Quote:
Originally posted by techweenie
Well, you're asking for a look inside a mind.
The fact that Dubya publicly stated that his intent was to remove Saddam from power two years before 9/11 is a bit of evidence.
So, too, is the commentary by several CIA employees that evidence was rejected if it did not conform to the administration's expectations.
Both the thin 'evidence' of some aluminum tubes in Saddam's possession and an obviously forged letter supposedly from Niger were thoroughly discredited long before they were used as "evidence" in presentations to the American people.
So I infer that the use of discredited and obviously false evidence is lying -- intentional lying.
If you want some documentation on this, do a search on "downing street memo."
I will grant you that Chalabi and possibly others were actively lying to the administration about Saddam's capabilities (with transparent motives). But offsetting that, I seem to recall that a general in charge of Saddam's WMD programs in the 80s escaped from Iraq in '98 and flatly stated that there were no ongoing programs to produce WMDs in Iraq.
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I'm not asking you to look inside a mind. I think that's what you're doing by assuming that you know what Bush was thinking, and that he was lying. The default position, until proven otherwise, should be that he was likely acting on bad intelligence, and not necessarily in bad faith. Your "evidence" that he was lying is far weaker that the evidence that was used to justify going into Iraq.