Feith Channel

I smell "plausible deniability," and it stinks to high heaven.

The days should be long over, when a president can say, oops, I didn't know, because my staff didn't tell me the whole truth.

What a crock. If he didn't know he should have. It's that damned simple.

This is war we are talking about here, not the Medicare D Bill, which, of course, they lied about as well.

Editorial - newsjournalonline.com:

How Pentagon hijacked intelligence for war

At the time in 2002, the public face of the Bush administration was still talking as if it was doing everything possible to avoid a war with Iraq. In reality, plans for an invasion were so solid by August of that year -- seven months before the invasion and months before the administration went to the United Nations to make the case for war -- that Pentagon planners already had a slide show about what Iraq would look like post-invasion, in 2006: It would be democratic. It would be stable. It would be a staunch American ally. And no more than 5,000 American troops would be stationed there. (You can see the slideshow at George Washington University's National Security Archive, nsarchive.org.)

Armed with rosy myths like that, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense at the time -- and a chief architect of the invasion -- could make the case to President Bush that attacking Saddam Hussein would be easy and rewarding. But there were still many in the intelligence community, and indeed dissenting generals within the Pentagon, who saw things differently. Analysts within the State Department and the CIA were skeptical about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Their views never made it to the president's ears, which Vice President Dick Cheney waxed with gate-keeping of his own.