Friday on MSNBC Rep. Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.) tried to cast the Republicans as hypocritical for expressing outrage about Benghazi but failing to call for "any kind of investigation" into the Iraq war.
"You know, it's really interesting," he said. "We had an Iraq war which was fed to us on a lie by the Bush administration, 4,000 Americans were killed. The Republicans not once asked for any kind of an investigation on that."
Simply put, the amount of falsehoods within that statement is staggering.
Congress investigated numerous aspects of the Iraq war, including pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which one can assume is the "lie" Engel references.
Several Republicans, including Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), called for an investigation into the intelligence failures prior to Iraq. The bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 2004 report placing the primary blame on intelligence analysts for overstating the case on WMDs:
Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.
More importantly, the 2004 report found "no evidence" the Bush administration applied any pressure on analysts to change their judgments.
A 2008 "phase II" of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report also confirmed pre-war statements made by the Bush administration warning of Iraq's nuclear, biological, and overall WMD threat were "substantiated" by the intelligence community.
Rep. Engel also seems to have forgotten that he voted for the war he now falsely says was based on a "lie."