A special investigatory panel chaired by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft is now finishing a report that faults the White House’s Uranium Claim:
The board believes the White House was so anxious “to grab onto something affirmative” about Hussein’s nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable.
With the White House featuring such an obvious forgery as the Niger uranium documents, the question has long been if they knew they were forged or not. Are the members of the Bush Administration scoundrels or fools? Scowcroft’s conclusions are unsettling: A year after the 9/11 attacks and months away from a second major war, he found that “there was no organized system at the White House to vet intelligence, and the informal system that was followed did not work in the case of that speech.”
An anonymous source talking to CNN described the mistake as a goof by fact checkers. The main justification for the war, given in the President’s most important annual speech is just shrugged off as a “goof”? Doesn’t this make the whole war against Iraq a “goof” too?
It is beyond obvious that this war wasn’t driven by facts or policy but by forces far more powerful in the current administration: greed and the raw use of power, not only against Iraq but against the U.S. intelligence agencies who long argued that there was insufficient evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
