JAMES KIRCHICK == LYING WAR WHORE

I can't recall where I first read about this atrocious article by Kirchick of the The New Republic so I can't give a "(h/t)" but I do appreciate whoever it was who wrote about it. Kirchick sounds like William "The Bloody" Kristol or some other neo-con hack and LIES about the SSCI Phase II Report.

Bush never lied to us about Iraq
The administration simply got bad intelligence.
Critics are wrong to assert deception.

By James Kirchick

June 16, 2008
LA Times

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: "Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses."

Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

I converted the original report from an image-only file to an MS Word 2003 file and this is what the report stated:

(U) Conclusion 12: Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence. (page 73)

(U) Conclusion 13: Statements in the major speeches analyzed, as well additional statements, regarding Iraq's contacts with al-Qa'ida were substantiated by intelligence information. However, policymakers' statements did not accurately convey the intelligence assessments of the nature of these contacts, and left the impression that the contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation or support of al-Qa'ida. (page 73)