By Scott Wright

With all the bloviating lately from Bush and his bodyguards (Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al.) about the lack of patriotism on the part of anyone who dares question the administration's truthfulness regarding pre-war intelligence, you might think such questions would slowly fade into the ether.

A year or two ago, perhaps that would have been the case. But the president is looking more and more incompetent every day. His advisors and close Republican cohorts are turning out to be a bunch of crooks and liars. Suddenly, it's not so far-fetched to believe that the same bunch that has lied about so many other policy decisions might have lied about why we went to war.

Unfortunately for the president and his ilk -- but thankfully for the rest of us and the ideals of democracy -- the talk of that very possibility is steadily becoming a sustained murmur. I for one hope the conversation quickly escalates to the level of a cacophonic call for criminal charges, should they prove warranted. (I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one.)

Whether the president lied or not, it's nice to finally find my opinion regarding the war in Iraq to be in the majority. Early on, I drank the Kool-Aid, too, I admit. But I came around quickly, probably because I was of the opinion that Bush is an idiot long before he set out to prove it to the rest of the world by his mindless actions.

Anyway, over the past few days the "you're unpatriotic" rhetoric has softened a bit. Hawkish Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are switching sides, calling for more congressional oversight of the war and openly challenging what they increasingly see as a level of secrecy regarding pre-war intelligence.

Last week, former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida repeated a charge he has been making since May 2003. In a Washington Post editorial on Nov. 20, Graham wrote that in February 2002, while he was still chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Gen. Tommy Franks told him the war in Afghanistan was "being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for a war in Iraq." A year later, American forces invaded.

Graham also wrote that after speaking with Franks, he asked CIA Director George Tenet to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) after he learned from Tenet -- much to his dismay -- that Bush had not already requested one. Tenet eventually provided a 90-page document that hinted weapons of mass destruction might exist, but also "contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information." Tenet also admitted to Graham's committee that most of the information pointing towards to existence of WMDs "had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States." In other words, we had no spies on the ground, instead relying on hearsay and rumor passed along by Iraqi defectors inclined to say almost anything.

Graham said he felt the American public deserved to know the info, so he requested a shorter, unclassified version of the NIE. Graham said he was shocked a short time later to read the final version of the document Tenet provided for public consumption.

"It represented an unqualified case that Saddam possessed (WMDs) ... and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version," he wrote.
Graham said the strategy caused him "to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing it."

Just last week, Murray Waas wrote in the National Journal that the Bush administration is still fighting to keep secret a Sept. 21, 2001 intelligence briefing that states the U.S. intelligence community had absolutely no evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda. According to the story in the Journal, the brief actually informed the president that Saddam was interested in having Iraqi agents infiltrate the group because he considered al-Qaeda "a potential threat to his secular regime."

Graham's successors on the Senate Intelligence Committee have asked to see this document, the Journal reported, but Bush has repeatedly refused to turn it over.

"What the president was told on Sept. 21," one former high-level official said in the Journal article, "was consistent with everything he has been told since -- that the evidence was just not there." Still, on Sept. 25, 2002 President Bush said, "You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

Folks, if that Journal report is accurate and that former official is being honest, then Bush was lying on Sept. 25, plain and simple. Maybe Bush will show is the intelligence briefing and we can settle this issue, once and for all. Wonder why he won't do that?

On Nov. 14, the Pentagon inspector general announced an investigation into whether Bush advisor Douglas Feith used a covertly established "Iraqi intelligence" group to feed bogus information about Iraq and al-Qaeda to the American public. The secret unit allegedly engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities."

Former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg, arrested last week for protesting in front of Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, said it best: "Those of us who finally saw through Vietnam saw through this war ... I think the American people will get us out of this (one)."

If this president is telling the kinds of lies Nixon told 30 years ago, I hope Ellsberg is right about getting our soldiers out of there. Let's just hope it doesn't take eight long years to extricate ourselves from this particular snafu.

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.