If being a neocon means never having to say you're sorry, then being an accessory to a world-historical mistake must grant you some kind of magical immunity. So it would seem after reading Bush administration stenographer Judith Miller's revisionist history on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal. In mea non culpa "The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths," Miller repackages the same bogus argument Bush apologist and federal judge Laurence Silberman ("The Dangerous Lie That 'Bush Lied'") published in the same pages less than two months ago.
Unfortunately for Miller and the co-chairman of Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Silberman long ago admitted his commission "ducked" on the question of how Team Bush used—and misused—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.
Of course, you'd never know that reading Miller's WSJ double-down diatribe:
There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war. Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community's incorrect conclusions about Saddam's WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying. ...Having just marked the 12 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, it's worth remembering how that war was sold to the American people beginning in the fall of 2002.The 2005 commission led by former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb and conservative Republican Judge Laurence Silberman called the estimates "dead wrong," blaming what it called a "major" failure on the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information ... serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions." A year earlier, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence denounced such failures as the product of "group think," rooted in a fear of underestimating grave threats to national security in the wake of 9/11.
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