We do not want people to forget that BushCo knowingly took the US to war on false pretexts. Thousands of people have died because of these lies. Justice served would find George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a plethora of other senior administration officials in the dock of the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Inspector general: Pentagon manipulated prewar intel
POSTED: 3:30 p.m. EST, February 9, 2007
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the Defense Department’s inspector general said Friday.
Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith took “inappropriate” actions in advancing conclusions on al Qaeda connections not backed up by the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy “were not illegal or unauthorized,” they “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.
“I can’t think of a more devastating commentary,” said Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan.
He cited Gimble’s findings that Feith’s office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before the attack, and that there were “multiple areas of cooperation” between Iraq and al Qaeda, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
“That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war,” Levin said in an interview Thursday. He said the Pentagon’s work, “which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate … is something which is highly disturbing.”
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