Victory Has Hundred Fathers; Defeat Is An Orphan

"Still, let's recall that the prime mission of presidential and parliamentary commissions tends to be not fact-finding but sweeping scandal under the rug and deflecting blame from politicians.

After mouthing pious verities about needing better intelligence, the commission, appointed by President George W. Bush, amazingly found: (a) No one was really guilty of the Iraq intelligence fiasco; and (b) there was no White House political pressure on the intelligence community to justify the war.

So the mighty Niagara of whitewash flows on. The report made no mention of Bush's claims about Iraqi drones of death, Vice-President Dick Cheney's pressure on the CIA to declare Iraq a nuclear menace, or Condoleezza Rice's terrorizing Americans with talk of nuclear mushroom clouds.

It ignored evidence from senior Bush aides Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke that the president obsessively pushed for war with Iraq soon after taking office.

There was no mention of Doug Feith's Office for Special Plans, a covert Pentagon intelligence shop set up to funnel claims about Iraq to the White House and U.S. media produced by a cabal of pro-war neo-conservatives -- which was investigated for giving Israel classified material. No mention of patriotic CIA officers reportedly fired or demoted for refusing to participate in such activities.

No mention of how national security was corrupted, manipulated and distorted for partisan political gain.

The report called Iraq 'one of the most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history.'

But, amazingly, the whitewash committee found no one responsible for this disaster. Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan. "

Bush rewards his failures