The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee released new information on Thursday that he claims is evidence that the Bush administration misled the nation in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
In a speech on the Senate floor, retiring Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., outlined a 2003 CIA cable that warns George W. Bush administration officials against making references to claims that Mohammad Atta - the man who led the 9/11 hijackers - met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech Republic before the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks. Levin claims Bush officials used the unconfirmed meeting to link Iraq to 9/11 to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"There was a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq in the public mind with the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks. That campaign succeeded," said Levin, who cited opinion polls from that time showing many Americans believed former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks. "Of course, connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al-Qaida were fiction."
He referenced a Dec. 9, 2001, appearance by Vice President Dick Cheney on "Meet the Press." Cheney said: "It's been pretty well confirmed that he (Atta) did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."
"Far from 'pretty well confirmed,' there was almost no evidence that such a meeting took place," Levin said. "Just a single, unsubstantiated report, from a single source, and a mountain of information indicating there was no such meeting. ... Travel and other records indicated that Atta was almost certainly in the United States at the time of the purported meeting in Prague."
Of course I am relatively certain that all of you already know that the Bush Administration lied us into the Iraq War. (And if you don't know that you need to drop everything and watch Hubris right now.)
However with all of the hubbub over the Senate report on torture right now it is a good time to remind ourselves that virtually everything we think we know about why we went to war in the first place is a lie.
And speaking of the torture report as I am sure many of you have heard, there is a concerted effort to convince the American people that President Bush himself was out of the loop when it came to the harshest interrogation techniques, but the CIA Director wants you to know that is all bullshit.
Courtesy of the Daily Mail:
The CIA's enhanced interrogation technique program was authorized by President George W. Bush, the bureau's current director John Brennan said on Thursday, and it had his full support.
Brennan, who worked at the CIA at the time as a deputy to a high-ranking CIA official, told reporters that Bush ordered up the program six days after al Qaeda attacked America, despite the fact that the spy agency did not have adequate space to house detainees nor did it have the correct training to interrogate them.
'In many respects the program was uncharted territory for the CIA, and we were not prepared,' he said, later stating that officers 'inadequately developed and monitored' the program and 'the agency failed to establish quickly the operational guidelines needed to govern the entire effort.'
Brennan also said that whether or not these "enhanced interrogation techniques" provided any intelligence that could not have been gathered without them is "an unknowable fact."
So to sum up, the Bush Administration lied us into a war that cost thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqi lives. Bush ordered the use of torture techniques even before we had captives on which to use them. And yet to hear the conservatives tell it President Obama is the one who has tried to "fundamentally change this country."
Simply put, George W. Bush is a criminal and a traitor to his country.
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