Department of Infuriatingly Undead Horses

By now you might think that there would be no need to point out - yet again - that the Iraq war was premised on deliberately misleading representations of half-assed conjectures as if they were established facts, facts which justified the most serious and consequential action any nation can take. Literally hundreds of thousdands have died as a direct result of the decision to lauch this war. Why?

• Saddam had sought Yellowcake uranium to make into nuclear weapons? No. And the administration knew it. Did I mention that they knew it?


• Saddam purchased Aluminum Tubes which could only be used in centrifuges for the enrichment of unranium? Yeah, he had some tubes, but they were better suited for making standard artillery rockets of a kind which posed no threat to the US. The administration was told this repeatedly, but gave no indication that the intelligence community was at best equivocal about whether the tubes had any relation at all to WMD.


• Saddam had mobile Bio-chem Trailers for the stealthy production of WMD? Um, not so much. And the informant who said so -- the aptly code-named "Curveball" -- was an alcoholic former taxi-driver from Iraq known to be a fabricator of bullshit which he tried to sell as "intelligence". Intelligence officers issued numerous warnings about Curveball's truthfulness which were bureaucratically suppressed or ignored as the administration incorporated Curveball's fabrications into their case for war.


• Saddam was supporting al-Qaeda? Nope. And they knew it.

Many of us knew these claims were highly questionable at the time they were originally made as the justification for war. And now we know the Bushies were deliberately misleading us. What do we call that when someone deliberately misleads us?

And are they the least bit contrite? Nope.

From the Washington Post (April 6, 2007):

"Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June. "This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

[The Post goes on to explain:]
Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion. "

Cheney is still at it.

Unfuckingbelievable.

Literally.

So we continue to beat the Zombie Horse.