George W's spins would make Clinton blush, by Dennis Hans - Democratic Underground

Two-thirds of Americans believe a horrible thing about Saddam that the CIA and FBI would swear on a stack of Bibles is false. No one in the administration who’s not clinically insane believes Saddam was involved in 9-11, but that hasn’t prevented Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and others from repeatedly suggesting otherwise, often selecting their words with care so they can convince themselves that, technically speaking, their statements aren’t outright lies...

Reacting to Bush’s speech, liberal Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold said it was "a shoddy piecing together of flimsy evidence that contradicted the intelligence briefings we’ve been getting." Conservative Vincent Cannistraro, who once headed counter-intelligence at the CIA, observed that “cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA.”

British reporter Julian Borger, to whom Cannistraro spoke, reported in the October 8 Guardian that “President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available U.S. intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.”

There’s a word for what Feingold, Cannistraro and Borger describe: cheating. Bush, fearing he might not get his way with Congress and the public if he played fair, opted to cheat.