I cannot recommend highly enough Norman Podhoretz’s recent essay “Who Is Lying About Iraq?†(available in html and pdf). It is a singular word of sane analysis among a din of media reporting that merely parrots anti-war talking points. I have been writing about this topic a great deal lately because opponents of the Iraq War have been making hay out of Scooter Libby’s indictment (read here, here, here, and here). They have used the indictment to slander President Bush by claiming he lied in order to dupe the nation into going to war.
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CNN Is ‘Dead Wrong’
I am watching in disbelief as “CNN Presents†narrates a misleading account of how the U.S. entered into the Iraq War. Basically, they are alleging that the President built a case for war based “substantially†on faulty intelligence. President Bush’s case for pre-emptive war against Iraq was based substantially on evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. But a presidential commission described the pre-war intelligence as “dead wrong.” CNN Presents pieces together the chain of events that led to the faulty intelligence (source).
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Stephen Hayes Is My Homie
Stephen F. Hayes, Senior Writer for The Weekly Standard In a previous post, I argued that the attempt to discredit the Iraq war on the basis of the indictment of Scooter Libby is a “non-sequitor.†Stephen Hayes says essentially the same thing in the most recent issue of The Weekly Standard: In the literal sense, attempts to link the case for war in Iraq to the Fitzgerald investigation are illogical. If a White House official lied to a grand jury in 2004, as Fitzgerald contends, that fact has little bearing on the case made for war in Iraq in 2002 (source). I might have alleged that Hayes has been reading…
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No Indictments for Leaking Identity of Undercover Operative
I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Photo Credit: AP Yes, I. Lewis Libby was charged today with perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements (see indictment). No, he was not charged with illegally leaking the identity of an undercover CIA operative. However, the indictment does not charge Libby with the original alleged offense that the grand jury set out to investigate: illegally revealing the identity of a covert agent in violation of a 1982 federal law (Washington Post). As I predicted in my previous post, this has not prevented congressional Democrats from smearing the entire Bush administration and the case that it made for…