The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus conclude in a Saturday piece of “news analysis” that the Bush Administration lies when it says that the BushLied™ Democrats saw the same pre-war intelligence as did the President and that “independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.” The reporters’ arguments are that Bush had access to more intelligence than did the BushLied™ Dems and that the commissions were not authorized to evaluate whether or not BushLied™.

But the Post is lying. In his speech yesterday, the President said only that the BushLied™ Dems “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.” Milbank and Pincus concede this, but go on anyway as if the President had said that the commissions had found in no uncertain terms that intelligence had not been manipulated. But the reporters concede that the commission found that the “administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions.”

read on…

The reporters try to base their BushLied™ contention on a bit from National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley Thursday:

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered “the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence.” He said that “those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen.”

That assertion by the reporters deserves an asterisk. At the briefing [transcript], Hadley said:

Seventy-seven senators, representing both sides of the aisle, the previous administration, and foreign governments around the world all believed, based on the same intelligence, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and imposed an enormous threat to his neighbors and to the world at large.

The President created the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission to examine our intelligence system. Their report in March of last year states: “The commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community’s prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs.”

To ensure our policymakers received the best intelligence, the President worked with the Congress to implement broad recommendations for intelligence reform. I point out that some of the critics today believed, themselves, in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapon of mass destruction, they stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people. For those critics to ignore their own past statements, exposes the hollowness of their current attacks. [emphasis mine]

He said that Silberman-Robb found no evidence to support the contention that intelligence was manipulated. If when answering a question he said that they had found that any manipulation “did not happen,” that was a mistake already countered by his prepared remarks; it was not an official administration assertion.

On the pre-war intelligence matter, the reporters insist that “Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community’s views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.”

This asserts, for their argument to stand, that the President based his decision to go to Congress solely on the Daily Brief, which has never been elsewhere claimed. It also concedes that Congress did have the Iraq Intelligence Estimate before the vote.

These two assert that the President’s argument deserves asterisks. Actually, the asterisks are more needed with their “analysis,” and it probably should not have been printed.