Cheney's Facts

Bob Woodward’s recent piece in the Washington Post argues that the debacle of the Iraq-WMD case should have made the Bush administration more circumspect about intelligence—and that everyone understood this lesson except the vice president. He offers the Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by the Israelis in September of 2007 as an example.

At a National Security Council meeting in June of that same year, Cheney urged a U.S. strike on the reactor that U.S. intelligence had discovered the reactor months before. The president declined and would later write in his memoirs that he was dissuaded by the doubts—fully shared by virtually the entire intelligence community—expressed by CIA director Michael Hayden.