For the full story, see:

“Bush Rewrites History”

On the side-issue of whether there was important information in the President’s Daily Briefing that didn’t make it to the Intelligence Committee, this National Journal article makes interesting reading.

Bullshit.

I can’t read the whole article because it is behind the paywall. But the part you quote does not make the claim that you think it does (which has been my straightforward point all along).

It begins:

The Democrats risk painting themselves as either opportunists (who turn against a war when it goes badly) or buffoons (too dim to question faulty intelligence when it mattered). They also risk exacerbating their biggest weakness—their reputation for being soft on terrorism and feeble on national security. So who is getting the best of the argument? Mr Bush starts with one big advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction seems to be a farrago of nonsense.

That paragraph does not say that current debate is just about the one thing. It says Congressional Democrats are working from a disadvantage in exploiting what you say the real debate is about because of their vote and because they had access to all sorts of intelligence—witness the “too dim to question faulty intelligence when it mattered” problem outlined in the part you quote.

As I said, I can’t read the whole article. It is behind the paywall. Maybe it goes on to say that there is no issue beyond “the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction seems to be a farrago of nonsense.” But the passage you quote doesn’t limit the scope of all inquiry or the even present inquiry to that one area. It merely notes that there is a very important area of whether or not Bush knew there were no WMD in Iraq at the time of the run-up to the war. This area has been well-hyped by Democrats and other factions on the left. In this facet of the debate, Democrats have a problem because it

A) appears to be untrue
B) plays into their traditional crappy reputation
C) makes them look like opportunists, or fools, or both.

As a political analysis goes, that is pretty much spot on.

You want to talk about:

They’re making the case that the Republican administration deliberately suppressed information that didn’t support its case, and presented highly dubious information as providing a slam-dunk case for imminent war.

That is a great thing to talk about. But you don’t need the Economist article to talk about that.

On that issue, I think you broadly overstate your case because the State of the Union address does not base its case on imminent danger. (I assume that is what you mean by imminent war).

Your focus on the general case of how the war was sold doesn’t (even if otherwise correct) touch the Economist analysis on the issue it actually analyzes in the quote you actually quote.

For what it’s worth, every third or fourth visit I am offered the opportunity to view a Flash ad, after which I get free access, to apparently everything, for some period of time.

You are far too kind, Henry. Sebastian has been a sophisticated sort of troll for as long as I’ve been reading blogs.

They didn’t have more or less the same intelligence. As Milbank and Pincus specifically note, ” there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE.” A judgement that is reinforced, for example, by the shoddiness of the intelligence from Curveball. And your argument about how “bad” Milbank and Pincus’ reporting is is specious to the extent that it isn’t entirely irrelevant. You’re defending the indefensible, and not for the first time. Do you really want to defend the Bush administration’s presentation of the “evidence” on aluminium tubes, on weapon drones, on mobile biological warfare labs etc as being honest and non-mendacious? Or to put it another way – would you care to actually address the issue that this post was about, rather than adopting your usual habit of playing defence for the administration?

I wasn’t defending the administration at all in my initial comments. I was saying that the Economist was correct in noting that the Democrats, and especially those on the Intelligence Committee, put themselves in a tough spot by their votes. This should be rather non-controversial. You then keep repeating things that you think should have changed Democratic Senators’ minds, but you keep ignoring the fact that for the most part these very same things were known to to Democratic Senators. They didn’t have access to every single report in the CIA universe, but they were well aware that the tubes issue was controversial and that the mobile labs thing was tough to confirm. And it is that very fact which makes the Economist correct that Democrats (who voted for the authorization) are in a tough spot.

That is addressing “the issue this post is about”. You seem to think that their article ought to have been about Bush and the presentation of the war in general. I think your view of the presentation in general ignores some rather noticeable things like the “State of the Union” address, but that is drifting well off the Economist topic. Their point was quite a bit more limited than that, which you have a problem with. You seem to confuse ‘making a limited point about political difficulties’ with ‘supporting everything Bush does’. To make the point you want to make, you don’t need to quote the Economist at all. You use their words as a peg to go off on a huge tangent. This happens both in your analysis of the Economist and now in your analysis of my comments. Going on a tangent is fine. Going on tangents while pretending to remain in touch with the text you quote and asking other people to stay on topic is just weird.

Now now, Henry—I don’t think that’s what he’s saying at all. He’s only saying that the people who believe a lie are, at the end of the day, far more blameworthy than the people who tell it.

You quote a classic of the genre (and for people not even in the committee):

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Less than 100 pages and practically no one could be bothered.

The specific doubts you worried about, and I quote, “and knew that the claims about aluminium tubes etc were bogus” well known issues of dispute at the time and had been hashed back and forth since May 2001 (even before 9/11). Even non-Committee Congressmen knew that was a disputed issue. The problems you have publically worried about for years now were known at the time. And the Niger “Saddam was seeking uranium” issue has gotten better for the administration since Wilson admitted that Moham-med Saeed al-Sahaf went to Niger, and that the prime minister interpreted his overtures as seeking uranium, and that when rebuffed al-Sahaf did not continue seeking ‘trade relations’, and no one can come up with a good non-uranium reason for al-Sahaf to go to Niger.

Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. … Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers.

The first clause is obvious. The Committee does not literally read all CIA reports. The second clause is not accurate, the Committee can and does seek reports through other channels. The last sentence is just stupid. The Daily Brief doesn’t go to lawmakers, but the information in it usually does. And the Daily Brief isn’t even particularly an issue anyway. You are complaining about much lower-level reports. The kind of things you are looking for don’t typically show up in the daily brief.

Furthermore, you might note that this gives no excuse whatsoever for voting for the war if you thought the intelligence was bad:

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release.

For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

How bad is this reporter? First, the fact that you can’t publicize something on the floor is no excuse whatsoever to vote for the war if you think the intelligence is faulty. Second, an example of something cleared for public use isn’t an example of something not cleared for public use, one day before the vote or not. (It would be a valid complaint if after the vote or minutes before the vote—though if it was a going concern, minutes before should be enough time because those opposed who already know about it, just not able to talk publically about it). Third, we are placed in the position of being forced to believe that the CIA, which you argue couldn’t get all sorts of physical issues right (going back at least as far as Clinton), was correct in its assessment of Saddam despite the historical evidence to the contrary. He had a documented history of using banned chemical weapons in non-backed-in-a-corner situations and he had a documented history of being reckless (invasion of Iran, invasion of Kuwait, assassination attempt of Bush I, protecting a bomber from the first WTC attack).

And once again the Intelligence Committee members knew all that. They had the report with all the information you claim they needed to know. They knew the issues you claim they needed to be aware of. They still voted for the authorization of force.

So to reiterate:

But your claim that Democrats on the Intelligence Committee or elsewhere had access to “more or less the same intelligence” is demonstrably untrue. Perhaps you’d care to withdraw it, and start looking for a new talking point.

is just you being rude. They did have more or less the same intelligence. They were aware of the issues you regularly flog. Almost all of the issues you talk about were available to Senate Intelligence Committee members at the time. They received reports sufficient to alert them to conflicting intelligence on the issues you seem to think were crucial. They still voted for the authorization. I suspect they did it because they don’t have a silly view that intelligence is ever 100% verifiably correct before the fact on anything. This is especially true in nuclear affairs—see the nuclearization intelligence failures regarding India, Pakistan, and pre-Gulf War I Iraq. I would think someone with your academic specialty might be aware of those.

Actually, I filed The Economist in the “funny pages” section after they ran a front page story in about 1998, “explaining” that the left wouldn’t allow the impeachment of Clinton because they were all starry-eyed and hero-worshippy, which is about as far from observable reality as possible before you get into CLINTON BODY COUNT land.
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I cancelled my subscription when they slandered Susan Sontag—and every thinking person who dared to question the empty patriotism and idiotic foreign policy of our current government.

The very clear tenor of the obituary they penned, and their subsequent response to those who criticized it, indicates that the editors of the Economist care neither for fact nor reason.