| No, wait! Now I remember. Yes, I really did read the National Intelligence Estimate, and I just reread it. But it didn't have anything that said anything that would really dissuade me from voting for the war. Just a couple of pages in this great big document.
That, essentially, was what Shays said today in the Darien town hall meeting. Yet sly ole' Both Ways Shays neglected to specify whether he was talking about the pure blather in the unclassified NIE, or the classified NIE that was made available to members of congress. To read the classified version, the congressman had to go to a highly secure room near the Capitol, where he could read the report, but not take notes. And, as reported in Frontline's documentary "Bush's War", it was the classified version in which all of the qualifications and disagreements to the administration's intelligence assertions were laid out. If Shays had read the classified version, he would have remembered it.
It seems that Shays is trying to obscure the truth: that he didn't bother to read the classified intelligence, but simply relied on Bush, Cheney, and Rummie.
Nice try, congressman, but you gave the honest answer the first time in Westport last weekend: you didn't bother to read the classified intelligence, and as a result, tens of thousands of Americans are dead and wounded. You made a horrible mistake, and this country will be paying for it for decades. |
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