The CIA asked Britain to drop it’s Iraq claim while Pres­i­dent Bush said that the CIA “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intel­li­gence ser­vices.”
    Remem­ber that Bush’s State of the Union address did­n’t claim that the US believed that Iraq was buy­ing nuclear mate­r­i­al from Niger or oth­er African coun­tries. It said that British intel­li­gence thought Iraq was. Shift­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for the claim gave the Bush team the wig­gle room to include an alle­ga­tion they knew was prob­a­bly not true. It’s the tri­umph of pol­i­tics over truth.
    As I’ve writ­ten before, there is a polit­i­cal bril­lance to the Bush Pres­i­den­cy. The Admin­is­tra­tion knows that it can sway large por­tions of the Amer­i­can pub­lic just by mak­ing claims. It does­n’t mat­ter if the claims are wrong –even obvi­ous­ly wrong– as long as they feed into some deep psy­chic nar­ra­tive. It’s been awhile since we saw a Pres­i­dent that could bul­ly through real­i­ty as long as the sto­ry sound­ed good. Ronald Rea­gan, the ex-actor, was good at it but I’m sus­pect­ing our cur­rent Pres­i­dent is even bet­ter. The ques­tion is whether enough peo­ple will start insist­ing on the truth and demand inves­ti­ga­tions into the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and Pres­i­dent Bush knew it. The Amer­i­can peo­ple would not have gone to war if we had known that Iraq was­n’t a threat and this too Pres­i­dent Bush knew.