t is thanks in part to the Democrats' weakness in Congress that the Bush Administration has been able to convey the impression of having been (along with Congress and the rest of us) the innocent victim of a CIA misinformation campaign--much easier since the committee postponed its examination of the Administration's prewar hype until after the election. But this misimpression is also a product of the selective amnesia of much of the media that covered the release of the report. In fact, almost everything we have learned about the shoddiness of the case for war was known at the time we were being stampeded into it. As the tireless Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay reported for the Knight Ridder chain back in October 2002, "Intelligence professionals and diplomats...privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war. These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses [and]...charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Hussein poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary." The reporters quoted one anonymous official who noted, "Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books."

Throughout the bureaucracy, evidence abounded for anyone who cared to look. For instance, a secret September 2002 report of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency informed Secretary Rumsfeld, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities," according to a report obtained by U.S. News & World Report. When Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Counterterrorism, explained to the Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, according to Patrick Lang, former head of Human Intelligence at the CIA, the Bush Administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post, "they did away with his job. They wanted just liaison officers who were junior. They didn't want a senior intelligence person who argued with them. Hardcastle said, 'I couldn't deal with these people.' They are such ideologues that they knew what the outcome should be and they thought when they didn't get it from intelligence people they thought they were stupid. They start with an almost pseudo-religious faith. They wanted the intelligence agencies to produce material to show a threat, particularly an imminent threat. Then they worked back to prove their case. It was the opposite of what the process should have been like."

Meanwhile, we also have compelling evidence that at least some in the Administration knew quite well the true state of Saddam's arsenal. In a February 2001 meeting with Egypt's foreign minister in Cairo, Secretary of State Powell said of the UN sanctions then in force against Saddam's Iraq, "Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Apparently accustomed to getting away with ignoring reality in almost all its forms, both Bush and Cheney remained adamantly oblivious in their responses to the report's release. The President robotically repeated, "We were right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them." A spokesman for Cheney, as if speaking from an alternative universe, told a reporter that the committee findings were consistent with Administration claims.

How long will the mainstream media lie prostrate for this kind of insulting and deeply contemptuous nonsense, which weakens our nation and leaves us more vulnerable to attack than we were before? Personally, I think it's long past time to tell Mr. Cheney and his sorry sidekick to go fuck themselves.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040802&s=alterman