Impeach Bush?

[davefoc]

Just wanted to add:

1. I am against any impeachment of Bush because I don't think impeachments should be used for such non-serious charges. So the intel was wrong and Bush cherry-picked his data. There was still ample evidence that pointed to Saddam having WMDs or trying to get them.

2. Politically it would kill the Democrats to do this as it would only be perceived as payback. Without some sort of criminal charge, impeachment looks petty IMO.

3. It is only two short years til Bush is gone. I think the country will survive.

...

I agree with this also. Maybe the strongest argument is that most of the information about Bush's misrepresentation of pre-war intelligence was available before his election in 2004 and the people voted to retain him as president anyway. Attempting to him impeach him now for that misrepresentation would be politically very problematic.

 

[Crossbow]

Well, let's look at the most authoritative source on the topic:
http://www.wmd.gov/report/index.html

It is true that Bush did not share certain "intelligence" with Congress. But what was not shared consists mainly of the Presidential Daily Briefings. Chapter 1 of the Silverman-Robb commission report (available at the above link) notes:
"Our study also revealed deficiencies in particular intelligence products that are used to convey intelligence information to senior policymakers. As noted above, during the course of its investigation the Commission reviewed a number of articles from the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) relating to Iraq’s WMD programs. Not surprisingly, many of the flaws in other intelligence products can also be found in the PDBs. But we found some flaws that were inherent in the format of the PDBs—a series of short “articles” often based on current intelligence reporting that are presented to the President each morning. Their brevity leaves little room for doubts or nuance—and their “headlines” designed to grab the reader’s attention leave no room at all. Also, a daily drumbeat of reports on the same topic gives an impression of confirming evidence, even when the reports all come from the same source."

In other words, had Congress been reading the PDB's, they likely would have gotten an even stronger impression that Saddam had WMD's than they did in fact get.

I want to end with another quote from that chapter:
"These are errors—serious errors. But these errors stem from poor tradecraft and poor management. The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."

Um, that is just the problem with PDBs.

The President drives the issues and topics covered in the PDBs by the questions he is asked. Bush kept on asking about Iraq, WMDs, links to terrorism, and so on, therefore the staff figured out pretty quick that Bush wanted to go after Saddam, therefore if they wanted to get in good with the boss, then they had better adjust PDBs accordingly.

Of course, no one in authority would actually order an analyst to change his judgements based on what the President wants to see. However, there all kinds of ways a supervisor can use his position to get what he wants from his suboardinates that falls short of an actual order but clearly communicates just what is desired.

But anyway, there is also a great deal of other information besides what was in the PDBs.

If the Congress actually had the same data as did Bush (as Bush originally claimed), then it is quite likely that at least a few people in Congress would have noted that the data was out of date, came from a single source, based on unconfirmed data, and involved the use of confabulators who were looking to gain money and/or power from the demise of Saddam.

 

[Ziggurat]

Your new claim is that the format of the data presentation to Bush made the case for WMD better than the format of the data that was presented to congress not that there was actually any data that Bush had that congress didn't with regard to the WMD question.

We're running into a semantics problem, which is partly my fault but is also widely shared both in this thread and outside. We should, in fact, distinguish between "data" and "intelligence", and I have been guilty of using the two interchangeably when they are not. This has obscured my position and made debate more difficult, for which I appologize.

A PDB represents intelligence which is not shared with congress. It is based upon data which is often not included in the PDB itself, but which also forms the basis for other intelligence products (such as the NIE) which are made available to congress. Neither congress, nor the president, nor their respective staffs reviewed all the data, or even most of it: that's not their job, that's the job of the intelligence community.

Now, what was withheld from Congress but shown to President Bush which has people in a tizzy? Data or intelligence? Intelligence. So when evaluating what Bush knew or should have known compared to what Congress knew or should have known, it's the intelligence, not the data, which is the relevant variable. Possibly even solely the PDB's (I haven't seen any indication that other intelligence was witheld, though feel free to correct me if you know of anything else). There is no indication that the intelligence available to congress was not based upon the same data set as the intelligence available to Bush. So the impression created by the PDB's is very much to the point regarding what Bush knew (or thought he knew) versus what Congress knew.

If Bush did have data more compelling than the musings of a wacked out guy living in Germany about Iraqi chemical weapons programs

Are you refering to Curveball? Again, let's go to the source I posted above:

"The Commission also learned that, on the eve of war, the Intelligence Community failed to convey important information to policymakers. After the October 2002 NIE was published, but before Secretary of State Powell made his address about Iraq’s WMD programs to the United Nations, serious doubts became known within the Intelligence Community about Curveball, the aforementioned human intelligence source whose reporting was so critical to the Intelligence Community’s pre-war biological warfare assessments. These doubts never found their way to Secretary Powell, who was at that time attempting to strip questionable information from his speech."
(emphasis mine)