.  .  . Bush and his advisors were convinced that professional intelligence analysts were once again asleep at the switch.

Have you answered the question (I haven't read your book) of why "Bush and his advisors" felt it necessary to chase Hans Blick and El Baredei out of Iraq before their investigations were completed.

And offered a judgment of whether you believe their actions were taken in good faith. 

This discussion is, in part, about reactionary polar thinking.  I see the same thing happening in response to radical right wing religion issues.  The knee-jerk response from the left is loaded with anger and generalizations about Christians, which reveals a degree of intolerance that resembles the very group they are reacting to.

Not everything you know is true, James. You're a smart guy and you've done your homework. But James, so have we.
The Bush administration is filled with fanatic true believers. That is a fact. The Bush administration lies about nearly everything. That is also fact. 
To acknowledge one and deny the other is to misunderstand what these people have been doing, and how they've been doing it.
I'll grant you an excess of zeal. And that's precisely the reason they lied. They assumed they would certainly find the evidence even if they didn't have any real evidence beforehand. How could there be NO WMD in Iraq? After all, he had gassed his own people, for heaven's sake! But there weren't. They gambled no one would notice the lies because they would find at least something. But they didn't.
Now, there are lies and there are lies. Bush employed both kinds and invented a few I'd never seen before. I wish they had worked as hard running the country.
As for evidence, I have seen no evidence, none at all, that the Bush administration can be trusted to tell the truth. Need some examples of Bush lies?  
We can start with Jessica Lynch, a trivial lie. We can move to the denials about officially approved torture at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and in Afghanistan, a gruesome obscene lie. And then there's lies no one's acknowledged in the US, like the rigging of the Loya Jirga to ensure a Karzai win. Not to mention the utterly false portrayal of Afghanistan as success when it could be more accurately called a disaster. And let's not go to Tora Bora and the serial lies about the escape of bin Laden, who was indisputably there.
As for Iraq, they lied about the wmd, they lied about the ease of the war, they lied about the Iraqi oil capacity to pay for the war, they even lied about the looting of the Iraqi museum. They lied about the nature of the opposition. And on, and on, and on, and on.
And of course, who can forget the fake reporters - one a gay hooker no less - who were paid to flack for the administration? Or the tax cuts for the very rich which they flat out lied about? 
And the biggest lie of all? If we don't act now, we may hear from Saddam in the shape of a mushroom cloud over one of our fair cities.
Now you can go through all of the above and quibble a la John Cleese. That's not a lie, that's a misrepresentation. That's not a lie, that's just a mistake in the fog of war. But look at the sheer amount of them, my friend. 
These people are fanatics AND they are liars. They lied and are still lying about the Iraq war.
And that is the truth. 

Indeed - that's always the real question.  The argument in America Unbound as explained in the post offers a strong explanation of how we ended up ready to go to war in February 2002, Bush's finger poised over the button. 

And the explanation seems to cover not just the Administration, but many liberal hawks and even most of the "Balking Hawks" - those who might have been expected to support the war but did not or withdrew their support shortly prior to the invasion (Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall, and others spring to mind).

But why was the button pressed in March?  By that time, they were finding out through the IAEA inspectors what we now know: no WMDs, no yellow-cake, no programs... Why follow through?  Was it blindness, caused by zeal and groupthink, a refusal to agree with the evidence?  Or was it a decision taken out of fear: that not invading would be weakness, that admitting there were no WMD would be taken as evidence of incompetence?  Or was it a more strategic fear that perhaps Saddam would in the future rebuild his programs and so needed to be stopped regardless of the status of his WMD?

Mr. Lindsay:

Your argument appears to work when you look at the big picture. I'm not sure it holds up, however, when you actually examine the details.

I believe that the evidence supports that the Administration lied about three specific claims:

(1) Aluminum Tubes: The Administration lied when it claimed that Iraq's purchase of nuclear tubes constituted evidence that it was re-constituting its nuclear program. DOE knew this wasn't true, and reported it to the press. The tubes were all wrong for nuclear usage. Yet the Administration persisted in repeating this claim and induced Judith Miller to publish an article on it, long after DOE had rejected the possibility that the tubes were connected to a nuclear use.

(2) Yellowcake from Niger: As we all know, this one has been wrong from the beginning and the CIA knew this rumor--that Iraq sought yellowcake uranium from Niger--was bogus as of 2001. Yet this bogus claim was repeated in the President's state of the union address, even after the same claim was removed from a speech he gave in October of 2002. The Administration knew this claim was bunk, yet they kept repeating it.

(3) Connections Between Iraq and Al Quaeda: This is another example of the Administration repeating a claim for which it had no support.

What's a Lie? These are all examples of the Administration stating a claim that they either (i) know is false; (2) know is likely false, or (3) have no grounds for believing is true. Under each scenario, I think it's clear that the conduct constitutes lying. At the very least, dismissing this conduct as mere "exaggeration" completely understates what is going on. For the sake of argument, even if you think these claims technically don't qualify as lies, they at least constitute mass deception by non-lying means.

So do you really want to persist in some metaphysical distinction between the administration's conduct and lying?

Tristero:

But if they sincerely believed they would find WMDs, notwithstanding evidence that was equivocal, they were not asserting something they knew to be untrue.  They were asserting something they believed was true. The issue concerns their mindset at the time they made these statements, not what the objective truth was.

My dictionary (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate) offers the following as definitions of the verb and noun "lie", respectively:

1. to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive (deceive it itself defined as "to cause to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid")
2. an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive.

The first definition passes on the question of whether the untrue statement was believed to be true or not true by the person making the assertion.  And the definition of "deceive" likewise passes on the question of whether the person asserting the claim knows or believes that it is false or invalid.  Because of the ambiguity left by these passes, it's possible to argue that (on one interpretation) a person is lying if they believe a claim is true, that the evidence is equivocal, and they represent the claim as unequivocally true.  Which is what the Administration did on WMDs in my opinion. 

Taking the second definition, the noun, one still has to have evidence of the mindset of the person making the claim.  The person making the claim has to believe or know the claim is false for it to be a lie.  And the person saying the other person told a lie has to know that the alleged liar believed or knew the statement was false. 

To take one of your other Iraq examples, in calling their statements about the ease of the war the work of liars, what makes you so sure they weren't incompetent fools instead?  Why isn't it more plausible to believe, based on the evidence so far, that they believed when they made the assertion that they would have an easy time of it, prior to screwing it up so badly that some people actually later believed they were lying--that they knew it would be the cluster**** it has turned out to be?

Whether or not your other examples of alleged lies hold up to critical scrutiny, since when does lying about one matter have relevance to whether someone is lying about another matter?

We sure heard the right wing make the bogus argument that Clinton's lying about Monica was evidence or even, somehow, "proof" that he was a serial liar or was lying about all manner of other things as well.  Clinton may or may not have lied about other things.  But his lying about Monica doesn't tell us whether he lied about other matters. 

Zeal is all about self-deception and premature suppression of whatever critical faculties a person has or might bring in interpreting a situation.  It's about wanting a fact to be true so badly that, instead of concluding from the inconclusiveness of the evidence that one might not really know something after all, that something instead is placed within the category of things which are true but simply cannot be proven yet. 

Troll rate this post if you care to.  But before you do I'd just like to add that my mindset on these issues is reflected in the chastisement Deep Throat gave to Woodward in one of the garage scenes in the movie "All the President's Men."  Woodward made a mistake, wrote something that he couldn't back up.  Deep Throat told him each time you shoot too high you set the whole investigation back.  He goes on to say that Woodward had gotten people feeling sorry for the Nixon crowd--and that he hadn't thought that was possible. Deep Throat was offering sage advice IMO, however maddening it was for the struggling, frustrated and exhausted Woodward to hear. 

I believe that if we, the loyal and patriotic opposition, overshoot the mark in the assertions we make about this Administration and the people in it, we risk causing some Americans, including some whose votes we want, to actually feel sorry for these guys. 
And that would be one of the worst and most ill-considered things we can do at this point, when our adversary is in the process of self-destructing before our eyes.
 

Luigi Vampa (as best as I can understand) argues that Iraq wasn't a threat to the United States so policymakers couldn't honestly believe it was a threat. This is a non sequitur.

As best you understand...

Here's the quotation from your book:

The claim that the Bush administration knowingly misled the country into war overlooks one key fact: American policy makers believed that Iraq possessed weapons of massive destruction and posed a threat to the United States long before Bush took office. Bill Clinton's policy toward Baghdad proceeded from the belief that Iraq had and was willing to use weapons of mass destruction.

Now, all you have to do is show where Clinton ever said or indicated that he thought Iraq was a threat to the U.S.  I've been looking at Clinton's major policy speeches on Iraq, and I haven't found it yet.  Without such evidence, it looks like you just made something up.  Not to accuse you of dishonesty or anything -- would hate to lump you in with Bush.

Just a comment. I don't believe the "slam dunk" quote. As far as I can guess, it is account George Bush gave to Woodward about his conversation with Tenet. It puts Bush in a good light and Tenet in a bad one. Did Woodward have any corroboration? Was Tenet bought off? Will we ever know? 

On the lying issue, Tristero has it right.  Indeed, on WMDs the question was not whether Saddam had any WMDs.  The question was whether the Administration (1) had powerful evidence that (2) his WMD program, unlike in previous years of the 90s, posed a near imminent threat.  Now we know from the much maligned movie -- maligned including by those supposedly progressive and often outspoken opponents of the war because of the truths in it rather than any alleged mistakes, as a matter of 'getting with the program and justifying the lying' -- Fahrenheit 9/11 both that (a) Powell and Rice had publicly AND accurately stated in 2001 that Saddam had been kept by the sanctions regime from reconstituting his WMD program, dismantled in the 90s, while being unable to project conventional OR WMD threats to his neighbors and that W Bush pressed his terrorism chief on 9/12 to find a link between 9/11 and Iraq, not asking about possible links to other countries and not even asking further questions about Al Qaeda.  This isn't rocket science.  The creep was looking for publicly plausible sounding pretexts for launching the war against Iraq that neoCons/aggressive nationalists/whatever-you-want-to-call-them warmongers then in his Administration had been pushing for since 1998.  Why is this so difficult for liberals to understand, and the media to honestly present? 

The bottom line about lying is it is part of the religion of the people in this Administration, arguably to a higher degree than any others for a long time.  But they believe in 'lying down' to the masses, in deciding on their 'expert calculations' and agendae to launch wars and then selling these wars to the public on the juiciest possible pretexts.  Kosovo was sold to the public on the basis of a pretext of preventing a genocide that was only triggered by the war itself.  The idea of telling the public anything that will get you over, as in seduction, is ingrained in the ruling elite.  It is like the notion of "pick hate" -- a higher value principle that is not to be questioned, nor tainted by such trivialities as 'eggplant tennis anyone' (the latter an issue only to be mechanically laundered anyway).  Big fish eats the little fish.  Take off your britches and sell out under ice.  These things are the governing philosophy and not only within this Administration, in which this approach to truth is distilled to new levels of purity.

    The problem is that lying is not limited to the W Bush Administration.  Others practice these same notions of lying down and justifying the lying, so confronting the lies of the Administration means you must necessarily also confront the 'justifying the lying' function of the mainstream media.  They aren't around to expose lies and explain even the most obvious truths to the public.  The media are a propaganda machine who are given certain lies to expose (as at the Repug Convention where they played gotcha with trivialities but steered clear of the Big One -- the flimsiness of the flipflop spin).  Then, down to the astroturf roots you have people, ideologically toilet trained to an ingrained acceptance of and furtherance of the justifying of the lying, practicing studied obtuseness when confronted with the obvious.

Just as an aside, here are some interesting examples of justifying the lying, as they have appeared in the NY Times, of a parrallel nature and both involving the mainstream media dutifully and preposterously covering for Bush and his Administration on issues of foreign policy.
In the first instance, candidate Bush was asked the leaders of four 'countries' -- Republic of China (Taiwan), India, Pakistan, and Chechnya.  Candidate Bush only answered the head of state of the ROC, who he had met.  Down to the astroturf roots (I heard my publisher/editor dad saying this at the time) the catechism was repeated that this was unfair gotcha, and unimportant, including from people who would insist to the heavens that they were true blue Democrats or at least supporting Gore (what I call 'credentialling').  An op-ed in the New York Times during the election season actually had the gall to state that JFK, during the campaign of 1960, might well not have known the names of four "obscure" world leaders. (Nehru?  are you kidding?).  India was not then and is not now 'obscure'; it is the most populous country on earth, and a pivotal nation in world and regional affairs.  But history was blatantly distorted, and on the oped page, to get with the program and justify the lying -- in a Democratic newspaper.  It isn't like Proudhon's rich and poor alike are forbidden from sleeping under bridges and begging in the streets; that is far too generous to the system.  Democrat and Repuglican alike have to cover Repuglican ass.  THAT's the system.

    A second example was quite recent (10/27).  Again, on the op-ed page of The New York Times someone wrote in a column about 'putting 2000 deaths in perspective' -- a pile of nonsense comparing the casualty level to WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Civil War -- but decided to simply go over the top again, rewriting history, speculatively.  Here, it was speculated that if you had Geraldo Rivera and Ted Koppel reporting on D-day, the public would have been disgusted and calling for an investigation and outraged by the incompetence of the whole thing etc. and quickly wearying of the effort.   Well first of all, you DID have Ted Koppel AND Geraldo Rivera covering the Iraq War itself, and it took years of being bogged down in a quagmire, with predictions that things would calm down being repeatedly false, and with the situation clearly not stabilizing, and with many other reported facts about a situation in a war that was sold on the basis of WMDs that never turned up before the public turned against the war.   And public resolve in WWII was extremely potent, much moreso than in WWI; many bloody battles were fought, including defeats for the allies especially in the early period, without any significant group inside or outside the media questioning the absolute necessity of fighting and winning WWII.  Again the rewriting of history is pure poppycock in service to getting with the program and justifying the lying.  There may be lip service paid to all kinds of whining about how kids don't know this or that about history.  But those protestations of concern are belied by the reality of what liberals actually do when the chips are down and that is to get with the program and justify the lying, including for the sake of parties and candidates they might sincerely oppose, and for the sake of wars they might sincerely oppose.  After all, to do otherwise would be "self referential", "arrogant" and "uncooperative" -- n'est ce pas?

Luigi - whether you or James find the Clinton "proof" is not important.  Prior to starting a war of choice the burden of proof should be very high. Just saying that Clinton knew or the British knew is not sufficient.  

That was actually a point I made elsewhere in this thread.  Look at the third paragraph after the quotation.

But Lindsay wants to keep things on a very narrow beam (why?): whether or not Bush was being honest, not whether or not Bush was being competent.  (It's my contention that the two are essentially intertwined in this case, but that's besides the point, and I'd hate to put Lindsay through another "as best I can tell" moment in explaining it).

Lindsay's argument is based on this: Bush believed what Clinton believed, so when Bush was talking about mushroom clouds and the like, he was being honest.  So now I want to see evidence that Clinton believed Iraq was a threat to the U.S.  It seems reasonable:  If you are basing your entire argument on what Clinton is supposed to have believed, you could at least be so helpful as to prove Clinton really believed it.  Daalder/Lindsay never do that in their book, and they haven't done it in their contributions to date.

cube - Is that true that only the book is the source?  It is so burned into my mind that it has become fact - appreciate the heads up.

If I go back to what I said slam dunk is still a pretty good test to go to war.  To one and all strike Tenet as the author of the phrase.

James, there are obviously two species of prevarication you are dealing with here: a. Lies about facts; b. Lies about beliefs about facts.

I think the charge that the Bush administration lied is, in fact, about the belief within the administration. The lie was that the administration thought Hussein constituted a serious and immediate threat.

All the analysis of all the information previous to the invasion will not, I think, sort this controversy out. Rather, to find out what the administration believed, look at the post-occupation search for WMD. Look for how much effort was put into it. Look for how it was conducted. Look for its thoroughness, and timeliness.

The reason for this is that belief and fact converged in 2003. And from what we know, the search for WMD, and indeed the guarding of weapons sites, was conducted with such carelessness that two conclusions are justified. Either, 
a. The Bush administration believed that mobile WMD in serious quantities was stored in Iraq, and was criminally negligent to an impeachable degree in trying to find it; or
b. The Bush administration believed that Hussein's WMD, if it existed, was second order and not really a threat. 

Your whole approach is founded on the idea that one can obtain clear answers by bracketing out the Bush administration behavior after the invasion, as if this is irrelevant. But that limit to your research project doesn't make any sense. The question of belief is the question of seriousness. You pre-suppose that the belief in WMD possession is the belief in the seriousness of the threat. Those are not, in fact, synonymous. The conviction that Bush lied is the conviction that Bush mislead us on the seriousness of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, upping the immediacy and extent of the threat with extreme claims that no subsequent action of Bush endorses.  

Tristero,

I had exactly the same reaction to Jim's post. He and Ivo are absolutely right that the war in Iraq was about zeal and conviction. And these two emotions tend to blind a person to reality. It hardly matters whether the lies were deliberate or not, but they were lies, even if some of them were lies in the same sense that Intelligent Design is a fabric of lies - all evidence must be made to bend to the "truth." Ivo and Jim seem too rational to be capable of understanding such a mind set.

Personally I expect politicians to lie - that's what they do so why is it a big deal whether Bush lied or not? The big deal is that their zeal is leading to disastrous consequences.

If it were me I'rather be had for lying to get the US into a justified and necessary war than condemned as an honest fool with convictions that produced tens of thousands of deaths. Unfortunately, Bush is a dishonest fool.

I don't expect politicians to lie about everything 24/7, no exceptions. Not in a country that pretends it has freedom of speech and press. 
It's not that Bush merely lies. It's that he lies about everything. It's that his administration has such utter contempt for the truth, they don't care even to hide that much when they undermine it, confident that people like James and Ivo will give them the benefit of a doubt.
After all, his minions and enablers arranged for a male hooker to masquerade as a reporter and actually ask questions at White House Press Conferences, and at least once to the president himself! 
And that masquerade is, of course, one more lie. I do not expect American politicans to hire male hookers to impersonate reporters. But that's what they did. 

And, along the same lines, what explanation do you offer for the Bush administration's behavior with respect to chemical and biological weapons proliferation?

In particular, how do you explain the U.S.-directed removal of Jose Bustani from the UN Office of Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on sudden and flimsy accusations of personnel mismanagement?

Commenters said at the time that Bustani's crime in U.S. eyes was to push for Iraq to join the OPCW and be included in inspections regimes.  Everything about the case supports this: the timing (January through April 2002), the fact that Bustani had been reelected only the year before with U.S. support, and the disproportion between the allegations and the U.S. determination to remove him (shown in the U.S. representatives' threat to withhold funds and violation of UN and OPCW process).

His firing was later found to be wrongful.

The Bustani firing is obscure, known only to Iraq war obsessives.  But what about the fact hidden in plain sight, which raised the suspicions of millions of Americans who'd believed the Bush line about weapons: the amazing fecklessness of the U.S. invasion and occupation forces with respect to securing Iraqi weapons facilities, IAEA-sealed and not?  How does that square with the idea that there was a serious concern with Iraq's weapons?

At every stage, the behavior of the Bush administration was not that of a government seriously concerned about Iraq's possession of weapons.  You accuse your critics of cherry-picking evidence, but it seems you ignore a great number of facts that all point in the same direction.

All the analysis of all the information previous to the invasion will not, I think, sort this controversy out. Rather, to find out what the administration believed, look at the post-occupation search for WMD. Look for how much effort was put into it. Look for how it was conducted. Look for its thoroughness, and timeliness.

Excellent point.

Not only did the invaders do much about finding WMD, they also left a huge stockpile of explosives wide open there just for the taking.

They secured the oil, not the weapons.

People can be incompetent in any way whatsoever, unfortunately.  Complete, utter, brain-dead stupidity knows no bounds. So, despite all the contrary evidence from their behavior, I must concede a reasonable possibility that the Bush Administration did believe their propaganda about WMD.

This brings up another issue.  When people spout propaganda, and we recognize it as propaganda, should we assume that they believe what they're saying?  Maybe if it's the common man on the street, but persons like Ashcroft, Rove, Rumsfeld, and Cheney?

As a non-technical type I am accustomed to working with engineers and scientists who have great pride in getting it right and great disdain for those of non-expert types who do not listen to try and understand.

What your piece this tells me is that Adminstration officials such as Colin Powell prior to his UN speech needed to have had a list of disitnerested experts to call in to give them technically sound analysis of things that require such - mobile labs, tubes for centrifuges. 

If officials with doubts could have called in disinterested tech types they could have had some facts and subsequent analysis to support their postions inside the government. Likewise Adminstration opponents outside the government, then and now, need someway to get some to do likewise.

For my curiousity, how could you and bretheren, who you may or may not know, be found and found fairly quickly? 

"For my curiousity, how could you and bretheren, who you may or may not know, be found and found fairly quickly?"

Ask the existing experts in the CIA. I firmly believe they are there. If not then a very high priority should be given to getting such experts into the CIA. Isn't that why the CIA exists? Isn't that (having competent experts in defense-related technical fields) what the CIA requires to be effective?

Note what Prados reported. When a joint CIA-DIA meeting was held to discuss the trailers only one agent believed the trailers were for WMD culture. All the rest (apparently) believed the trailers were for hydrogen production, which is the truth. The experts were there, in place, where they were needed. They applied their expertise and provided their analysis. That was disregarded in favor of the opinion of one analyst (Tenet misspoke when he said "analysts in his building" believed the trailers were for WMD culture: it was just one analyst. Note Tenet did not say he believed that nor did he say the CIA believed that, just that "analysts in his building" believed that. You have to pay careful attention to how things are said, pay attention to the difference between what is implied and what is explicitly stated. Tenet implied the trailers were for WMD culture and implied that was the belief but only said that "analysts in his building" believed that.)

If you read the white paper with the idea that the CIA employed competent experts in mind you have to wonder why people who knew the evidence indicated hydorgen manufacture was the purpose of the trailers would write such a bumbling, amateurish white paper: there would be a substantial risk that the falsity would be detected.

(I just answered the question "Why?" Did you catch that?)

After the white paper was released one of the authors was re-assigned in the CIA, one was sent to Iraq. Does that look like a reward or does that look like punishment? What might you do if you knew, from your expertise, that the purpose of the trailers was for hydrogen manufacture but nonetheless someone of high rank was feeding you nonsensical (to a technical person) arguments for why what you knew wasn't necessarily definitive? Might you finally say "OK" and put the nonsensical arguments made by that person of high rank in the required document, expecting that the nonsense would quickly be detected and used to discredit the report? The nonsense very obviously is in the white paper. The possible explanations for the presence of the nonsense in the report seem to be two:

1. Incompetence
2. Deliberate inclusion of nonsense despite knowing it was nonsense.

Other than the white paper all we see on the trailers (and also what we don't see but read about) shows that the experts correctly analyzed the trailers and did so and reported so prior to the release of the white paper. Doesn't that rule out reason 1, "incompetence"?

I've got a favored explanation(2.) Is there a reason 3 that I don't see because of my bias?

Think of the disdain you've seen. Might not such experts finally think "screw this guy - I'll put his garbage in the white paper so it comes back to bite him, which is just what he deserves" and then follow through?

My comment about outsiders was not that CIA or any other appropriate agency lacked expertise but with the political pressures people like Powell needed some experts who were not subject to political leaning.

I asked the question about finding experts because I pictured myself in Powell's position and needing to know if I should trust what they were telling me. His gut and experience told him to be oh so wary. What if there was a way to quickly tap outside experts.

I hadn't thought of the "oh well screw em" motivation but it is plausible. Working as a contractor with federal employees who had to deal with appointees the favorite phrase "we be here before them and we be here after them"  frequently shortened to "webees."