Bush War Lies #26

Actually, this installment should properly be called Blair War Lies, but Bush repeated them, so they are his lies too.

From yesterday's Washington Post, in a story by Glenn Frankel:

The public inquiry into the apparent suicide of a British weapons expert has opened a rare window on how Prime Minister Tony Blair used Britain's intelligence services to help sell the case for war in Iraq to a reluctant public.

Eight days of testimony have shown how Blair's top aides worked closely with senior intelligence officials in compiling a dossier for public distribution, pressing for changes that sharpened the language and conclusions in the document.

The judicial inquiry has heard testimony that at least two intelligence officials raised objections to this process, as did David Kelly, the weapons expert. He told a BBC reporter that the process of turning raw intelligence data into a polished document had led to distortions that made the threat posed by Iraq appear more imminent and alarming than it really was.

(emphasis mine)

Well, well, well. So the Blair dossier -- which Bush quoted in his lie-filled State of the Union speech -- was distorted. Fancy that.

Of course, some would argue that we can't fault Bush for repeating what Blair's office lied about. Except that as the other 25 installments of this series show with full documentation, Bush knew perfectly well that the dossier wasn't true. The Cheney-Rumsfeld-led intelligence force that compiled our "dossier of bullshit" fed bits to the Brits, and when they used those bits of hyperbole to "sex up" their documents, it was cited by the very people who had made the stuff up in the first place as proof that it must be true, or at least credible.

Salvador Dali must be laughing his ass off in the astral plane by now.

Somebody asked me the other day why there are so few comments on this series, when the blog itself gets a respectable 70 or so people checking it out every day (on average). There are, I told them, three possible answers:

1. They do not know that they can click on the word "comments" at the end of each story to add their own comments.

2. The comment system is periodically (and randomly) offline and not present. (curse you, enetation!)

3. They agree with my comments to the point that they do not feel motivated to add their own.

I'm hopeful that reason #3 is the prevailing sentiment. :)