WTF
Shameless revisionism – That is what Cheney has accused those who have said that the administration may have misled them with their use of intelligence that was known to be faulty.
The story goes that they had access to the same intelligence as the Whitehouse therefore to now claim that they were misled is “rewriting history.” They would certainly be right, a fact which they are no doubt banking on to give there claim the appearance of credibility, but there is one problem, it isn’t true. The executive branch gets the raw intelligence reports where the legislature gets the polished final product, which I might add the president’s cabinet has signed off on, in some cases emphasizing some aspects of a report, while de-emphasizing other aspects of the same report.
In other cases, they completely fail to mention important information about how information was obtained, as in the case of DITSUM # 044-02, a DIA memo which was received by the Whitehouse in February of 2002 and cautioned that the source providing the primary information on the Al Qaeda – Iraq link was likely to be very unreliable. “It is possible [he] does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.” While this report made it to the Whitehouse, it isn’t clear that congress was ever made aware of this information, and 8 months later, President Bush used this claim by this individual to make the case for war, an until 2004, continued to do so.
It seems to me that by the administration making this claim of “we all saw the same intelligence”, they are in fact themselves, rewriting history.