WTF Is It Now?!?

Napoleon Bonehead calls for own removal
"Aggression and evil intent must not be ignored or appeased. They must be opposed early and decisively." - pResident Evil, somewhere in Europe, 5/03.




"I guess credibility means nothing these days." - Sean Gonsalves, in Bush administration justifications for war - in its own words.

Not unless a Democrat's genitalia is involved, but by the way things are going, it's pretty safe to say that they don't have any.




"I'm not reading this," Powell declared. "This is bullshit."
New questions about U.S. intelligence the White House's lies regarding Iraq's WMDs

From US News: Dick 'Chicanery' Cheney played a major role in the secret debates and pressed for the toughest critique of Saddam's regime, administration officials say. The first draft of Powell's speech was written by Cheney's staff and the National Security Council.

"It was over the top and ran the gamut from al Qaeda to human rights to weapons of mass destruction," says a senior administration official. "They were unsubstantiated assertions, in my view."

Powell was so unimpressed with the information on al Qaeda that he decided to bury it at the end of his speech, according to officials. Even so, NSC officials kept pushing for Powell to include the charge that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. He refused.

"The policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day," says an intelligence official. In September 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons. It concluded: "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."





Standard Operating Procedure
From Paul Krugman's column:

The mystery of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction has become a lot less mysterious. Recent reports in major British newspapers and three major American news magazines, based on leaks from angry intelligence officials, back up the sources who told my colleague Nicholas Kristof that the Bush administration 'grossly manipulated intelligence' about W.M.D.'s.

And anyone who talks about an "intelligence failure" is missing the point. The problem lay not with intelligence professionals, but with the Bush and Blair administrations. They wanted a war, so they demanded reports supporting their case, while dismissing contrary evidence......

It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters - a group that includes a large segment of the news media - obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies....

It's no answer to say that Saddam was a murderous tyrant. I could point out that many of the neoconservatives who fomented this war were nonchalant, or worse, about mass murders by Central American death squads in the 1980's. But the important point is that this isn't about Saddam: it's about us. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.

But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.


"Saddam gassed his own people!
Oh look - a butterfly!"


Why do I even bother?????