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Bush didn't mislead on war, Adviser says
14.11.2005
By Douglass K. Daniel
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While admitting "we were
wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,
President Bush's national security adviser on Sunday
rejected assertions that the president manipulated
intelligence and misled the American people.
Bush relied on the collective judgment of the
intelligence community when he determined that
Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction, national security adviser Stephen
Hadley said.
"Turns out, we were wrong," Hadley told "Late
Edition" on CNN. "But I think the point that needs
to be emphasized ... allegations now that the
president somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow
misled the American people, are flat wrong."
Republican lawmakers and other officials who
appeared on Sunday news shows echoed Bush's Veterans
Day speech in which he defended his decision to
invade Iraq.
Bush said Democrats in Congress had the same
intelligence about Iraq, and he argued that many now
claiming that the information had been manipulated
had supported going to war. The president also
accused his critics of making false charges and
playing politics with the war.
Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean rejected the
criticism on Sunday and said, "The truth is, the
president misled America when he sent us to war."
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," the party
chairman disputed Bush's claim that Congress had the
same information - the president withheld some
intelligence and some caveats about it, Dean said -
and that two commissions had found no evidence of
pressure being placed on those within the
intelligence community .
In fact, Dean said, how the administration handled
the intelligence it received has yet to be
determined by a Senate committee.
Contending that the president has not been honest
about the size of the deficit as well as the war,
Dean said, "This is an administration that has a
fundamental problem telling the truth."
Hadley said Bush received dissenting views about the
accuracy of intelligence and relied on the
collective judgment of the intelligence community as
conveyed by the CIA director. The national security
adviser criticized those who continue to claim that
Bush manipulated the intelligence and made
misleading statements.
"It is unworthy and unfair and ill-advised, when our
men and women in combat are putting their lives on
the line, to relitigate an issue which was looked at
by two authoritative sources and deemed closed," he
said. "We need to put this debate behind us."
Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz.,
said Democrats have a right to criticize the war but
that it was disingenuous to claim that Bush lied
about intelligence to justify it.
"Every intelligence agency in the world, including
the Russians, the French ... all reached the same
conclusion," McCain said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
In a column for The Washington Post, former Sen.
John Edwards, D-N.C., said he was wrong to have
voted to give Bush the authority to go to war and
called the intelligence on which he made that
decision "deeply flawed and, in some cases,
manipulated to fit a political agenda."
"The information the American people were hearing
from the president - and that I was being given by
our intelligence community - wasn't the whole
story," wrote Edwards, the Democratic nominee for
vice president in 2004. "Had I known this at the
time, I never would have voted for this war."
Hadley said issues about the accuracy of U.S.
intelligence have not impaired the administration's
ability to pursue its policies regarding the nuclear
programs of Iran and North Korea.
"We've been able to move our diplomacy forward at
the same time we're taking the steps we need to do
to improve our intelligence," he said.
Asked why people should believe U.S. claims about
the nuclear plans of Iran given the failure of
intelligence about Iraq, Hadley said there has been
international consensus about Iran.
AP
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