Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Iraq intel: Dick Durbin opens the kimono a bit too far
Dick Durbin has declared that as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee he knew ex ante that the Bush administration was lying about the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
“I was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and I would read the headlines in the paper in the morning and I'd watch the television newscast and I'd shake my head. …[T]he information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it.”
“You see, in the Intelligence Committee, we're sworn to secrecy. We can't walk outside the door and say, ‘The statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that's being given to this Congress.’” (Sen. Dick Durbin, Floor Speech, 04/25/07)
Oops. As the linked post makes clear, either Durbin is lying now or Senators Carl Levin, John Rockefeller, Evan Bayh and Harry Reid were lying then.
So, what did the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee know, and when did they know it? Somehow, we doubt the Washington press corps is curious enough to figure out the answer, or even to ask the question.
8 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Apr 26, 12:50:00 AM:
And as we know BILL CLINTON lied everytime his mouth was open SQUAWK SQUAWK
By 
Gordon Smith, at
Thu Apr 26, 08:05:00 AM:
Huh?
Cardinalpark isn't going to like you talking about how much lying went on in the run-up to the war.
You've got an enormous cheek to focus on Democrats lying about Bush's lies without any scrutiny of the administration itself. With word that Bush was using government agencies as think tanks for Republican elections, with Gonzo's utterly absurd lying performance last week, with the lies about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch you're going to get on your high horse about a guy who kept his mouth shut when he shouldn't have?
Bollocks.
By TigerHawk, at
Thu Apr 26, 08:12:00 AM:
Screwy,
Perhaps I was being too subtle. Of course I don't think that people lied about the intelligence in the run-up to the war. Nor do I think that those other Senators were being disingenuous then (even if some of them have been now).
The point is, Dick Durbin is just completely full of it. He has become so enamored of the "cooked intelligence" meme, which is really viewing the judgments of that day through a "retrospectoscope," that he is at best making up new memories to conform to his current political position. My (I thought obvious) point is that in his revisionism Durbin has fairly severely sandbagged his colleagues. That, I think, is the most powerful evidence that Durbin is deceiving himself, and perhaps us, about the deliberations of the Senate Intelligence Committee four years ago.
By , at
Thu Apr 26, 01:27:00 PM:
Based on what appears over Screwy Hoolie's name, being too subtle for him is virtually impossible to avoid. So - speaking as a resident of Illinois - I'll make my point using language that is the equivalent of spelling it out in big, block letters: Dick "Gitmo Gulag" Durbin is a laughably shallow and transparently partisan hack who would have to expand his IQ by at least one order of magnitude to be half as swift as the average fencepost.
By Christopher Chambers, at
Thu Apr 26, 02:05:00 PM:
I dunno..maybe Bil Moyer's documentary will ask that very question of the DC press corps--the same one your cadre accuses of being too liberal apparently swallowed the war hook line and sinker (maybe they were smoking/mainlining what Rush was doing--by the way we all LOVED "Obama de Magical Negro" produced by Rush on his website...but that's for my blog).
By Georg Felis, at
Thu Apr 26, 03:55:00 PM:
I have not actually watched
Bill Moyers PBS special on the intel in the run-up to the war, but I’ll bet I can summarize it in a few sentences. “We wuz Deceived! We wuz lied to. Those evil Neocons wanted us to report what we did, and they wanted the war. But we’re smarter now, that’s why you should believe us now and ignore what we told you back then.”
Am I close?
By Cardinalpark, at
Fri Apr 27, 10:55:00 AM:
Guys - what was the "lie" from the intelligence exactly anyway? It's intel. That Iraq had or was intent on developing WMD? Whether or not we have discovered post war that Iraq did or did not have significant stockpiles of WMD doesn't mean anybody lied. Intel is imperfect. And as has been written pretty much by everybody on the planet, every intel agency in the world thought Saddam Hussein was producing or trying to produce WMD, and hiding it. And furthermore, he was ACTING like he was.
That's why the lie meme that Screwy whips around with other lefty types is frankly hilarious. Even Joe Wilson has been debunked in that regard.
I can't beleive people waste their breath on this stuff anymore.
As for Durbin, he's just ridiculous.
But then, I LOVE gitmo and have the t-shirts to prove it.
By , at
Sat May 05, 09:20:00 AM:
I am constantly amazed at how much smarter the right leaning average American is than a Democrat congressman AND how much smarter the average left leaning American is than a Republican congressman.
If only we all had the courage of our convictions and ran for office. What an improvement we could make in America.
