Lying About Terrorism

Last fall, Bush gave a speech just days before Congress voted to authorize war with Iraq. In that speech, Bush highlighted the immediate threat that Iraq posed to US security — it had weapons of mass destruction and ties with al Qaeda. Bush's assesment of the threat was unequivocal, but the intelligence backing up the speech was just the opposite.

Bush, in his speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, made his case that Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, by mentioning several items such as high-level contacts that "go back a decade." He said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks contained none of the caveats about the reliability of this information as contained in the national intelligence document, sources said.

Saying that Bush offered "none of the caveats" is a rather generous way to put it. Let's look at some of the specifics.

Bush: "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." But: "Bush did not indicate that the consensus of U.S. intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack against the United States only if he thought he could not stop the United States from invading Iraq."

Bush: Iraq and al Qaeda have "high-level contacts that go back a decade." But: "Bush also did not refer to the report's conclusion that those early contacts [in the early 1990s] had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources said."

Bush: a "very senior al Qaeda leader … received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." But: "U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said."