What he knew

Published August 4, 2004 2:20PM (EDT)

President Bush is proudly telling audiences that regardless of the bad intelligence, he would have plowed ahead with his war in Iraq anyway, because he liked the result: Saddam out of power. "Knowing what I know today, we still would have gone on into Iraq," Bush says.

But what Bush knows today about the bogus information underlying his case for war closely resembles what he's known all along, David Sirota and Christy Harvey write in In These Times. "As author Flannery O'Conner noted, 'Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.' That means no matter how much defensive spin spews from the White House, the Bush administration cannot escape the documented fact that it was clearly warned before the war that its rationale for invading Iraq was weak."

"Top administration officials repeatedly ignored warnings that their assertions about Iraqs supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and connections to al Qaeda were overstated. In some cases, they were told their claims were wholly without merit, yet they went ahead and made them anyway. Even the Senate report admits that the White House 'misrepresented' classified intelligence by eliminating references to contradictory assertions. In short, they knew they were misleading America. And they did not care."


By Geraldine Sealey

Geraldine Sealey is senior news editor at Salon.com.

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