Did we get lied into war? Did the Bush administration use deliberate deception to bring America into war with Iraq? The Senate Intelligence Committee's June 2008 report may get us closer to the truth.(TERRORISM)(George W. Bush)

On June 5, the Senate Intelligence Committee, concluding five years of investigations (and partisan disagreements), released its report about whether the Bush administration had based its decision to attack Iraq on valid intelligence estimates or had lied us into war. The New York Times summed up the report: "The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska."

The chairman of the committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), noted in a statement accompanying the report: "The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

The committee's minority leader, Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), and three of his Republican colleagues disagreed with the majority conclusion. Committee Vice-chairman Bond and Republicans Saxby Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Burr signed a "minority views" statement that did not dispute the reality that "after-the-fact," postwar evidence indicated that the decision to go to war in Iraq was based on faulty information. However, they accused the majority that produced the report of having a partisan agenda, which--despite the benefits derived from making this information available to the American public--is possible. And they also correctly pointed out that some Democrats also made statements back in 2002 charging that Saddam Hussein was aggressively trying to build a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

In determining if the Bush administration was culpable of publicly twisting the intelligence to suit its ends, it is helpful to start with the report's own definitions of its scope and methodology. It notes that its scope (quoting from the original 2004 unanimous committee agreement) is to assess "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information."

The committee focused especially on five key speeches made by administration officials concerning "the threats posed by Iraq, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi ties to terrorist groups, and possible consequences of a US invasion of Iraq."

The committee also noted that it selected statements from those five speeches pertaining to eight categories: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, methods of delivery, links to terrorism, regime intent, and assessments about the postwar situation in Iraq. The report is very repetitious and includes a section for WMDs, though the report itself says WMDs commonly refers collectively to "nuclear, biological and chemical weapons." Here is a sampling of quotes by members of the Bush administration and the report's conclusions as to the truthfulness of the statements:

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