Bush and Blair Deny 'Fixed' Intelligence

In a joint meeting in Washington, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair brushed off a recently revealed British memo from July 2002 that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" to remove Saddam Hussein "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D." or weapons of mass destruction. "There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush said in his first public comments about the so-called Downing Street memo the New York Times reports. While Bush and Blair continue to insist that at the time they had every reason to believe intelligence indicating Hussein had stockpiles of deadly weapons, there is much evidence showing that others in the intelligence community and government were not convinced and issued warnings against some sources of the WMD intelligence. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports, "a close reading of the recent 600-page report by the president's commission on intelligence, and the previous report by the Senate panel, shows that as war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs."