Liars

To follow up from the post below, the PDB reported on by the National Journal discussed immediately below is important because it shows INTENTIONAL manipulation of evidence by Bush, Cheney and higher up officials just prior to the Senate vote authorizing the use of force.

Examples from the article:

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.

They had been informed repeatedly and consistently that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime.

Yet there they are, just before the vote proclaiming NEW evidence (evidence for which the existence of is...we lack evidence) of a connection between Iraq and the now ever present "boogeyman" Al Qaeda. This evidence, like the September 21, 2001 PDB has not been provided, even in redacted form to the Senate.

Funny how we find out of this as Darth Cheney is heading out to AEI to lie in front of a Kool-Aid consuming audience.

Karma hates you Dick.