Rusted Sky

Looks like the LA Times is starting to realize that reality is a trifle more important than political doctrine. I wouldn't have expected such a thing from them.

Bush never lied to us about Iraq - Los Angeles Times

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House "manipulation" -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: "Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses."

Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

I realize the Democrats have to deny that anything Bush did may have had sufficient reason, or seemed to - but it's both rather heartening to me that the LA Times, of all papers, has realized that Bush wasn't lying - and disheartening that this was an editorial instead of a first-page feature.

But I'll take even tiny steps towards them recognizing that reality isn't defined by doctrinal thought - and that an attempt to rewrite what actually occurred makes interpreting current events a fool's game.

J.