After reading this Salon.com article I’m convinced that President Bush is flat out guilty of crimes and misdemeanors and should be impeached immediately.
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.
Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.
Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam’s WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell’s speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods.
Much like his insistence that there’s no possible way anyone could have predicted the New Orleans levies would break even though the White House had been told by specialists that exact possibility before the storm ever hit, Bush ignored the evidence that contradicted what he wanted to believe and then lied his ass off to justify an illegal war. If ever there was a sound justification for impeachment proceedings, this is it. It’s time we removed him from office and put him on trial for war crimes.
Go read the rest of the article, but be prepared to have your blood pressure shoot through the ceiling.
Posted on 09/09/2007 at 03:56 AM 
Because Bush was about making his name as a “war President” and he’d have never been elected a second term if all the violence in the world we were committing was the low-level “policing the goat-herding drug dealers” stuff we have to deal with in Afghanistan. He needed to invade someone or else his constituency would only be worrying about “Why did that Jackass let Bin Laden escape?” You can’t be a war President without a war, and you can’t rely on the patriotic jingoism that his administration needed to grab their political goals without a serious state of fear. We beat Afghanistan too quickly, they didn’t give us any trouble without the CIA shipping them weapons to resist being invaded as was the case when the Soviets invaded.
Who knows, maybe they were hoping that the Russians would fund Afghani resistance on general principle and misjudged the savvy nature of Putin’s long range planning. I mean, now the Russians are running Cold War “fuckyouYankee” exercises and we can’t do shit about it, or even complain much, because we’ve overextended ourselves thanks to our “war President.”