It's OFFICIAL: Bush lied, Senate Committee

It is now officially and abundantly clear that the Bush administration "misrepresented" the facts about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and its threat to the world. "Officially?", you may ask. Yes, it is now official. In June, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released its Phase II report on the failure of the intelligence claims and assessment of Iraq's WMD generated by the Bush administration, claims used to lead our nation into the 5 year war/quagmire in Iraq.

Allow me to quote directly from the Senate Committee:

"today (the Committee) unveiled the final two sections of its Phase II report on prewar intelligence. The first report details Administration prewar statements that, on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq. The second report details inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities conducted by the DoD’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department."

That is damning. In essence, all the stuff that the Bushies were feeding us (by us I mean "we the people", AND the Congress) about Iraq's WMD was either false, misleading or very questionable. V. P. Cheney's bombshell about Iraq working on a nuke was false. Condi Rice's "mushroom cloud" talking point was an extreme exaggeration of the known facts at the time. The strangely imprecise 16-word claim in Bush's State of the Union in 2003 about uranium yellowcake was unverified and unsupported by the evidence.

Even the less scary claims about bio and chemical weapons were wrong. Quoting from a different source, a classified British intelligence document written in 2002, 9 months before the war began:

"It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

So now it is official about the "failure" of the WMD intelligence. We don't have to wait for the judgement of historians on Bush and his cabal of Neo-Cons with regard to Iraq. The war decision had been made long before ANY evidence was in (and when the real evidence started coming in and pointed in the wrong direction, it was ignored and buried). All that was needed to start the war was some truthiness - that sounded believable - to back up that fateful and tragic decision.

links:

Senate Intelligence Committee press release:

http://intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=298775

Senate Intelligence Committee complete Phase II report

http://intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2a.pdf

Intell Committee Report on DOD Policy Office:

http://intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2b.pdf