More Positive Proof that Bush Lied

from Barton Gelman and Dafne Linzer assisted by Julie Tate at The Washington Post

I'd say that given the tone and content of the article, they will be seated on the press plane next to Dana Milbank, Warren Strobel, Ron Hutcheson and the luggage.

Still they do bury the lede.

the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger.

The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address.

That's it. The White House was informed that the 16 words were false. The intelligence community expressed no doubt on the issue. Four U.S. officials with direct knowledge are talking and it sure sounds like they were saying that the White House was informed before the State of the Union address.

If it depends on what the meaning of the word "as" is, then someone is misleading either the journalists or the reader so extremely as to be lying.

Also amazing, but, by now, not important, Libby was still lying about the evidence in July 2003

July 8, 2003. He spoke again to Miller [snip] on July 12.

At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.

In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments

Bush was told that the alleged evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program was controversial to unequivocally baseless.

Murray Waas recently reported that the one page executive summary of the National Intelligence Estimate informed Bush that the DOE was unconvinced that the Aluminum tubes were gas centrifuges for Uranium enrichment. The intelligence community didn't make it clear that the intersection of the set of people who believed the tubes were gas centrifuges and the set of people who had any expertise at all on gas centrifuges was one guy at the CIA, but they gave Bush vital information which he hid from the American people.

Now we know that, as long claimed by Wilson, the intelligence community made it totally clear to the Bush administration that they believed that there was nothing to the allegations about Nigerien Uranium.

It is now definitely proven that Bush lied to the American people in order to trick the USA into invading Iraq. The terminally naive American people seem to think he can be impeached for doing so. (search for Zogby). Sorry folks. To impeach you need high crimes or misdemenors and, above all, Democrats in congress.