DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE….Captain Ed defends the honor of the Bush adminstration in re The Case of the Dubious Mobile Bioweapons Labs:
What the Post neglects to mention in its sensationalist zeal is that this was one of several teams that investigated the trailers, and the totality of their evaluations came to a different conclusion than that of the leakers who supplied this story.
….To put it in advertising terms, two out of three inspectors agreed that the trailers were part of Saddam’s WMD effort. The Pentagon relied on that majority opinion, as did the administration, and no one can argue that doing so constituted either an intent to deceive or even an unreasonable decision at the time.
Nice try, but cutesy advertising jingles to the contrary, this episode fits the usual MO of the Bush administration perfectly: a flat statement of fact about intelligence matters that’s made with great fanfare even though they know there’s significant dissent within the intelligence community. I haven’t been keeping my list of examples up to date, but here are seven cases of the exact same thing, and what they demonstrate beyond question is that you simply can’t trust the Bush administration’s public statements about intelligence issues. The bioweapons story is #8.
So: Intent to deceive? Check. Unreasonable decision? Check. Deliberate lie? Check.
