The Propaganda Campaign Dissected

Randall Mikkelsen writes for Reuters: "Bush's and Cheney's assertions that Saddam was prepared to arm terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the United States contradicted available intelligence.

"Such assertions had a strong resonance with a U.S. public, still reeling after al Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Polls showed that many Americans believed Iraq played a role in the attacks, even long after Bush acknowledged in September 2003 that there was no evidence Saddam was involved."

Opinion Watch

The New York Times editorial board writes: "It took just a few months after the United States' invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

"It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. . . .

"The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it -- if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for. . . .

"We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public -- or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true -- to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough."

The USA Today editorial board writes: "For this and future administrations, the lesson is that White House officials need to weigh and study all available intelligence, not seize on only what supports their preconceived notions. They mustn't present ambiguity as certainty. They mustn't launch pre-emptive attacks without bulletproof evidence. And never again should they treat war as a marketing campaign, like selling a new brand of toothpaste."

Here's MSNBC'S Keith Olbermann talking to former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke last night:

Olbermann: "I use the word lie. The report does not use the word lie. Are there lies?"

Clarke: "There certainly are and this is a big report. What it says is statements by the president were not substantiated by intelligence. And then it stays statements by the president were contradicted by available intelligence. In other words, they made things up. And they made them up and gave them to Colin Powell and others who believed them."

The Second Report

John Walcott writes for McClatchy Newspapers about a second report issued by the Intelligence Committee yesterday: "Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have 'been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,' a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

"A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said. . . .