Dick Cheney’s Biggest Lie....

[KoKo]

Dick Cheney’s Biggest Lie
By Kurt Eichenwald / May 19, 2015 7:26 AM EDT

The CIA officer sitting across from me at the Silver Diner in McLean, Virginia, seemed nothing like Hollywood’s portrayal of an intelligence agent. It wasn’t so much his appearance—bearded, bald, with glasses and a brown plaid shirt—that belied Ben Bonk’s occupation. Rather, it was the tears in his eyes.

“Maybe if they hadn’t deceived me, I could have done something,’’ he told me. “Maybe I could have stopped the Iraq War.”

Bonk, a former deputy director of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center and an officer responsible for intelligence on Iraq in the year leading up to the U.S. invasion in 2003, spoke with me on background in June 2010 about events leading to the disastrous war. He died eight months later. Under our agreement, everything he told me is now on the record.

And Bonk’s statements—about deceptions that prevented solid intelligence on Iraq from reaching President George W. Bush, as well as other information kept from the public during the buildup to war—are once again in the news as candidates for the Republican presidential nomination fumble with questions about whether that invasion was a mistake. This has been asked of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio, each time with a qualifier: “Given what we know now...”

But with that parenthetical, reporters are perpetuating one of the greatest falsehoods in history. The real question should be: “Given what we knew then...” Bush hawks knew there was no good intelligence establishing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). And in what could easily be interpreted as near-treason, they never told the president about the weakness of the intelligence, several former high-ranking officials from the administration have told me.

Plenty of the best-informed intelligence sources were certain the WMDs were a fantasy. French intelligence knew it; so did Russia and Germany. The strongest human intelligence collected by the CIA—which secretly came from the Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and Iraq's head of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti—was detailed, correct and ignored. Instead, the administration built its case on Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (the infamous “Curveball,” a man German intelligence had warned the CIA was unreliable) and Muhammad Harith, a former Iraqi intelligence officer whose information was dismissed by British intelligence as a fabrication 10 months before the war began.

Back then, the agency’s intelligence on Iraq was feeble. Throughout the 1990s, it relied on weapons inspections conducted by the United Nations and did little to develop its own sources inside the country. Then, in 1998, the world discovered that then-President Bill Clinton had received oral sex from an intern, and the GOP, working with Independent Prosecutor and sexual sleuth Ken Starr, upended the executive branch. Starr produced his lurid report on September 11, 1998, and Republicans clamored for impeachment. Fifty days later, Iraq stopped all U.N. inspections; Bonk said he had no doubt Saddam’s decision was based on a calculation that Clinton was crippled, meaning the United States was unlikely to muster a meaningful response. And Saddam was right. When Clinton shot a couple of missiles at Iraq in response, Republicans tut-tutted that he was trying to distract from the investigation into his sex life.

By 2002, Bonk and his team knew the claim that Iraq possessed WMDs was built on the intelligence equivalent of spiderwebs. On the other hand, senior Pentagon officials—including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith—were pushing Bonk about connections between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda. Both men were certain the ties existed, which would have helped justify an invasion.

MUCH MORE at:

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/29/dick-cheneys-biggest-lie-333097.html

[Jefferson23]

1. Degenerate on steroids aka Dick Cheney. K&R

[shadowmayor]

2. War Crimes

Folks,

Here again is another valuable description of how our elected leaders behaved. They are first and foremost war criminals and should be treated as such. That they lied, that they were incompetent, that they were arrogant matters less than the fact that they led our country into a war. Not of liberation, but of subjugation. And our media whored for them all the way to Iraq.

I spent 2005 as an Army reservist in Abu Ghraib prison. I was against this war before it started, against it while I was there, and have been against it still. Yes I served and it's complicated. But while we were there, our forces actually had a sign posted where incoming detainees had their photo taken with a caption above their heads reading: Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People One Detainee at a Time. At first I thought it must be a joke, but the soldiers assured me that the command staff thought it was excellent, even profound. The whole war was like that - completely bugfuckity nuts! Frankly I think a goodly portion of our country lost their collective minds. I even recall that turd George Will writing some crap about how the invasion of Iraq met the Just Causes for War criteria. Scoreboard: Over 1 million Iraqis are dead, 4-5 million have been displaced (a soft term for fleeing one's own home); we freed them from clean running water, reliable electricity, safe roads and schools, hospitals with medicine and doctors, at least 1 brewery closed, sewage treatment plants that work, and more. We did all of this to a people that had never done anything to harm our country in any way, ever. For what?

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and their minions all belong behind bars, not on my TV. When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross - S. Lewis (or so some say) I used to wonder how so many German people gladly followed Hitler down the road. Well, we (by that I mean far too many of our citizens) followed Alfred E. Newman's stupider twin willingly. About Germany I no longer wonder. In both cases of war, the American and German people were led by their elected leader. It's the fact that we were led by such a stupid man that makes me worry about our country the most!

The Shadow Mayor

[yurbud]

3. No. Saddam was not a threat even if he had WMD. Also, Congress had much stronger

evidence linking Saudi Arabia to 9/11 and did nothing about it.