Senate Report Shows Intel Debunked Al Qaeda-Iraq Link Before Bush's Speech

[L. Coyote]

Senate Report Shows Intel Debunked Al Qaeda-Iraq Link Before Bush's Speech
Andrew Tilghman - June 16, 2008 - http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/06/intel.php


Buried deep in the new Senate intel report is evidence that yet another pre-war Bush administration claim about Iraq had been discredited within the intelligence community, months before the president used the claim publicly as an argument for war.

In October 2002, a few weeks before Congress voted to authorize the Iraq invasion, Bush told a crowd in Cincinnati: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses."

Problem is, it wasn't true. More importantly, a lot of people at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency knew it probably wasn't true. That's one of the interesting revelations inside the Senate's recent 171-page Phase II report on whether White House statements were backed up by prewar intelligence.

Once again, it's important to make the distinction between good-faith flaws in prewar intelligence and evidence that the public was misled by a bogus case for war. .....

[annabanana]

1. And yet people are getting on air STILL and insisting that the

"intel was flawed".. not the "intel was cooked".

[Lint Head]

2. There was no real intelligence. Only propaganda.

:dem: