Cheney attacks war critics

Nothing new about that but what is new is that Knight Ridder deconstructs and exposes Cheney's lies. They debunk the already tired claim that Congress had the same intelligence as the White House was privy to and the administration's ridiculous assertion that Congress authorized the removal of Saddam when in fact they merely authorized defensive action against what we now know were the ficitional WMDs. And this point is particularly good.

ASSERTION: In a Veterans Day speech last Friday, Bush said that Iraq war "critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."

CONTEXT: ..."Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that was not part of our inquiry," Silberman said when he released the panel's findings in March.

...the committee found that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, analysts were under pressure to avoid missing credible threats, and as a result they were "bold and assertive" in making terrorist links.

In a July 2003 report, a CIA review panel found that agency analysts were subjected to "steady and heavy" requests from administration officials for evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, which created "significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection."

So in other words, while the committee concluded the intelligence community was not pressured to change it's findings, it was pressured to come up with findings that supported the foregone conclusions of the White House.

More at Talking Points Memo and Mahablog.