The International Herald Tribune offers an analysis of the torque currently surrounding the "Did-Didn't" contorversy around Bush's distortion of intell in order to create an artificial casus belli.

In this analysis the authors point out an interesting fact concerning the standard response in defense against accusations of distortion:

"... News Analysis: Prewar intelligence a thorn in Bush's side
By Richard W. Stevenson and Douglas Jehl The New York Times

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2005

.. the Bush administration is furiously parrying a new round of accusations that it exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein in leading the United States to war, the imagery is startling.

There on Monday was Ahmad Chalabi, who as a leader of Iraqi exiles before the war funneled what proved to be inaccurate information about Saddam's weapons programs to the United States, being whisked into meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the most influential of the hawks in the administration when it came to Iraq.

...The White House is building two main lines of defense. It is asserting that many Democrats saw the same threat from Iraq as the administration did. And it is pointing to two government studies that it says found no evidence that prewar intelligence, while admittedly flawed, had been twisted by political pressure.

The first is giving the White House some political protection, though not enough to deter Democratic attacks. The second addresses only part of the issue, because neither study directly addressed the broader question: whether the administration presented that intelligence to Congress, the nation and the world in a way that overstated what it said about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons programs and any links to terrorism....

"...At a news conference Monday on Capitol Hill, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic party leader, ran through a list of topics the administration had cited to show Iraq was a threat, including Saddam's efforts to acquire nuclear material and aluminum tubes that could be used in a nuclear program and terrorist training camps in Iraq. "All of these things simply were not true," he said. "The administration knew that, but they did not share that with me or anyone else in Congress that I know of.

The White House's aggressive effort to defend itself has taken on all the trappings of a campaign. In an indication of the coordination between the White House and Republican leaders in Congress, Senator Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican and the majority leader, planned to distribute to Senate Republicans on Tuesday a list of statements made by Democrats raising the alarm about the threat from Iraq.

The situation makes the new effort by Democrats to turn the focus on the use of intelligence into a political minefield. Among the issues the Democrats are seeking to explore is whether public statements by Bush and others about Iraq exaggerated the threat it posed, even beyond what was described in the flawed intelligence presented to them

To date, the major official inquiries - by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, and the Robb-Silberman commission in March 2005 - have addressed only prewar intelligence itself. Neither found evidence that any pressure by the Bush administration had contributed to the failures by the CIA and others in assessing the threat posed by Iraq

On the question of whether there were close, collaborative ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the reviews found Cheney and others had encouraged analysts to rethink their skepticism, but they found no evidence that the repeated questioning from the administration had altered the conclusions reached by the agencies

But neither panel compared public statements by Bush and his aides with the intelligence available at the time, or reviewed internal White House documents, including a draft of a speech to the UN Security Council that was later delivered by Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, for further evidence of how intelligence had been used.

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Does it strike you as somewhat illogical to claim in defense of such a charge a findings that did not actually examine the questyion being asked? It does me. How could any panel exonerate Bush by "not finding evidence that he exagerrated or distorted intelligence" when not actually comparing what he said with the intell?

Doh!! How stupid.

SSDD.


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