A striking story from the notoriously rightwing, Bush-adoring NYT:
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The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03documents.html?ei=5090&en=ba99ceafb0f67900&ex=1320210000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
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The trouble with the Bush/Blair lied argument over Iraq is that we don't know whether the respective leaders believed what they said at the time.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, did they intend to mislead?
And I say that as someone who has never voted for Mr. Blair's Labour Party.