Left I on the News

Responding to Scott McClellan's new book, former Bush administration communications director Dan Bartlett had this to say:

"The fact of the matter was the weapons of mass destruction were not there. The intelligence was wrong. But that doesn't make people out to be liars or manipulators or propagandists. It makes them wrong."

I'm forced to repeat something I've said many times, for example here last year:

And that [that they weren't lying] might be true, if they had said to the American public, "We think Iraq has WMD" or "Our most reliable evidence strongly suggests that Iraq has WMD" or something along that lines. As soon as they said "We know Iraq has WMD," they were lying, just as surely as if they had said "The moon is made of green cheese" without ever having been to the moon to subject it to a taste test (which has been done, by the way).

But, of course, they didn't say they "think," they presented it to the American public as a certainty. Why? Because as illegal as it was to invade a country which wasn't threatening the U.S., the American people could still be brought to support a war given the certainty that Iraq had WMD (not that they would have used them against the U.S. even if they had). But only given the likelihood or even just the possibility that Iraq had WMD, that support would have been much harder to obtain. So they lied. Flat out lied, Bartlett and everyone else who tries to pass off that "honest mistake" nonsense to the contrary.