September The Eighth, 2002

If you talk politics with a Republican - or with someone who is only moderately informed and wants to remain naive to what our government is capable of - you will hear a lot of things like this: "Everyone was wrong about Iraq's WMD's. You can't say Bush was lying because Kerry said Sadaam had WMD, Clinton said it, Gore said it, etc... It wasn't just our intelligence that got it wrong - the British thought he had them, the French, the Germans, the Russians all thought he had them, etc..."

However, this is a simple argument for a simple person. It is true that Kerry, Clinton, et al thought Iraq had WMD's; but to take that fact and then make the leap to think that therefore Kerry, Clinton, et al were equally culpable to the Bush administration for the Iraq War is at best very naive and at worst just plain stupid.

The facts are that most people thought Iraq probably had WMD's based on the intelligence we had prior to the war. But, this in no way implies that they had all the information or that they thought there was 100% proof that Sadaam had them. People act as if there were only two choices: either you thought Sadaam didn't have WMD or you knew he had them. But, this simple-minded thinking ignores the obvious realities that there are different levels of believing something. For example: someone might have thought that based on the intelligence you couldn't tell if he had them, i.e. that it was 50/50. One might have leaned towards believing he had them - say they were 60% sure. One could have concluded he most likely had them - they were roughly 75% sure... etcetera, etcetera. Until you get to the Bush/Cheney level where they said, "He's got them... We know where they are", i.e. they were about 98-100% sure. There is a difference.

Also, there is an enormous difference between biological or chemical weapons and nuclear weapons. In reality, it was the threat of nuclear weapons which is what convinced the majority of Americans to support the war. Many Democrats and foreign intelligence communities did believe that Iraq had some chemical or biological weapons, but they were not convinced about his nuclear capabilities. Kerry, Clinton, Gore, etc... were not traveling around the country on a 48 city Weapons of Mass Destruction Tour and playing all their biggest hits including "Beware of Mushroom Clouds", "Uranium and Aluminum Tubes", and "The Iraq-al Qaeda connection". And, neither the Democrats nor any foreign intelligence agency were engaged in criminal like propaganda to fool and scare the American people into supporting a war of choice. The deception used by this administration, and the manipulation of the media was taken to a level that even the most informed people didn't think was possible in a "free" society.

This brings us to September 8, 2002, which is one of the most significant examples of manipulation by the administration. We are only now learning some of the details of what happened around this time thanks to the CIA leak investigation and the Scooter Libby indictment. It is now a matter of public record that the Vice President's office, through Scooter Libby, was feeding a reporter, Judy Miller of The NY Times, information about Sadaam's nuclear weapon's capability. They were doing this directly themselves and also through Ahmed Chalabi who was their source for the information - and an especially weak source at that. Judy Miller was set up with Chalabi as a source, and then she used Scooter Libby as a second source to confirm the information Chalabi told her, which Libby naturally did as it was all part of the plan. Of course that information was later proven to be false, as was most of the information Chalabi was feeding the administration and which they regurgitated to the American people.

On September 8, 2002, Judy Miller's story about Iraq possessing aluminum tubes which are used in the development of nuclear weapons appeared on the front page of The NY Times. In what we can now tell was without doubt a well-coordinated plan, all the top administration officials were scheduled to appear on the Sunday talk shows that day (Meet The Press, Face The Nation, This Week, Fox News Sunday, and CNN), and they all referenced this same NY Times article as proof to further their claims about the danger posed by Sadaam Hussein. That's right - the article that Cheney and Libby helped create, they then turned around and presented to the American public as objective evidence that they were right in saying Iraq was a serious threat. After all, if the “liberal” NY Times was reporting it, it must be true.

As Bill Maher appropriately labeled it, they were laundering information through Judy Miller; so they were in effect quoting themselves while sitting down for these interviews. As Chris Matthews describes it (laid out brilliantly by Arianna Huffington), it was an alley-oop play they were involved in with Judy Miller. They handed her bogus intelligence, she then lobbed it right back to them so they could go on TV, catch the pass, and slam dunk it for an easy score in the game of selling a war.

This kind of high-level deception is but one example of how the administration, spearheaded by lead hawk Dick Cheney, manipulated intelligence and lied to the country about Iraq. We also know that Cheney was often at the CIA butting heads with intelligence officials from the CIA and State Department as they vetted through the intelligence about Iraq's WMD's and connections to al-Qaeda.

The members of Congress who voted for this war were not the individuals engaged in this activity, nor were they aware at the time that this is what was going on. To say that Kerry, Clinton, et al looked at the same intelligence about Iraq's WMD's and came to the same conclusion as the administration is just not true. Nobody else knew that Dick Cheney's office was manipulating the press to the extent which we now know they were; or the way in which they were manipulating intelligence before the congress had a chance to look at it. This information is something that only those in the administration were aware of.