Finally!

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there were some of us running around ranting about what a big pack of lies the administration was telling and had told to get us into war in Iraq.

After it became clear that the Saddam didn't really have WMD, and maybe we'd made a mistake, the Senate Intelligence Committee started an investigation into what happened.

Senator Roberts, Republican chairman of the committee divided their investigation into two phases. The first part dealt specifically with the intelligence community, and a report highly critical of them was issued in July of 2004.

Phase II, which would deal specifically with how White House and Pentagon officials handled the intelligence, somehow never managed to quite get completed, despite extreme measures from Democrats. The GOP, and particularly Senator Roberts, apparently figured the voters didn't need to know anything about what part the White House might have played in misleading us into war. In fact, Senator Roberts said

"I don't think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence. I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further.

Years later, the committee has finally released a report, not that it will really make a difference anymore. What do you think it says?

WASHINGTON — President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials promoted the invasion of Iraq with public statements that weren't supported by intelligence or that concealed differences among intelligence agencies, the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday in a report that was delayed by bitter partisan infighting.

Surprise.

The Senate report, the first official examination of whether top officials knew that their public statements were unsubstantiated when they made them, reviewed five speeches by Bush, Cheney and former Secretary of State Colin Powell between August 2002 and February 2003. It also dissected key statements made by them and other top officials, including Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The committee found that the administration's warnings that former dictator Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden, a highly inflammatory assertion in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaida attacks, weren't substantiated by U.S. intelligence reports. In fact, it said, U.S. intelligence agencies were telling the White House that while there'd been sporadic contacts over a decade, there was no operational cooperation between Iraq and al Qaida, the report said.

The administration's repeated statements "suggesting that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al Qaida with weapons training, were not substantiated by intelligence," it said.

Contentions by Bush and Cheney that Saddam had to be removed because he could give terrorists weapons of mass destruction to strike the United States were "contradicted by available intelligence information" that found that the late Iraqi dictator was unlikely to make such transfers, the report said.

Cheney's assertions that Mohammad Atta, the chief Sept. 11 hijacker, had met months before the attack with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital, Prague, were also unsubstantiated, the inquiry found.

The committee said that Bush and Cheney "failed to reflect concerns and uncertainties" expressed in intelligence analyses that questioned administration assertions that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops as liberators and warned that American forces could face violent resistance.

Statements by Bush, Cheney and other top officials that Saddam had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions were "generally substantiated" by what turned out to be erroneous U.S. intelligence analyses, the report said.

However, while intelligence reports "generally substantiated" their claims that Iraq had secretly restarted a nuclear weapons program, the committee said, Bush and other officials failed to disclose that the State Department disputed that finding.

The administration's statements also failed to disclose that the Energy Department joined the State Department in rejecting allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, the report said.

So, just to review:

A: They knew Saddam wasn't working with Al Qaeda.
B: They knew Saddam wasn't about to give al Qaeda weapons, much less nukes.
C: They knew that what Cheney was saying about Mohammed Atta was unproven.
D: They knew that our own intelligence people had doubts about our welcome in Iraq.
E: They knew that our own analysts disagreed about whether Saddam was even working on nuclear development again.
F: They knew that the 'uranium from Africa' story was a bunch of hooey.

(Oh, and by the way, they knew the aluminum tubes weren't for centrifuges, too.)

Yet, we had to go to war to keep "the smoking gun" from being "a mushroom cloud."

Now over 4000 US soldiers, and uncounted Iraqis dead. Incredible sums of money, and decades of diplomacy and prestige flushed down the toilet. And they lied. Early and often.

I still can't quite figure out why those people aren't in prison. It's insane.