If, as news reports have it, Intelligence agencies were feeding policy makers bad information about Iraq, and policy makers like the president made decisions based on that information, and then it turns out that the information was incorrect, how is it that the policy makers are called liars?
Yet this is exactly what those who feel comfortable with the promiscuous use of such epithets repeatedly called George Bush throughout 2003 and 2004. It was an insulting slander then, and the odiousness of it is made even more apparent now with the release of the findings of the Presidential panel commissioned last year to study why we were led to believe there were WMD in Iraq.
The panel was co-chaired by retired Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia and it concluded that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most prewar assessments about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Moreover, Robb and Silberman agreed that they had found no evidence that senior administration officials had sought to change the prewar intelligence in Iraq, possibly for political gain. Robb said investigators examined every allegation "to see if there was any occasion where a member of the administration or anyone else had asked an analyst or anyone else associated with the intelligence community to change a position they were taking or whether they felt there was any undue influence. And we found absolutely no instance."
There are lots of people who today owe George Bush a profound apology. Such acts of graciousness, however, presuppose a modicum of decency and honesty on the part of people who have shown themselves, over the last two years, to be singularly bereft of such virtues, so we won't be holding our breath.
