Intel Liars Club Gets More Bad Credit

Here it is years after much mud wrestling and partisan parsing is a US Senate Intelligence Committee report baldly stating President Bush & Co-president Cheney oversold, over hyped and overused intelligence to maneuver the USA to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003. Only people with nonworking logic faculties believe Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. And thanks to Scotty McClellan for memorializing in book form the truth of What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception as he left an 1812-style scorched executive mansion in his revelatory wake. It's only because republicans lost control of the US Senate in 2006 that all these years ater is the report being duted off and presented to the public. Most of what's contained in the new credenzaware was held by frightened republicans so as not to taint saint Bush's re-election chances in 2004. This exacerbates the simmering division between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman, John Rockefeller of West Virginia and the vice chairman, Kit Bond of Missouri of the committee at venal verbal odds.

“The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,” Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the committee’s Democratic chairman, said in a statement accompanying the 171-page report.

The committee’s report cited some instances in which public statements by senior administration officials were not supported by the intelligence available at the time, such as suggestions that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda were operating in a kind of partnership, that the Baghdad regime had provided the terrorist network with weapons training, and that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague in 2001.

A second committee report, also made public on Thursday, detailed a series of clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in Rome and Paris in 2001 and 2003. It accused Steven Hadley, now the national security advisor, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, of failing to properly inform the intelligence agencies and the State Department about the meetings.

The biggest underpinning for national security is intelligence. Intelligence should be an depoliticized commodity for the president and national security apparatus's consumption. The biggest users of intelligence is the military. Except in fuzzy bushworld, they distorted the truth to fit the fiction they served up to the world to facilitate a neocon's fantasy of gunboat democracy in Mesopotamia. To further aggravate those lies, the intentional outing of a covert spy was done partially to intimidate others who dared to say they were making the crap up just like an ad agency on 5th Avenue in New York. It went alongside other misuses of intelligence gathering and public distortion of a few facts by the Bush misadministration's strong arming of the big telco companies to turn over information based on their illegal warrantless wiretapping abuses that allow them t collect information on the innocent to use as they saw fit with out benefit of FISA court approved warrants later while running around saying the al qaeda bogeyman was the principal target of the intel gathering. More lies.

Democrats have not been proud models of leadership in the congress by autorizing Bush's ill begotten actions in Iraq based on intel lies and then not holding anyone accountable for the resulting Iraq debacle. It needs presidential leadership not hobbled by someone who's approval ratings proudly dwell in and dark dank basement. Intelligence was at the core of the dark arts portfolio that Bush beknighted Darth Cheney with to use as he wished and look how it all turned out. The CIA is in charge of HUMINT or human intelligence agents that bring information to the agency. The Agency remained the last bastion not under Cheney's incompetent control. Cheney was heart attack desperate that the yellow cake Niger stories from the Italian forgeries saying what he needed them to say so as not to be proved part of the superglue web of lies as written about in the jaw dropping book, The Italian Letter.

Bestselling national security author Richard Clarke, brings the truth on intelligence matters into stark relief for the interested reader in Your Government Failed You: Breaking The Cycle of National Security Disasters. Later this year, the film made from his excellent nonfiction historical account in 2004 book will be in movie theatres from no less a personage directing it than Robert Redford. It is Against All Enemies which aptly describes the beginning of oath a president takes to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies - foreign and domestic.