Judge Silberman lies about Bush's Iraq War lies

Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has two primary claims to fame. First, in July 1990 the Reagan appointee was part of the 2 to 1 majority that overturned Oliver North's Iran-Contra convictions. Then in 2004, he co-chaired the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, more commonly known as the Silberman-Robb Commission on Iraq WMD.

But on Sunday, Judge Silberman took on a new role as an apologist for President George W. Bush's case for war with Iraq. He denounced "the dangerous 'lie' that Bush 'lied," calling the charge "defamatory" in the same way that the Nazi used the "stabbed in the back" canard in their quest for total power. Unfortunately for him, Silberman long ago admitted his commission "ducked" on the question of the Bush administration's uses--and misuses--of pre-war intelligence. Worse still, a mountain of subsequent analyses did not duck, instead cataloguing numerous cases where Team Bush lied about what it knew-and what it did not know--about Iraq and its WMD program.

As the 12 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaches, it's worth remembering how that war was sold to the American people in the fall of 2002. (And it was "sold"; as Bush chief of staff Andy Card explained that summer, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.") In an October 7 address in Cincinnati, President Bush warned, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." That echoed the talking point National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice mouthed a month earlier, when she fretted, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Addressing the VFW nearly six months before Colin Powell would make his infamous presentation to the United Nations, Vice President Dick Cheney was unequivocal about the threat from Saddam Hussein:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth."

Of course, there were doubts on all these issues. But even after chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer testified in October 2004 the White House's WMD claims were "almost all wrong," Americans did not learn of Bush's politicization of pre-war intelligence until he was safely reelected and on his way out of the Oval Office.

After the White House initially opposed calls to create an independent panel to probe the intelligence used to make the case for war, President Bush relented. On February 6, 2004, he named the members of the Silberman-Robb Commission which included, among others, Senator John McCain. But Bush's panel, led by Judge Silberman and Senator Chuck Robb (D-VA), did not include the subject of intelligence manipulation within its charter. The report concluded that the CIA had been "dead wrong" about Iraq WMD. Silberman himself acknowledged as much as to PBS Newshour about the 600 page report the commission delivered in 2005:

MARGARET WARNER: Let me finally ask you, Judge Silberman, about what you concluded. When you started this work were there a lot of charges being made by critics of the administration and Congress, about news reports, about politicization. And there were two elements to this: One was that in some way policy makers exerted pressure on intelligence analysts to come up with certain conclusions, and two, that the president and others did not accurately convey the caveats that were in the intelligence when they spoke publicly. What are your conclusions on those two points?

JUDGE LAURENCE SILBERMAN: Well, on the second point, we duck. That is not part of our charter. We did not express any views on policymakers' use of intelligence -- whether Congress or the president. It wasn't part of our charter and indeed most of us didn't want to get into that issue because it's basically a political question and everybody knows -- you can look at the newspaper and see what people said and make your own judgment. On the former question, as to whether or not there was any policymaker effort to influence the intelligence, we found zip... [Emphasis mine.]

Meanwhile, an even more egregious farce was underway in the Republican-controlled Senate, below.