Beyond All Reasonable Doubt

Beyond all reasonable doubt, the Bush Administration is guilty of the high crime of lying our nation into war. We all must work now for justice, to do nothing, to allow such an enormous offense to go unpunished, dishonors us all. We the people cannot allow President Bush and others to act as King and Royal Court thinking themselves unaccountable to anyone, thinking they can get away with committing such monumental fraud. When President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others sold this war to the America people, they clearly committed fraud. They lied our nation into a war.

"A retired CIA veteran is disputing U.S. President George Bush's claim that there was faulty intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war.

Tyler Drumheller, who worked for the CIA for 26 years and ended up directing covert operations for Europe until retiring a year ago, told CBS News it became evident Bush was going to invade Iraq regardless of what the intelligence said.

"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure. This was a policy failure," Drumheller said."

"Drumheller also said the Bush administration paid no heed to Naji Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister, who had made a deal to reveal military secrets, and who said there were no secret weapons." - CIA vet says Iraq pre-war data was bogus [The Mainstream Media should have informed the general public of this fact! Scott Ritter tried to warn the American people about this before the war in an Op-Ed back in September of 2002. MSM has been downplaying or suppressing these things, for example, Missing From ABC's WMD 'Scoop' Star defector Hussein Kamel said weapons were destroyed]

"[The source] told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," Drumheller is quoted as saying. "The [White House] group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' [ At the same time they were telling us that it was about WMD! ]

Cover Up Of Bush Crimes: WMD Report Doesn't Match CIA Official's Memory

• (From Talking Points Memo:)
  
• "But here's an angle I'm not sure we're going to hear much about.
  
• Drumheller's account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence.
  
• So why didn't we hear about any of this in the reports of those Iraq intel commissions that have given the White House a clean bill of health on distorting the intel and misleading the country about what we knew about Iraq's alleged WMD programs?
  
• Think about it. It's devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels.
  
• Did you read in any of those reports -- even in a way that would protect sources and methods -- that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren't any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn't help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story?
  
• Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?
  
• I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently.
  
• Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight's 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely." - Talking Points Memo Joshua Micah Marshal asks why little or none of what he had to say had made it into the reports of either the Robb-Silbermann Commission or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports on Iraqi WMD intelligence. and he points out that Sen. Robb and Sen. McCain and others on the Committee heard what Drumheller said.
  

I pointed out Bush administration's war lies before in previous posts:

The Problem Was Not "Faulty Intelligence," the Problem Was Dishonestly Selecting And Omitting Intelligence

"when the Bush administration began gearing up for war with Iraq in 2002, it found that selective citation of Kamel's testimony could be very helpful in making its case. Vice President Dick Cheney asserted in an August 2002 speech (8/26/02) that the Iraqi regime had been "very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents," and continued "to pursue the nuclear program they began many years ago." To back this up these claims, Cheney added, "We've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law"?a reference to Kamel.

In a Chicago Tribune op-ed (9/10/02), former head of the U.N. weapons inspection team Scott Ritter pointed out that Cheney had left out a critical part of Kamel's story:

Throughout his interview with UNSCOM, a U.N. special commission, Hussein Kamel reiterated his main point - that nothing was left. "All chemical weapons were destroyed," he said. "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed."

Nevertheless, the administration continued to selectively use Kamel's disclosures to bolster its case that Iraq had hidden stockpiles of banned weapons. "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX," then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said in his February 5, 2003 speech to the U.N. "The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law." Powell did not note that Kamel had also reported that this nerve gas, along with all other such weapons, had been destroyed years earlier (Extra!, 5-6/03)." - Missing From ABC's WMD 'Scoop' Star defector Hussein Kamel said weapons were destroyed

US Intelligence About Iraq Didn't Really Fail, It Was Manipulated
"General Zinni was alarmed that day to hear Cheney make the argument for attacking Iraq on grounds that Zinni found questionable at best:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central Command, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.'"

Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. "I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?' " Their response, he recalls, was, "Silence."