INTELLIGENCE MISUSED

Discredit your critics. Talk about terror. Point out that any criticism of U.S. foreign policy will only serve to aid the enemy.

That game plan has served the Bush administration well in recent years and it’s still being put to use, as shown in the president’s Veterans Day speech. The problem for him now is that he no longer has the public support to back up this approach to leadership. In a room of 10 people, only about three are still part of his core support.

The president said last week that it’s irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the Iraq war began. He said that all senators and representatives had access to the same intelligence he had when they gave him support to launch a preemptive war against Iraq.

What the president didn’t say is that there was plenty of evidence that eroded his case for war. Our elected representatives believed the intelligence presented by the White House. After all, how could the president be anything but genuine in something as important as leading the country to war? They didn’t know the intelligence was “fixed around the facts,” as the British put it. They didn’t know portions

were overstated and other parts omitted. They trusted the president.

For a brief review:

• Air Force intelligence officers knew the report on Iraq’s drone aircraft capable of delivering chemical weapons was wrong;

• The International Atomic Energy Agency believed the African uranium claim was bogus;

• Our Defense Intelligence Agency—the combat support arm of the Department of Defense—thought the prime witness for the story about the Iraqi-al Qaeda ties to weapons was lying;

• The Department of Energy didn’t believe the story about the aluminum tubes that would be used to produce nuclear weapons.

But those findings never stopped administration officials from continuing to make claims in speeches in the run-up to war.

When U.N. inspectors could find no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the administration turned to its usual tactic: discredit the inspectors. If you don’t agree with us, then we’ll find something bad to say about you.

If the president is innocent in the claims that intelligence was manipulated, he should welcome a congressional investigation. Instead, he’s fought hard to prevent it.

The president stated in August that we must continue the war in Iraq so as not to dishonor those who have died in the conflict. What a brilliant rationale for war. By next Veterans Day, we should have another thousand names added to the causality list and we can continue fighting to honor them.

Dishonoring our troops began by sending them into an unnecessary war with inadequate armor, then trying to trim their pay, then reducing their benefits, then...don’t get us going.