Irrefutable: Chimpie and Cheney Are Liars (I'm Shocked! Shocked!)...and WORSE

The National Journal is a pretty sober journal of insider information in Washington D.C., about as nonpartisan as it can be, and rather expensive too. I have a relative by marriage who writes for them and I've become livid trying to get this person to explain to me how in the world the Bush administration ever achieved any level of credibility given what has been know for a very long time inside the Beltway and is now only trickling--and soon to be gushing--forth from the mainstream media outlets. But I'm not a moderate by any means and I have to accept that to gain traction in politics in this country, or to get read by those who have traction, people and publications have to be diplomatic, measured, and maddening (to me).

So consider what it means when The National Journal publishes this piece by Murray Waas, and its first paragraph says this:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

This isn't The Daily Worker or Michael Moore's website or International A.N.S.W.E.R. or a blog by some nutcase like me, this is a magazine that if it were a stew would send you scurrying for salt, Tabasco, Worcestershire, gunpowder, anything to make it more exciting to taste. It is as bland, and therefore neutral, as you can stand, the perfect gruel for political wonks, geeks, and nerds alike, but hardly grist for the radical freaks like me who need their tongues singed before they consider that something has taste, good or bad.

Then comes the zinger:

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

Got it? If there was any connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, it was as adversaries, and I have to wonder why, when not that long ago earlier Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand, we didn't enlist him in helping us to destroy Al Qaeda. After all, who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

Incompetence? Cover-up? Stupidity? After all those years of punishing sanctions against Iraq plus the UN weapons inspections, wouldn't you think that the mad dictator would have wanted to play ball to ease the pressure on his regime? Wouldn't native Iraqis have been ideal for infiltration of Al Qaeda?

Of course, that's a side issue at this point. What Mr. Waas's article points out with as near certainty as can be had in my lifetime is that Chimpie Bush, Dickfuck Cheney, and Donald "War Criminal" Rumsfeld are baldfaced liars, and worse. Much, much worse. For example, remember this?

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

Now Chimpie claims that he was just acting on the intelligence he was given, which, if you can twist your mind into the pretzel logic of the neocons, you could almost pull off, because indeed there was information that supported these contentions:

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

And you'd expect, of course, that this unit would be staffed by intelligence professionals:

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks.

Wait, wait. I'm not impugning someone just because he's a journalist or a neocon. Read on:

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

It just makes you feel good all over, doesn't it? One reason we're in Iraq is because two ideological incompetents, one of whom was even a bad security risk under rules your humble blogger understands (his modest military career was in the intelligence arm), had the undivided attention of the highest policymakers in the land, to the exclusion of the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and all the military forign intelligence services.

But wait, as they say in the K-Tel commercial, there's more:

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.

Dig? Having served the nefarious agenda of the criminal war profiteering empire of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, the office was disappeared, so to speak--poof! That seems odd, because if they'd done such a bang-up job, you'd want to keep them around. Especially when they were so wonderfully compliant, as this paragraph reveals:

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.

Now, is there anybody out there who doesn't think impeachment, indictment, trial, conviction, imprisonment and perhaps execution are in order for some fuckers involved in this fiasco, this catastrophe?

And yet there are still more than 30% who still approve this cabal. How fucking goddamned stupid can people get, even in America?