Contentions by Bush and Cheney that Saddam had to be removed because he could give terrorists weapons of mass destruction to strike the United States were "contradicted by available intelligence information" that found that the late Iraqi dictator was unlikely to make such transfers, the report said.
Cheney's assertions that Mohammad Atta, the chief Sept. 11 hijacker, had met months before the attack with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital, Prague, were also unsubstantiated, the inquiry found.
However, while intelligence reports "generally substantiated" their claims that Iraq had secretly restarted a nuclear weapons program, the committee said, Bush and other officials failed to disclose that the State Department disputed that finding.
The administration's statements also failed to disclose that the Energy Department joined the State Department in rejecting allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, the report said.
To my current knowledge, none of the big news outlets published these facts and that means they have let us down again.
McClatchy does a better job than the AP in reporting on some of the bogus evidence for invading Iraq. In "Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?," John Walcott gives us more information about how dysfunctional the war whores were. First, the DoD's own counter-intelligence unit suspected that Iranian agents may have deliberately misled the U.S. about Iraq. Unfortunately,
A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
The top aide was Stephen Cambone, who's now working for a defense contractor. McClatchy also lets us know more about war whore Ledeen:
Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.
And we also get to know more about who participated in the Rome meetngs:
The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.
On the Iranian side were Ghorbanifar, an unidentified Iranian exile from Morocco and an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps defector.
And we get to know what some in the DoD thought of Ledeen's contacts:
When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.
And yes, idiot GOP politicians were also involved:
According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney's office, the Senate report said.
He reported back to officials in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, but "there is no indication that the information collected during the Paris meeting was shared with the Intelligence Community for a determination of potential intelligence value," the report said.
This is exactly the type of reporting we desperately need to combat the war whores.
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Yes and the slug-like trail of such as Clear Channel's Mike McConnell outlines why:
Pre-war it was WMDs round-the-clock
and anyone who questioned the intelligence was a conspiracy kook (the entire BDSDed Left and the isolationist Buchananite right)or a disgruntled rabble rouser (Scott Ritter.)
When the WMDs weren't found it was
"Rumsfeld's 30 reasons for war,"
found in one obscure speech never emphasized by any other Bush Adminstration member, and of course none of those reasons valid either.
Finally with McConnell it is
"we would eventually have gone anyway; Saddam would have given WMDs to terrorists' once he had them" excusing an illegal pre-emptive war based on faulty rationale negated by the CIA's own report that Saddam would not have done so unless attacked first, but never mentioned by war whore McConnell.
Returning to the BDS tautology,
after Vincent Bugliosi bested
McConnell in an interview promoting his new book on why and how Bush should be indicted for war crimes, the jabberer explained
to his sheep that the ex-prosecutor betrayed a pathological hatred for Bush privately before the interview.
Curiously, so many of the "Bush-haters" identified as conservative Republicans before the Bush reign, eg. Ray McGovern,Clarke, O'Neill, Scott Ritter and perhaps even Bugliosi.
But then chickenhawk media war whores are themselves political sociopaths and might be harder to reform than the common streetwalker variety.
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