In "Bush Rewrites History", I argued that in attacking opponents of its uses and manipulation of pre-war intelligence, the Bush White House and its amen corner were propagating four new myths.

First, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their allies claimed that Congress has access to the "same intelligence" as the White House. Second, the President and his team asserted that two investigations of the Iraq war run-up found no evidence that the President or his administration had manipulated pre-war intelligence. Third, the Bush team team claimed that no pressure had been exerted by the administration on members of the intelligence community. And last, the President and Vice President claimed, their opponents were rewriting history.

All four of these White House claims are, of course, false. To use the Vice President's own words, it is the Bush White House which in fact is "corrupt", "reprehensible" and "dishonest."

And Dick Cheney should know. As Perrspectives reader Jeff Kartak reports, Vice President Cheney in a telling September 9, 2002 PBS interview with Jim Lehrer made it very clear that Congress most certainly did not have access to the same intelligence as the White House:

LEHRER: You said several times just now we know, we know, we know. Are you and the President prepared to tell the members of Congress and the American public, and the international community...are you going to lay all this information out in a way that we can all see it?

CHENEY: We are certainly going to share a good deal of information with selected members of Congress; we've got a problem here. When we learn information from sensitive sources about what Saddam Hussein is doing with respect to his weapons program, it has to be treated in a confidential fashion or it will destroy our ability to continue to collect that information.

If you brief 535 members of Congress, it will probably stay classified - and I don't mean to be critical members of Congress- I was one for 10 years - but that many people, you're likely to have a leak in very short order. So there's some happy medium here...you brief just the senior leadership, for example, of the Congress, the big four - the Speaker, Minority Leader in the House and Majority/Minority Leader in the Senate, and maybe key committee chairmen, ranking members...there are certain pieces of information that are highly classified and need to remain highly classified, in terms of our ability to continue to work these problems.

LEHRER: So then it could come down in the final analysis to you and the president saying you just have to take our word for it?

CHENEY: No...We'll get as many members of Congress read in to what we know as we can. But there has to be some kind of understanding that there's a limit beyond which we can't go without destroying our capacity to be able to know what's going on in a crucial, crucial area.

Lehrer, of course, was right to question Cheney's claim that "we know, we know, we know." As it turns out, key personnel in the CIA, the DIA and other intelligence roles questioned virtually every claim Vice President Cheney presented as fact on and after September 9, 2002. Again, Cheney from the September 9, 2002 Lehrer interview:

"We know...he (Saddam Hussein) is continuing to expand and improve his biological weapons capability both in terms of production and delivery systems. We know he is once again working on a nuclear program...We know again that he has the weapons design, we know he has the technicians who know how to build a nuclear weapon. And we know that he has re-energized, if you will, his efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon…We know he continues to work on his chemical weapons capabilities...That activity is underway it's ongoing."

A hat tip to Jeff Kartak for bringing us this highlight of the corrupt, dishonest and reprehensible Vice President Cheney in action.

—Perrspective 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |