July 16, 2004

Probe clears Blair of deliberate distortions on Iraq

Prime Minister Tony Blair escaped harsh criticism in an official inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq, which faulted him yesterday for informal decision-making and pushing available intelligence to the limit, but found no deliberate distortions.
    
Mr. Blair said he took full, personal responsibility. But after the much-awaited report was released, he told Parliament, "No one lied, no one made up the intelligence."
[...]
 Although the report criticized Mr. Blair's "informal" governing style, it absolved him of misleading the public over Iraq, a charge that has dogged the prime minister since he took Britain into the U.S.-led war.
[...]
    
 Mr. Butler's judgment vindicates the British government of some of the harshest charges against it, a week after a Republican-led U.S. Senate committee excoriated a "broken corporate culture" at the CIA and said there had been a "global intelligence failure" on Iraq.

The verdict takes some pressure off Mr. Blair, whose popularity and credibility have been battered by the war and continuing violence in Iraq, and by the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction.
[...]   
"We have no reason, found no evidence, to question the prime minister's good faith," Mr. Butler told reporters.
    
He concluded "no single individual" was responsible for intelligence failures that led Mr. Blair's government to overstate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
   
 Before the war, Mr. Blair said Saddam "has chemical and biological weapons ... [and] existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons."
    
Addressing the House of Commons yesterday, however, he acknowledged it was likely Saddam "did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy."
   
 But Mr. Blair defended his decision to go to war.

"I cannot honestly say I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all," he said. "Iraq, the region, the wider world is a better and safer place without Saddam."
[...]
    
 The report was the latest to exonerate the Blair government. Three previous inquiries also cleared officials of misusing intelligence or lying.
 

Good to see our wartime British allied leader is cleared--I never doubted he would be!--and by consequence, so was President Bush, who was also cleared by the Senate report, as well.
Here's more about former Ambassador and now fiction writer and sKerry campaign boy Joe Wilson:
British report undermines Wilson on prewar data

The British government yesterday bolstered President Bush's assertion that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, casting further doubt on former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's claims to the contrary.

The conclusion was reached by Robin Butler, who once was Britain's top civil servant, in a major report on prewar intelligence that came five days after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reached a similar conclusion in its report.

Taken together, the British and U.S. reports appear to undermine Mr. Wilson's criticism of Mr. Bush, which led to a criminal investigation of the White House and made the retired diplomat a media darling.
[Oh, yeah...Joe and his spook wife were having big fun this time last year speculating about who was going to play them in the inevitable blockbuster film which would have been the "companion piece" to the dreadful Fahrenheit 911.
What is almost as revolting as Wilson accusing the President of lying to the American people in his SOTU address without a shred of proof is the fact that the Liberal Left Lying media carried Wilson's water for him and now that he's been exposed as a fraud and a liar, they are maddeningly silent and not issuing the flurry of apologies to us, their audience, for playing this story for all it was worth.
Disgusting and revolting behavior on the part of the Left all the way around!]

It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999," the British report said. "The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.
    
"Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible," the report added.
   
 That buttressed an assertion by Mr. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
[...]
The State of the Union assertion rankled Mr. Wilson,
[It seems anything done by a Republican President does rankle Mr. Wilson.--Jen]
who said he found no evidence of such an attempted purchase during a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger. Mr. Wilson arrived in the African nation in late February 2002.
[My private belief is that in those first few months after the 9/11 attacks, the intell community of the FBI and the CIA was in such a flurry and kind of a mess trying to comb the world to identify and track our enemies so that they couldn't hit us again that they were force to use every warm body to track down leads and tips.
This is why I think that Wilson's spook wife was able to recommend her hubby to track down the story on Saddam trying to buy yellowcake from Niger, because everyone else was so busy.--J.T.]
[...]

Mr. Wilson, who opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom and works as an adviser to Democratic Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, accused Mr. Bush of twisting the facts "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
    
The accusation set off a feeding frenzy in the media that intensified after conservative columnist Robert Novak mentioned in a July 2003 column that Mr. Wilson's Niger trip had been suggested by his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA employee.
[...]
 Mr. Wilson, who did not return phone calls yesterday,
[Can you imagine? Have you ever seen a publicity whore like Wilson pass a camera or a mirror without diving in? I love it, though.
Maybe he actually has a sense of shame, unlike most of the people in his political party!]
has publicly accused White House political strategist Karl Rove of leaking the name, although he has provided no evidence to back up that accusation.
   
 "It's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," he told an audience on Aug. 21, 2003.
[As I've stated below, it's Joe Wilson and his wife I'd like to see frog-marched off to jail in handcuffs!
No-one talks about Ms.
Plame's ethics and why she would compromise our national security by letting her partisan husband handle a matter of our national security!]
   
 Earlier this year, Mr. Wilson parlayed the controversy into a book, "The Politics of Truth," in which he insisted that his wife was not the one who had suggested that the CIA send him to Niger.
[Oh, goody! Another Bush-bashing book that's all made up of lies. Just what we need...Thud.]

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Mr. Wilson wrote. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
    
But that assertion was disputed by the Senate intelligence committee report last week.
[And then this British report really put the matter to rest!--Jen]
[....]
According to the Senate report, Mrs. Plame boasted to her CIA superiors about Mr. Wilson's contacts with Niger.
[...]

Like the British report, the United States did not back away from Mr. Bush's State of the Union assertion. The U.S. report said Mr. Wilson did little to change the CIA's belief that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.
    
"The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessment of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal," the U.S. report said. "For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."

Mr. Wilson has defended his position by pointing out that some documents linking Iraq with Niger were forgeries. U.S. and British officials said the forgeries may have been a red herring to cloud the issue
[And like the real idiot he is, Wilson fell for it!] and, in any event, did not surface until after the link had been established.

For my money, Conservative talk radio host supreme Hugh Hewitt puts it simply and best on his equally terrific blog:

[...]...Joe Wilson lied.  Joe Wilson's wife did have a hand in sending him to Niger. Saddam was trying to buy enriched uranium from Niger --and there is only one reason to do so, which is to build nukes. And Bush and Blair didn't lie. In fact. they acted as any sane leader would act: To preemptively remove a dangerous tyrant trying to gain even more lethal weapons than the ones our intelligence agencies already believed him to possess.

Instapundit ...is right to gloat over the collapse of credibility of the Bush Lied crowd, but note carefully how they are covering their collective ears and raising their collective voices so as not to have to notice the appearance of the truth at their door. The truth doesn't matter to these people.  Power matters. They want it back, even if it means denying real threats to the country and thereby setting impossibly high standards of threat visibility in the future.  Quite simply, they have taken the Democratic Party to a position where it could not be trusted to take any action to prevent an attack on the United States because they have denounced the legitimate basis for having attacked Saddam. They have raised the bar too high to ever act preemptively, and in so doing, have disqualified themselves.  It is that stark.

Thanks for the clear analysis, Hugh (and for all the other fine work you do--I listen to him every weeknight!).
We can only hope and pray that the Left's attempt to raise the bar too high on President Bush's policy of preemption is an abyssmal failure, for as our troops help the Iraqis settle down in their newly born democracy, we have problems looming ever larger with the NorKs and with the Iranians;
Behold, if you have a strong stomach and lots of courage to read these current reports:
North Korea admits to nuclear weapons facility, says US
Iran Plans to Continue Nuke Program Work
Diplomats: Iran Atomic Shopping Deepens Bomb Fears.
I would have you note the bellicosity of both nation's insistence on their "right" to pursue nukes, but it will only upset and outrage you, as it does me.
These 2 reports--that of Congress and of Lord Butler--came just in the nick of time!
These Axis of Evil countries need to know that the Civilized World, led by Bush and Blair with the backing and the confidence of a good majority of their citizens, will hold the leaders of these rogue states responsible for developing WMDs and harboring and sponsoring terrorism as we did Iraq and Afghanistan.