Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

The Associated Press, via USA Today, reports on an appearance by Stephen Hadley, The Weasel's national "security" "adviser," on CNN's "Late Edition" program. The topic: Did The Weasel and his minions really, y'know, lie about the intelligence in the run-up to Iraq? Hadley:

But I think the point that we need to emphasize here was, allegations now that the president somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow misled the American people are flat wrong.

[...]

The president and the secretary of state relied on the collective judgment of the intelligence community as conveyed to him by the director of Central Intelligence. They were contained in a national intelligence estimate, a classified document that was provided to the president and provided to the Congress of the United States.

There were some dissenting views that were set out in that national intelligence estimate. But at the end of the day, the president has to go with the collective judgments of the intelligence community.

[...]

And it is unworthy and unfair and ill-advised, when our men and women in combat are putting their lives on the line, to relitigate an issue which was looked at by two authoritative sources and deemed closed. We need to put this debate behind us. It's unfair to the country. It's unfair to the men and women in uniform risking their lives to make this country safe.

All this is actually a follow-up of sorts to Hadley's remarks at a briefing on Thursday, as reported by the Washington Post

Some of the critics today... believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people. For those critics to ignore their own past statements exposes the hollowness of their current attacks.

Other than Condi's replacement, who, you might wonder, is Stephen Hadley? A great source of information about anyone in the current right-wing power structure is the Right-Web site ("Exposing the architecture of power that's changing our world"). Here's some of what they have to say about Hadley:

Stephen Hadley is a hardliner close to Vice President Dick Cheney and to the neoconservative camp. Named by the president in mid-November 2004 to replace Condoleezza Rice as his National Security Adviser, Hadley formed part of a loosely constituted group of foreign policy advisers known as the Vulcans who advised candidate Bush in 2000 and were at the core of the presidential transition team following Bush’s election. Among the other Vulcans who later moved into the first Bush administration were Rice, Colin Powell, Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

[...]

Hadley advocates extending the role of nuclear weapons to include deterrence against all so-called weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons. He wrote in the Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law, "To say that a security policy based on nuclear weapons was 'irresponsible' and 'immoral' from the outset is to accuse the United States government of pursuing a policy that was irresponsible and immoral. Such a serious and false accusation against a democratic government destroys public confidence in our institutions and our leaders.... It is often an unstated premise in the current debate that if nuclear weapons are needed at all, they are needed only to deter the nuclear weapons of others. I am not sure this unstated premise is true."

[...]

During the first Bush administration, Hadley served as the fall guy when allegations arose regarding Rice's alleged mishandling of information about Iraq's purported effort to buy uranium from Niger. According to the Washington Post, Hadley was told by CIA Director George Tenet that the Niger allegations, which were used by Bush in various speeches (including the January 2003 State of the Union Address) and served as a key justification for invading Iraq, were probably bogus and should not be used by the president. Hadley, who claimed that Rice had been unaware of the controversy, told the newspaper, "I should have recalled ... that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue." An Associated Press report of July 22, 2003 noted that Hadley said he had suggested that the president remove a similar statement about yellowcake from his October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, but as the State of the Union address was being prepared the two CIA memos about the shaky basis for the claim that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons had slipped from his attention.

Like Cheney, Hadley did not let the facts get in the way of his own public assertions about Iraq’s threat to U.S. national security. A few weeks after the infamous State of the Union Address in 2003, Hadley in a Chicago Tribune op-ed repeated the allegation that "the regime has tried to acquire natural uranium from abroad," pointing to what he said was a sustained, wide-ranging effort to acquire nuclear weapons.

Also of note is recent news provided by Italian journalists, that Hadley himself was point man on the bogus Nigerian-yellowcake-uranium story:

...investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

[The] exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to [the American Prospect, which reported on the Italian journalists' scoop].

If this is the kind of lying, self-serving jackass presented in all earnestness as the public face of the misAdministration, it's no wonder its credibility is in the toilet. Would you want your child to grow up to be Stephen Hadley? Didn't think so.