You Knew They Were Lying About WMD's, What About 9/11?

Knight-Ridder has produced an illustrative overview of how the Downing Street Memo's verify what many of us saw as weird goings-on here in America. As you may remember, it always appeared as though Bush was speaking out of both sides of his mouth regarding peace (he wanted it) or invasion (it was all Saddam's fault) in Iraq. If he was willing to lie, twist, distort and cover-up this much about Iraq...what is he hiding about 9/11?

By mid-March 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, top British officials were already so resigned to a war that they seemed preoccupied mostly with building international support and finding a legal justification.

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Richard Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning, told an interviewer that in an early July 2002 chat with then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, he questioned putting Iraq at the center of the U.S. war against terrorism. He said Rice advised him "essentially, that that decision's been made, don't waste your breath."

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Moreover, they echo other accounts of Bush's determination to unseat Saddam, who once tried to assassinate his father.

Bush came into office with aides, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who believed that the United States erred gravely by allowing Saddam to remain in power after the 1991 Gulf War.

Four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, during a crisis meeting at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued for attacking Iraq in response, as first recounted in journalist Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack."

Later that month, Wolfowitz helped arrange a trip by former CIA Director James Woolsey to the United Kingdom to look for evidence of an Iraqi role in Sept. 11.

Richard Clarke, at the time a veteran White House counterterrorism official, has written that Bush ordered him to look for the same evidence the day after the attacks.

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"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6 spy service, told Blair and his top advisers after talks in Washington, according to the first memo to be leaked. It was dated July 23, 2002.

US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al (Qaida) is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts reported earlier in his March 2002 letter to Straw.

In his own letter to Blair three days later, Straw also seemed to question the scale of the threat. "In the documents so far presented, it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action," he wrote.

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In yet another memo, Christopher Meyer, then Blair's ambassador to Washington, said he met with Wolfowitz on March 17, 2002, and discussed how to build support for military action. "I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors," Meyer reported to London.

The two governments discussed ways to craft an ultimatum to Saddam on U.N. weapons inspectors that he would be sure to reject, providing an excuse for war and a path to building international support.

Said Mann: "Going to the U.N. was always a box to be checked and a necessity for winning the support of the British government."

And Clinton was impeached for lying about a blow-job that came up during the trumped-up Whitewater scandal? Are you fucking kidding me?