Miller: Did Bush Lie About Iraq?

In Prager University’s latest video, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Judith Miller puts to bed the myth that former President George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Miller, who at the time was a reporter for The New York Times, says unequivocally that Bush did not lie. President Bush received intelligence from American and European arms-control experts, intelligence analysts and counterterrorism agents who had also previously provided The New York Times with information on Osama bin Laden and the rise of al-Qaeda.

“The members of the intelligence community with whom I dealt were overwhelmingly reliable, hard-working and honest,” Miller says. “But they were also human, and in the aftermath of 9/11, they were very wary of ever again underestimating a terrorist threat.”

Bipartisan investigations have determined that there is no evidence to substantiate the claim that intelligence analysts were pressured to modify their findings to push the Bush administration’s agenda.

“The 2005 commission headed by former Democratic Senator Charles Robb and Republican judge Laurence Silberman called the intelligence community’s estimates on Iraq ‘dead wrong,'” Miller said. “A year earlier, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence denounced such intelligence failures as the product of ‘groupthink’ rooted in a fear of underestimating grave threats to national security in the wake of 9/11.”

In addition, none of the Congressional committees that were briefed on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ever complained of “bias or error.” The intelligence provided to Bush was understandable given dictator Saddam Hussein’s history of using chemical weapons against his own people as well as invading his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait.

There is also no evidence that the Bush administration started the war in Iraq for oil, as they could just purchased it.

While many think that the Iraq War was a bad policy, it was not based on lies.

“They were mistakes, not lies,” concludes Miller.