Mr. Smoke and Mirrors.

• Position: Comment

George Bush is fond of slapping nicknames on people. His nickname should be Mr. Smoke and Mirrors. That applies not only to his Iraq machinations, but to the deceitful budget he proposed. At times, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney seem to have almost a pathological propensity to repeat an assertion that has already been discredited. For instance, in the lead-up to the war, even after weapons inspectors had discounted the theory that Saddam had aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons, Bush kept mentioning the tubes.

And even as his search teams found no weapons, Bush continued to assert that Saddam somehow posed a "grave and gathering" threat. On February 5, Bush told a crowd in Charleston, South Carolina, "We had a choice. Either take the word oft madman or take action to defend the American people. Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time."

But that wasn't his choice. He did not have to rely on Saddam. U.N. weapons inspectors were scouring Iraq, and the United States, France, Russia, and Germany had spy planes and satellites that were surveying practically every square inch of the country.

Cheney, the biggest hornswoggler of them all, was still contending in January that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs, though U.N. weapons inspectors and U.S. search teams had cast grave doubts on this.

Bush's chief weapons inspector, David Kay, finally blew the lid off when he resigned and announced that "we were almost all wrong."

But he managed to cover the President in the process by saying that Bush hadn't let the American people down, but that the intelligence agencies had let Bush down.

CIA Director George Tenet also provided cover when he asserted, "No one told us what to say or how to say it."

That is much too simplistic a formulation, however.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reached a different conclusion in its recent report, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications." The evidence "suggests, but does not prove, that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002," the report says. "Although such situations are not unusual, in this case, the pressure appears to have been unusually intense."

It noted Cheney's own repeated, and extraordinary, visits to CIA headquarters, a fact The Washington Post disclosed on June 5, 2003, in an article by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest.

"Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to Al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush Administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials," the Post article...