President Bush claims critics are rewriting Iraq war history

November 11, 2005

President Bush accused critics of the Iraq War of rewriting history and distorting the events that led to the U.S. invasion. In an effort to divert criticism of his administration's decision to go to war with Iraq, Bush said that some Democrats viewed the same intelligence and came to similar conclusions. "Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," Bush said. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat) responded "Attacking those patriotic Americans who have raised serious questions about the case the Bush administration made to take our country to war does not provide us a plan for success that will bring our troops home," Reid said.

At the same time, the Senate Intelligence Committee is making progress toward an agreement on how to implement 'phase two' of the Iraq WMD investigation set up to investigate how administration officials used the intelligence information available in the run-up of the Iraq war. The first phase of this investigation only focused on the quality of the intelligence information. Phase two was postponed until after the November 2004 elections.