In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush 'lied us into war in Iraq.'
Judge Laurence Silberman explains the origins of his ruling against the ban on handguns in Washington, D.C. He explains, 'It wasn't a right to bear arms granted by the Constitution, it was a right that was protected by the Constitution.'
In any event, it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam.
The intelligence community's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction - a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.
The intelligence community was absolutely uniform and uniformly wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq).
