Friday, April 06, 2007

[Here's an example of what Bulworth is talking about below. Cheney's still flogging the same dead horse.]

Cheney: Deluded or just a big ol' liar?

We report; you decide.

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.


The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.


The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.


And -- what a surprise! -- former head of the Office of Special Plans Douglas Feith was right in the middle of the whole deception.


Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.


The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.


Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.


Okay, the report was released on the same day Cheney made his comments. Are we to assume he hadn't already seen it? Maybe he's been so isolated in that undisclosed location that he hasn't heard -- even W now pretends that he never tried to link Saddam to 9/11. Isn't it time to blame some underlings and move on?


Oh, and since it's clear that the real intelligence didn't support going to war with Iraq, why exactly was it so important to fake some? Why did we really attack Iraq in the first place? Hmmm?

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