Judge Silberman's take on it:
“Bush lied, people died.” In certain quarters, the charge has by now achieved the status of a settled question. Judge Laurence Silberman intends to unsettle it.
“The notion that Bush lied about intelligence to get [us] into war,” Silberman says, “is an absurd and outrageous libel.”
Dignified and eloquent, Silberman, a senior judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, represents one of the leading figures on the federal bench. (In 2007, Silberman wrote the decision striking down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. Upholding him the following year, the Supreme Court produced the most important decision on the Second Amendment in some seven decades.) From 2004 to 2005 Silberman served with former Democratic Sen. Chuck Robb as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
In its official report, the Silberman-Robb Commission evaluated only American intelligence on Iraq, not what the administration did with it. But Judge Silberman saw more than enough to draw his own conclusions. During a recent interview with me, he spoke freely about his views for the first time. “As a federal judge I am very careful to stay out of politics,” Silberman says. “But [now that several years have passed] I am inclined to think that … [for] historical purposes I can give an opinion.”
Did the Bush administration distort or misconstrue intelligence to show that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction? No. The intelligence agencies did that by themselves.
The intelligence agencies, Silberman says, “clearly indicated that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. They made that clear to both President Clinton and President Bush. They made that clear in the national intelligence estimate of 2002.” How did the intelligence agencies get such a basic, vital question so thoroughly wrong? “A lot of fundamental and almost amateurish mistakes.”
Consider, for instance, the intelligence that Saddam had resumed his program to produce biological weapons.
“That claim came to American intelligence from several different entry points,” Silberman says. “[But] it turned out that it all came from a single source, one person who had made the claim to German intelligence. Nobody in American intelligence realized that what looked like three or four bits of corroborating evidence was really all the same phony thing.”
The intelligence community, in other words, proved incapable of a task that takes place dozens of times a day in every newsroom in America: double sourcing.
Bush lied? Hardly. The intelligence agencies screwed up.
Silberman, however, refuses simply to shift blame for the war from the administration to the intelligence agencies. Instead he rejects the idea that the invasion of Iraq represented a war of choice in the first place.
“Even people at the highest level of the Iraqi regime believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction,” Silberman explains. “Saddam was running a bluff. He was bluffing his own people, and he was bluffing Iran. It would have been impossible for any intelligence agency in the world … to have determined that Saddam had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction.”
Even if the intelligence agencies had performed flawlessly, they would therefore have found themselves advising the president of grave dangers. “A first-class [intelligence] opinion would have said, ‘We [the intelligence agencies] know Saddam once had weapons of mass destruction, we know that he proved capable of using them, and we have no evidence that he has destroyed them. Although we cannot prove that Saddam still has weapons of mass destruction, we think it highly likely that he has.’”
If the intelligence agencies had submitted just such a report–an accurate, considered assessment–what would have happened?
“The country,” says Silberman, “would probably have gone to war anyway.”
“When Germany seized the Rhineland in 1936, France and Britain failed to respond. I’m sure leaders in France and Britain thought, ‘Well, if we went to war now, we would be waging a war of choice.’ But was it really a war of choice? Of course not. By 1939 there was no choice.
“When the Bush administration went into Iraq, the timing may have been a matter of choice,” Silberman says. “But historians will probably conclude that the war itself was inevitable.”
The Bush administration no doubt made its mistakes, and the intelligence agencies undeniably committed one bungle after another. But after years of attempting to blame each other for the conflict, Americans should recognize that the war in Iraq was never ours to choose. A barbarian forced it upon us.
Hard to admit a conspiracy or cover-up when the people involved don’t see they did anything wrong...
You went full on 14daroad batchit crazy. Like I said, the surefire way to win a political debate is by being more informed than your opponent. When the opponent exposes his lack of intellectual capacity or goes silent that is when the debate has been won... 
My response… 
NewsBusters? That wingnut site is a joke... 
. Me being informed and against the Iraq war makes me a good citizen. It makes me sick that families lost their kids in a sick game of political chess. 
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