Simple...Bush lied, case closed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/29/op...82830e&ei=5040

George Bush, in Denial


President Bush needs to move things forward by starting -- or allowing
Congress to start -- an independent investigation that goes beyond the
British inquiry and looks into all aspects of the apparent
intelligence failures on Iraq.

Mr. Bush, whose aides had been plotting a war against Iraq practically
since Inauguration Day, has dodged questions about why the American
intelligence about Iraq was just as wrong as Britain's intelligence.

Vice President Dick Cheney continues to make outsized claims about
Iraq's prewar weapons programs, and the administration's allies
continue to grasp at straws.

It was painful yesterday morning to watch John Warner, chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, trying to drag some positive nuggets
from David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector.

After Dr. Kay said he had found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction and concluded that none would be found, Mr. Warner pounced
on the idea that Dr. Kay said he had accounted for "only" 85 percent
of Iraq's military programs.

So that, Mr. Warner said triumphantly, leaves 15 percent.

Yes, and in a few months it will be 10 percent, and months after that
5 percent, and the answers will almost certainly be the same:

Iraq destroyed its weapons and weapons programs long ago under the
pressure of the same United Nations inspectors that Mr. Bush and his
aides vilified in the months leading up to the war.

American intelligence was wrong in concluding that weapons existed,
and that robust programs to develop more were continuing.

Dr. Kay has repeatedly told the administration just that.

It has responded by trying to edit the rhetoric.

Rather than addressing the alarming failures of American intelligence,
Mr. Bush and his aides have gone from talking about weapons to talking
about weapons programs, and then, in the State of the Union address,
"weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

It is time to stop refining the spin and make a serious attempt to
find out where and how American intelligence went wrong.

The public also needs to know, as authoritatively as possible, whether
the administration made ambiguous intelligence seem certain for
political reasons or, worse, whether analysts were pressured to
exaggerate their intelligence.

It is easy to understand, tactically, why Mr. Bush is reluctant to do
that in an election year.

No matter how he and his aides try to change the subject to how
tyrannical Saddam Hussein was, it was the presence of chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq that Mr. Bush gave as his
justification for rushing into a war without real international
backing.

Dr. Kay said yesterday that he had seen no evidence of politically
twisted intelligence reporting before the war.

But he put it well when he said that "it's important to acknowledge
failure."

Only an independent panel can be trusted at this point to find out
what went wrong in Iraq and give the public some hope that another big
intelligence failure can be prevented in the future.