President Serial Liar

We learned a couple things today that are in direct opposition to one another, at least theoretically. One is that the President still believed Saddam had WMD as late as April of 2006, though he dare not say it in public for fear of sounding like a nutjob (as if that's stopped him). The other thing we learned is that, actually, Bush knew Saddam didn't have WMD BEFORE he went to war with Iraq.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

The evidence came from the former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, who disclosed that Saddam didn't have WMD. But it didn't matter. The policy was already in motion and if you disagreed you hated America.

These two seemingly contrasting statements can easily both be true. Bush was told Saddam has no WMD in 2002; he refuses to believe it, invades the country claiming that the WMD are there somewhere, and spends three long years clinging to that belief because the last thing he can admit to himself is that he was wrong.

But the point is that the CIA had the intel. And it was hidden from key players, in particular Colin Powell and the senior military leaders who were still out in the field in hazmat suits expecting to be hit with chemical or biological agents. The whole war was a fiction, a complete, inescapable fiction, right down to the current assertion by the President that we're kicking ass over there.

There's not a jail big enough for this gang of miscreants.

UPDATE: This is encouraging and I hope Senator Kerry is being straight about it.

update: A lot of you are asking about what we can do about it. That’s the right question. I can't guarantee success, but we're closer than we've ever been. The media swirl around this debate doesn't capture the dynamics I see in Congress. Republicans are much more nervous about this, and there's far less Democratic disunity than the media storyline portrays. I'm talking to my colleagues every day (I just got out of a caucus meeting), and the Bush-advanced fallacy that the escalation is working just isn't a big part of our discussions. I think we hammered that reality home pretty hard yesterday at the Foreign Relations Committee with some important validation from Sen. Lugar.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are not confident at all. Their party is being driven over the cliff by the President’s stubborn insistence on sticking to this failed policy. And they know it. No one wants to consign themselves to a permanent minority, but that's what's happening. They're not unified at all on this.

Contrasted with Carl Levin's wishy-washy statements, I'm not so sure. Perhaps the idea is to give the Republicans the room they need to come over to the other side. But I fear that we'll end up with some nonbinding suggestion to withdraw 50 troops at a time of the President's choosing but only if he feels like it and this isn't a demand it's more a suggestion please PLEASE DON'T CALL ME UNPATRIOTIC!!!!!