JB

On March 18, 2003, on Good Morning America, Fox News political commentator Bill O'Reilly made the following promise:

"Here's, here's the bottom line on this for every American and everybody in the world, nobody knows for sure, all right? We don't know what he has. We think he has 8,500 liters of anthrax. But let's see. But there's a doubt on both sides. And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again, all right? But I'm giving my government the benefit of the doubt."

He made a similar claim in this interview with Condoleeza Rice:

Last March, I stuck up for you guys. After Colin Powell (search) went to the United Nations -- and I said on "Good Morning America" that I believed that we were right to go to war, the United States, based upon weapons of mass destruction and the danger that Saddam posed. And I also said to "Good Morning America" if the weapons found to be bogus, I'd have to apologize for my stance.

Now that David Kay has confirmed that Saddam destroyed his WMD's long before the invasion, O'Reilly has not apologized or confessed that he no longer trusts the Bush Administration. Rather, he has argued that the Bush Administration was hoodwinked by the CIA's lax intelligence gathering into believing that the WMD's were real and therefore the President should investigate the reason why this occured. Because of the intelligence failure, Bush cannot be said to have lied to the American public.

Unfortunately, O'Reilly's argument overlooks the fact that the Administration cherrypicked CIA reports to hear what they wanted to hear, and conveyed this information to the American public, and in some cases relied on questionable or completely bogus information that they knew was unreliable in order to justify repeated statements to the American people that Saddam was creating WMD's-- including nuclear weapons. So O'Reilly's portrait of the Bush Administration as having been completely hoodwinked by the CIA and having made all of these representations to the country through no fault of their own is simply not plausible.

O'Reilly should apologize as he promised. He should criticize the President for hyping the intelligence sources and relying on information he should have known was unreliable. Even if Bush did not lie, he seriously misled the public. O'Reilly needs to confront that fact.

Nevertheless, O'Reilly does come out strongly in favor of having the President publicly admit that there was a mistake and publicly investigate the causes of the intelligence failure, something which the Bush Administration has so far been unwilling to do. Indeed, Administration officials have tried to bluff their way through the problem. Dick Cheney has brazenly insisted that the WMD's are there after all, while the President has been reduced to talking about the existence of "weapons of mass destruction related program activities." (Does the President really think he's fooling anyone when he talks like that?)

And in the following interview with Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, O'Reilly bluntly tells conservative defenders of the President to stop making excuses and that there must be some public accountability in light of the Kay report:

O'REILLY: [H]ere is the problem. We live in a republic where the people are supposed to decide crucial issues, all right? And the people can't decide the issue if they're given erroneous information. And the Bush administration gave us erroneous information, not because they lied, but because they got erroneous information from the Central Intelligence Agency. And I believe President Bush hasn't been nearly aggressive enough in holding those people in the agency accountable.

MAY: I think we need to totally refurbish the CIA. The question is whether George Tenet, who served Clinton, served Bush, is the best man to do it. And if somebody thinks not in the Democratic party, they should say what they're going to do the about it.

O'REILLY: Well, what about Bush, though? Why isn't he doing it now? He knows the 9- 11 situation better than anyone on the planet. . . .

. . . And he knows this is a screw-up.

MAY: His marching orders to George Tenet ought to be, we need to do - - overhaul the CIA so they can do the kind of intelligence gathering we need. . . . the most important thing to understand, it seems to me is this. Saddam Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction.

O'REILLY: No, that's baloney. That is right-wing spin. And a guy as smart as you, I don't want to hear you say that.

MAY: No, no, no, no.

O'REILLY: I don't want to hear you say that right-wing talking point business. Look, let's get back to the issue here.

. . . The Americans can decide for themselves whether that policy was good for America or not. But we got hurt overseas. We still hurt overseas. This Colin Powell went to the U.N., put this big WMD scenario in play. And it turned out not to be true. Our image overseas is hurt. OK?
. . . .

O'REILLY: But here's the fundamental constitutional question. All right? You have an administration, which is closed. The Bush administration is not open with the folks. Everybody knows that. All right? Now you have, and I believe this report, and I've got to say, I will say this in President Bush's defense, President Bush could have booted this. He could have said to Kay, hey, find something and this and that. He wanted the truth. He told Kay, even if it's black and bad and going to hurt me, you get it. I think we all -- that reflects very, very well on the president, but he's got to now step up. And he's got to admit the mistake. And he's got to take strong action to protect us, Mr. May.
. . .

O'REILLY: That's right. But we also need openness on the part of the president. And he can't be sitting up in the White House not saying anything about it.

I still think O'Reilly should apologize. But I think that he is starting to get it. The problem is that this President does not like to be open or honest with the American people on any number of issues, including Iraq. And his Administration never likes to admit that it has ever made a mistake: The Washington Post reports that at a recent "private meeting between Bush and congressional leaders," Bush and Tom Daschle had what sources described as a "testy exchange" when Daschle dared to suggest that "it is important to determine what went wrong to produce the flawed prewar weapons charges." Acting like a petulant child when someone shows real flaws in your decisionmaking process is not leadership.