Steve Benen on MaddowBlog has been harping on Trump’s sharp disagreements with the CIA recently:
The news on Friday night was a bombshell: The CIA not only believes Russia interfered directly in America’s presidential election, the foreign adversary did so because Vladimir Putin’s government hoped to put Donald Trump in the White House.
Trump’s first instinct wasn’t to deny the accuracy of the reporting, but rather, to attack the CIA: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” It was the latest in a lengthy series of instances in which Trump has questioned the integrity and the professionalism of U.S. intelligence agencies – a pattern that began months before Election Day.
But Steve never mentions that this, too, could be construed to be yet another Trump lie. As I recall, one of the tremendous Bush scandals was that the Iraq invasion’s pretext of WMDs possessed by Hussein turned out to be false – and that our intelligence agencies knew that. So I did some research, and it turns out that the CIA tried to satisfy the Administration’s desire to pin WMDs on Hussein – but couldn’t quite get there. From Jason Leopold on Vice News:
An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq “probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant” to manufacture biological weapons “but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed.” The NIE also said Hussein did not have “sufficient material” to manufacture any nuclear weapons and “the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.”
But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”
“We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,” Rumsfeld said. “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.”
But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on “sources of varying reliability” — like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.
By the time Bush & Co discussed the report with the public, all the qualifiers are gone and everything is definite.
So, does Trump ring the bell yet again? In my book, keeping in mind that I’m an engineer who is forced to be precise, yes, I think so. I think Trump is hearing information from the intelligence agencies he doesn’t like, so he’s searching for an excuse to ignore them – and thinks he found it.
UNFORTUNATELY for him, this just makes him into Donald J. Trump Bush, Jr. Yep, that’s right, we’ve got ourselves a Bush & Cheney again, not grounded in reality, but rather in the fantasies going on in their heads.
And the American people are the ones likely to pay for it.
