to provide Congress with materials.

More recently, the President has asserted that Congress had more intelligence information than the White House. This is so patently absurd, I barely know how to respond. The only intelligence materials the Congress has, it receives from the President and his administration.

The President has gone on to state that the bipartisan investigation carried out by the Senate Intelligence Committee found, and I again quote, no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

This claim is wrong on several counts. First, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has not yet done its inquiry into whether Bush officials mischaracterized or misrepresented intelligence.

Second, the Senate Intelligence Committee's first report did find that the national intelligence estimate was manipulated.

Finally, the overall soft approach of this first report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has been disputed by several senior intelligence officials. Richard Kerr, the former acting CIA director, who led an internal investigation of the CIA's failure to correctly analyze Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability, stated that the intelligence analysts were pressured and heavily so. Senators ROCKEFELLER, DURBIN and LEVIN noted in their additional views to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report that the CIA's independent review found, and I quote, significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

A second independent investigation by the CIA ombudsman found that the, quote, hammering by the Bush Administration on Iraq intelligence was unusual and that George Tenet confirmed that agency officials had raised with him personally the matter of pressure on analysts.

President Bush tries to assert that President Clinton believed in the same threat. What he leaves out is that President Clinton has repeatedly asserted that he believes it was a mistake to invade Iraq before the United Nations weapons inspectors had a chance to complete their investigation. In fact, the U.N. investigation was aborted before it even had a chance to really begin by the launch of U.S. military operations.

Mr. Speaker, President Bush asserts that other governments' intelligence agencies agreed with ours. That is simply false. Many countries felt that the U.S. intelligence was faulty or overblown and did not agree with their own intelligence data, and that is why they opposed us in the United Nations Security Council or declined to provide troops for our invasion. Even this year we have heard Vice President Cheney continue to imply that Iraq was somehow tied to the September 11 attacks and was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Well, let us set the record straight. There were no weapons of mass destruction, there were no ties to al Qaeda, there was no imminent threat. The arguments in favor of war presented to Congress and the American people by the President deliberately used the most inflammatory of language.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say one more word on the President's latest series of attacks. He says that those of us who criticize the war, who called for withdrawal, or who focused on how the American people were deliberately misled into supporting the invasion on Iraq, that somehow we are betraying our troops and advocating a cut-and-run strategy.

Mr. Speaker, our troops, who have carried out this mission with courage, dignity and sacrifice, represent our Nation with honor, but they have been betrayed. They have been betrayed by policymakers who rushed into a war on false pretenses, they were betrayed by policymakers who sent them into harm's way and overruled the good advice of our top military leaders as to troop strength and post-invasion planning, and they have been betrayed by policymakers who will not admit that mistakes were made and significant changes in policy are required in order to bring them home safe and sound.

Critics of this policy strongly support reconstruction assistance for Iraq. We strongly support the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces. We strongly support internationally supported security forces in Iraq. We do not support cutting and running, but we do not support lying and hiding. Mr. Bush cannot rewrite history, he cannot rewrite the intelligence again, and he cannot continue to lie to the American people. The truth, the ugly truth, is coming out.
[From the New York Times, Nov. 2005]

Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials

To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.

Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.

It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.

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.

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was ``significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection'' between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's ``hammering'' on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.

The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.

Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that ``it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.'' We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

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