When you see a byline of Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus, you better duck. While Milbank has been a little full of himself since he started to get talking head gigs, he has still been one of this administration’s most vocal critics. And Pincus? Well, Pincus just rocks.

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

Before I even talk about the Washington Post article, I want to stipulate something. The Clinton administration also misled the public about the threat Saddam Hussein posed and the state of his WMD programs. They hyped the threat to help justify our continued presence in the region as enforcers of the embargo and protectors of the Kurds and Shi’a. The disinformation program was intended as much for a global audience as a domestic one.

And a second stipulation:

September 24, 1998: The House Judiciary Committee announces the committee will consider a resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Clinton in an open session on October 5 or October 6.

On September 29, 1998, the Iraq liberation act was referred to the House Committee on International Relations.

On October 20th it was passed from Congress to the President.

October 31, 1998

STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT

Today I am signing into law H.R. 4655, the “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.” This Act makes clear that it is the sense of the Congress that the United States should support those elements of the Iraqi opposition that advocate a very different future for Iraq than the bitter reality of internal repression and external aggression that the current regime in Baghdad now offers.

Clinton signed the act into law despite having opposed the bill’s passage. It was moment of tremendous jeopardy for Clinton’s presidency, and signing the act was probably the biggest foreign policy mistake of his two terms in office. It was effectively a declaration of war on Iraq, declaring our commitment to overthrow their government and appropriating money for that purpose. The next day, November 1st, Iraq officially stopped cooperating with the UNSCOM inspectors. By December the U.S. and Britian were bombing Iraq in retaliation.

So, the GOP is correct when they point to assertions by the Clinton administration that Saddam had WMD and posed a serious threat. But the problem with using that argument is that the Clinton administration was lying too, their policy sucked too, and, most importantly, Clinton didn’t invade Iraq.

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As for the current state of affairs, the administration is lying again. Surprised?

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.”

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

There is a lot more to it. Stephen Hadley was the official that took the blame for the 16 words about Niger in the State of the Union speech, and offered to resign (he was promoted). Hadley was the recipient of an email by Karl Rove that exposed Rove’s call to Matthew Cooper in l’affair Plame.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Pat Roberts, has refused to investigate the administration’s manipulation of intelligence, and that is why Senator Reid forced the Senate into secret session last week.

The Silberman-Robb commission was not allowed to look into the issue of items like the role of the Office of Special Plans, or the White House Iraq Group. But those groups are exactly what needs to be investigated.

The administration first denies they had a role in fudging the intelligence, and then they assert that Congress had access to the same intelligence and drew the same conclusions. That’s not exactly true.

Bush asserted that “more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” Giving a preview of Bush’s speech, Hadley had said that “we all looked at the same intelligence.”

But 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.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Even within the Bush administration, not everybody consistently viewed Iraq as what Hadley called “an enormous threat.” In a news conference in February 2001 in Egypt, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said of the economic sanctions against Hussein’s Iraq: “Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.”

It’s nice to see that Powell quote in the MSM again. I mostly see it on conspiracy sites.

It’s painfully obvious that Congress, on a bipartisan basis, did not do a good job in lead-up to the Iraq war. It’s pathetic that so few Congresspeople read the full NIE. But the NIE was filled with crap. And the administration was aware that the NIE was filled with crap. Most congresspeople were not aware of that fact.

And when you begin to have doubts about how much responsibility the administration has for the crap in the NIE, remember that Colin Powell refused to use most of the intelligence provide to him by Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby, and he still got almost every single fact wrong. The sources he used were discredited, or doubted by analysts in the DIA or the CIA or the INR or the Energy Department.

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that “it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: “When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support.”

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce “all relevant Security Council resolutions,” and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend “against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

So, who is being deeply irresponsible? Who is rewriting history?