On the December 15 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, host Chris Matthews did not challenge Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) when he made the false claim that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by former Sen. Charles Robb (D-VA) and Reagan appointee Judge Laurence H. Silberman, exonerated the Bush administration of misusing intelligence on Iraq or misleading the American public prior to the start of the Iraq war. Matthews did not correct Bond when he asserted that the “Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb committee both said it was the inadequacy of the intelligence, not any massaging or misleading of the public” by the Bush administration that led the United States into the Iraq war on false pretenses.
In fact, as Media Matters for America previously noted, neither the Senate Intelligence Committee's "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" nor the Robb-Silberman commission's report to the president addressed the question of whether the Bush administration “massag[ed]” the intelligence it received or misled the American public. The Senate Intelligence Committee report determined that intelligence assessments on Iraq were not tainted by “pressure” that analysts received from policymakers, but it did not investigate whether the Bush administration misused that intelligence or misled the public. The committee postponed analysis of the latter until after the 2004 presidential election, pledging to include it in the second phase of its investigation. The Robb-Silberman report similarly excluded examination of the use of intelligence, noting: "[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community."
From the December 15 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:
MATTHEWS: Let me go to Senator Bond. Same question. A big bet on the table, lots of chips, lots of American lives lost, endangered, lots of casualties, a half-trillion dollars in expenditure. Has the bet paid off? Do we have a working democracy on the way in Iraq?
BOND: We're moving in that direction, and it looks very good. The information on which the president went into war was intelligence which was not adequate because our intelligence system had been substantially downgraded in the '90s. But our Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb committee both said it was the inadequacy of the intelligence, not any massaging or misleading of the public. Now, the president has gone on record to talk about what's going right in Iraq. And I can tell you from troops in the field, including my son, who say that they hear nothing about the good things that are going on, and the president is talking about and will talk about the fact that the Iraqis are going to vote, they're participating. They've got a long way to go to establish a government, but this is certainly an encouraging sign that Iraqis of all religious faiths want a -- want a democracy.
