Republicans Still Denying Bush Lied About Iraq [View all]

[kpete]

Silberman does not mention that the commission he chaired did not even investigate whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence. Senate Republicans refused to allow the commission to investigate this matter, fearing it would harm Bush’s reelection prospects.

...

The question of whether, in addition to being victimized by faulty intelligence, also misrepresented the intelligence it did have, was left to a second Senate report, called the “Phase II” report, which came out a few years later. That report, which was endorsed by two of the committee’s seven Republicans and all its Democrats, concluded, “the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

Incredibly, Silberman’s op-ed does not mention the Phase II report at all. Silberman simply asserts that his committee, which was specifically instructed not to investigate whether Bush manipulated intelligence, did not find that Bush manipulated intelligence, and presents this as the final word.



more:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/republicans-still-denying-bush-lied-about-iraq.html


Silberman also overturned the convictions against Oliver North:

https://consortiumnews.com/200...

Some of that fury played out within conservative judicial circles. In Firewall, Walsh’s book about the Iran-contra scandal, the special prosecutor described how the black-robed Republican appointees to the U.S. Appeals Court in Washington “waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army.”

A leader of this partisan faction was Judge Laurence H. Silberman, an obstreperous conservative who had served as a foreign policy adviser to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. At one point during the Iran-contra scandal, Silberman berated MacKinnon over his support for the special-prosecutor law.

https://consortiumnews.com/2001/012901b.html