From "American Conservative"?

You mean there are still "real" conservatives, as opposed to members of "team Bush"?

Well apparently there are a few. Something backing up Josh Marshall:

In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.

Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State.

The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by providing information to friends in the media. It has subsequently been alleged that false information generated by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was given to Judith Miller and other journalists through WHIG.

On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the documents.

Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the CIA Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent straight to Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went directly to the NSC and the Vice President’s Office.

On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.

President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.

Once again, many of the enablers are treating Fitzgerald's indictment as the "end" of this matter. But it will not be.

The new Gallup poll shows that 53% of the country thinks that Bush "misled" the nation into war and 55% of the country judges his presidency a failure; a majority of the country wants to get the fuck out of Iraq -- and Bush refuses to leave, or make plans for leaving.

It gets progressively worse on this matter. It is not going away. History is going to judge Bush and his minions "War Criminals" -- I'd suggest conservatives might want to get on board before their legacy gets permenantly entwined (mostly too late for that). As it happened -- and has now been confirmed -- against the Johnson Administration, illegal wars - especially the illegal wars you do not win (see James K. Polk for what Bush was hoping for) have a tendency to really count against you in history's judgment.

Sadly, the senseless deaths are not going to end; which added seven Americans and dozens of Iraqi civilians yesterday. And will inevitably add thousands more in the coming months. Bush has staked his legacy on his illegal war. See the paragraph above.

After World War I, former general (and war hero) and progressive Smedley Butler called war a "Racket". Well, the Second World War came and to an extent it seemed the exception to the rule perhaps -- but can anyone really dispell Butler's claim to this war? Sold on deceipt and resulting in gigantic profits for Halliburton and Oil Companies?



*Butler was a marine major general and a double Medal of Honor winner. It is frankly shocking, but indicative of how a "progressive" is treated by history that he is largely forgotten -- though the fact is that much of World War I is forgotten in the shadow of its sequel.