The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence just spent four months sifting through 19 volumes of classified materials, and arrived at the same exact conclusion I arrived at months ago, after just a few hours of research on the web. Talk about your classic "No shit, Sherlock" moment. Thanks to Jay Marvin for the link:
Leaders of the House intelligence committee have criticized the U.S. intelligence community for using largely outdated, "circumstantial" and "fragmentary" information with "too many uncertainties" to conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda.Top members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent four months combing through 19 volumes of classified material used by the Bush administration to make its case for the war on Iraq, found "significant deficiencies" in the community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq, and said it had to rely on "past assessments" dating to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 and on "some new 'piecemeal' intelligence," both of which "were not challenged as a routine matter."
"The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist," the two committee members said in a letter Thursday to CIA Director George J. Tenet. The Washington Post obtained a copy this weekend.
Just to recap the findings of my own investigation:
...From what I can tell, the threat from Saddam was no greater when Bush gave his speech than it was twelve years ago.As you can see, many of the lines included in Bush's State of the Union address were "technically" correct, with the obvious exception of referring to Jello as a biological weapon. Nonetheless, every single line was misleading at best, dishonest at worst. He was lying by omission, if not lying to the American people outright. Is that what passes for Presidential integrity and leadership? The day that we start allowing our leaders to treat foreign policy and war like any other partisan squabble - and distort the facts to make their case - is a day we are in deep, deep trouble. Is that day already here? You be the judge.