Lying about Lying

The administration lying is nothing new. The administration lying about lying isn't even new. There was something new in the wake of Bush speech yesterday, The Washington Post actually reported that he lied and gave specific examples.

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

OK, they didn't say lie but that's a lot more than they would have said a year ago. The administration continues to claim that lawmakers had the same intelligence they had. This is blatantly false and one of the individuals who made sure they didn't, Stephen J. Hadley, said:

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."

The Post, without using the word explains that he was lying.

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

The post then points out that Bush repeated the lie.

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

The Bush administration lying is nothing new, standard operating procedure. What is new is that the media is not helping them lie and in fact is calling them out. The news is that the media is doing it's job for the first time in five years. That has to be the really bad news for the administration and the Republicans.

Update
Jazz over at Running Scared and Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice also weigh in. Joe thinks that while the speech will fire up the Kool-Aid drinkers it will further alienate everybody else and hurt Bush rather than help.
Steve Soto also discusses and concludes with this:

Look, the White House is returning out of desperation to a Rovian attack strategy directly at the Democrats on Iraq. It will be critical for Reid and Pelosi to answer every charge and attack with a counterattack. Fire must be returned with facts and withering return fire. Voters no longer trust Bush, and the Democrats need to capitalize on that.

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Intelligence, Iraq, Bush