Two years after George W. Bush duped the American people into a preemptive invasion and occupation of Iraq we're being asked to believe that the President himself was duped into believing Iraq was a threat (never mind that even as the Senate Intelligence Committee Report was being released George continued to insist that the attack on Iraq was justified ... you know how sometimes news cycles overlap).
But the real corker is that this is not the report that was supposed to have been completed. More than a year ago, when the Senate Intelligence Committee began talking about doing this investigation, the plan was for a single broad investigation, but the Republican committee majority wanted no part of it. And so, in order to get any investigation at all, the Democrats had to settle for dividing the work into two parts. The first, investigating the intelligence failures themselves, was just released. The second, yet to begin, will investigate how the Bush administration actually used the intelligence to build its case for war. Of course that part is conveniently scheduled to be completed some time long after the fall election.
Let's stop kidding ourselves. The Bush Administration knew exactly what it was doing and the Republicans know exactly what they are up to.
The first step was to dupe the American people into a preemptive invasion of a country that posed no threat to American security. In order to accomplish that the Bush Administration took flawed information and then magnified it and spun it into exaggerations, misleading statements and outright falsehoods with the intention of scaring Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein possessed huge amounts of weapons of mass destruction and that his regime was closely linked to Al-Qaida and the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Now, the Republicans are engaged in a cynical effort avoid pre-election exposure of the Bush Administration's conniving leading up to the invasion of Iraq, even if that means thwarting the proper working of democracy by preventing Americans from having full information before they vote.
This fall America will decide whether or not they get away with it.
New York Times: Senate Report Does Little to Still Debate on C.I.A.'s Prewar Data
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