Electric Josh

Bush lied
I've now talked to two people today who are usually on top of this sort of thing, and neither had any idea what I was talking about. (Must have been the holiday.) A deviation from this space's relatively apolitical voice is therefore in order.

Over the last couple of days the Bush administration has actually been caught lying about war, and, most astonishingly, has been getting called on it by the press (rather than just these silly weblogs). Cursor, the one in the sidebar, provides a decent overview (scroll to "July 8"). Roughly, the Times published an op-ed by Joseph C. Wilson, 4th (could such a name belong to anyone but a diplomat?), the very guy whom the government sent to Niger to check out the claims that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium ore. The piece was called What I Didn't Find In Africa, and begins:

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

... It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me.

Then Ari Fleischer got tripped up Monday morning by some unusually persistent questioning from the normally submissive press corps. (The official White House transcript for July 7th should appear here, but isn't up yet for some reason.) Followup from the other Josh here. David Corn weighs in in The Nation (also in the sidebar),

If you blinked--or were busy buying hot-dogs and beer for a Fourth of July cookout--you might have missed the latest evidence that George W. Bush misrepresented the threat from Iraq as he guided the country into invasion and occupation in the Middle East.

The day before Independence Day, Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading a review of the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, held a series of interviews with journalists and revealed that his unfinished inquiry had so far found that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been somewhat ambiguous, that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence services had received pressure from the Bush administration, and that the CIA had not found any proof of operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.

and David Sanger follows up in the Times:

The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.

The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at the United Nations.

The acknowledgment came after a day of questions - and sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials - about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent, a warning that White House officials say never reached them.

So don't space out on the news even for one day, gentle readers.
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