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By Tracy Stokes, BET.com Staff Writer & Wire Reports


Did Bush deliberately mislead the public on Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? Take our poll and click on “Discuss Now” to talk about it.

Posted Nov. 14, 2005 – "Turns out, we were wrong" President Bush's national security adviser told CNN Sunday, speaking about the administration’s belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The adviser, Stephen Hadley, told "CNN that Bush relied on the judgment of the intelligence community when he determined that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and nuclear weapons.

But it should be emphasized that “allegations now that the president somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow misled the American people, are flat wrong," he said.

Republican lawmakers and other officials who appeared on the Sunday news shows echoed Bush's Veterans Day speech in which he defended his decision to invade Iraq.

Bush said congressional Democrats had the same intelligence about Iraq as his administration and agreed that war was necessary. Those contending now that information had been manipulated or exaggerated are merely playing politics with the war, Bush administration officials have charged in recent weeks.

But Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean rejected the criticism on Sunday, saying, "The truth is, the president misled America when he sent us to war."

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The president withheld some intelligence and some caveats about it, Dean said - on NBC's "Meet the Press."

While acknowledging that two commissions had found no evidence the administration had exerted pressure on the intelligence community, Dean said a Senate committee will ultimately determine how the administration handled the information that had been gathered about Iraq.


Dean also accused the Bush administration with being less than honest about the size of the deficit, as well as the war"This is an administration that has a fundamental problem telling the truth," Dean said.

But, Hadley said, "It is unworthy and unfair and ill-advised, when our men and women in combat are putting their lives on the line, to relitigate an issue which was looked at by two authoritative sources and deemed closed. We need to put this debate behind us.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Democrats have a right to criticize the war but that it is disingenuous to claim that Bush lied about intelligence to justify it.

"Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French, ... all reached the same conclusion," McCain said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

In a column for The Washington Post, former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) said he was wrong to have voted to give Bush the authority to go to war and called the intelligence on which he made that decision "deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda."

Hadley told CNN that issues about the accuracy of U.S. intelligence have not impaired the administration's ability to pursue its policies regarding the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.

"We've been able to move our diplomacy forward at the same time we're taking the steps we need to do to improve our intelligence," he said.

Asked why people should believe U.S. claims about the nuclear plans of Iran given the failure of intelligence about Iraq, Hadley told viewers that there has been international consensus about Iran.

Now that you've read the story, do you think that Bush deliberately misled the public about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction? Click on the top link to the left to take our poll and click on “Discuss Now” to talk about it more.