This came up during the Moore vs. O'Reilly Showdown in Beantow. The spectacle started out like this:
BILL O'REILLY, HOST: The issues... all right good. Now, one of the issues is you because you've been calling Bush a liar on weapons of mass destruction, the Senate Intelligence Committee, Lord Butler's investigation in Britain and now the 9/11 Commission have all come out and said there was no lying on the part of President Bush. Plus, Vladimir Putin has said his intelligence told Bush there were weapons of mass destruction. Wanna apologize to the president now or later?
MOORE: He didn't tell the truth, he said there were weapons of mass destruction.
O'REILLY: Yeah, but he didn't lie, he was misinformed by -- all of those investigations come to the same conclusion. That's not a lie.
MOORE: Uh huh. So, in other words, if I told you right now that nothing was going on down here on the stage...
Moore blew it right here. First of all, the 9/11 Commission doesn't say anything about Bush's statements on Iraq. The 9/11 Commission dealt oddly enough with 9/11, and not Iraq (except as to al Qaeda). O'Reilly misspoke (to put it kinder than he would). He meant the Senate Intelligence Committee report on prewar intelligence. O'Reilly has previously said:
"President Bush, who's being accused of many things, <and> some of them <are> flat-out untrue. For example, the Senate Intelligence Committee "did not find any evidence that the Bush administration attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgment" on WMDs in Iraq -- so reads conclusion 83 of the Senate report.
Thus, all the bomb-throwers who accuse Mr. Bush of lying about WMDs have been dishonorable. They were wrong and had no proof to begin with. They are guilty of a slander, a dishonorable act."
So he got the report right that time. But that report doesn't say Bush didn't lie. It only said intelligence analysts were not coerced. Two separate issues. O'Reilly was WRONG (if only I had a nickel for every...). Also as Brock reports, that conclusion as to coercion was not unanimous. And strike 3 is that this was only Phase 1 of the senate's report which only dealt with the quality of the intelligence. Phase 2 of the report will deal with how the Bushies handled the intelligence (which conveniently won't be released until after the election).
I saw Hannity make the same mistake when he had Janeane Garofalo on. He said the same thing about Bush not lying because the 9/11 Commission said so. (Did the mistake originate in the Fox morning memo?) Janeane failed to challenge him on this as well. :(
Ok so I hope it's settled that they can't use the 9/11 report or the Intelligence report to defend Bush on this issue. Besides, Bush (and his officials) did lie and we already have plenty of evidence. My favorite one is the aluminum tubes. As some of you probably remember, when those statements were being made, there were stories out that the IAEA had concluded that the tubes could not be used for nukes. So if we knew that, they also had to know it, but they kept hammering away about the scary "aluminum tubes" in several public statements, including Bush in 9/02, 10/02, and 1/03, as well as by Powell in his UN testimony. You can find those statements at Mr. Waxman's Wonderful Page of Deceptions. You will also find many other statements of dubious content that they had to know were suspect.
The Senate report on prewar intelligence itself cites many conclusions in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting provided to the Committee." So some people at least at the analyst level knew they were making misstatements in the NIE. That in of itself also leads me to believe the analysts were pressured to do their job in a biased manner. Barring severe incompetence, why else would they report findings "not supported by the underlying intelligence"?
The only deniability Bush has left is that he can't ever be lying because he only says what they tell him to say without any understanding of what he's saying - the lowered expectations syndrome. But the rest of them knew they were lying.
Moore is wrong in going easy on him by asserting Bush was lying simply for saying things that they only found out later were not true. They knew those things weren't true when they said them.
Bush did lie. Let's kill that meme.
p.s. you can edit now! yay!