Makin’ shit up
Much of the Bush “case” for invading Iraq came from a now discredited source the US never spoke to directly and didn’t even know the identity of. Yet Colin Powell trumpeted this “evidence” as a reason for war.
The Bush administration’s prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball,” according to current and former intelligence officials.
<These reports> became a crucial part of the White House case for war — including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the war.
However the Bushies never got independent corroboration, never investigated themselves, and thus based their justification for war on second-hand reports from a mystery man now proven to be lying. One wonders if he ever existed at all. If he did, and they believed him without checking the facts, then they are bumblers. What’s more likely, if this mystery person actually exists, is his story was deliberate misinformation and propaganda designed to build a spurious case for war. Now, WHO could have wanted that to happen?
Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice would just love to testify publicly, but darn it, she just can’t.
“Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify,” Rice told CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle involved here: It is a long-standing principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress.”
What a bunch of evasive hooey. Even her allies think she’s shooting herself in the foot.
White House allies and Republicans investigating the Sept. 11 attacks pressed Sunday to hear open testimony from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice with one commissioner calling her refusal a “political blunder of the first order.”
And why doesn’t she want to testify? Well, there are those darned perjury laws, y’know.