Lying Us into War

Brigadiers have often come to verbal fisticuffs over the question of whether or not the Bush Administration's manipulation of prewar intelligence constitutes lying, per se. The Washington Monthly's blog has this to say on the matter of one of the main manipulations that was used to persuade the public into supporting an invasion:

CURVEBALL....Brian Ross of ABC News has uncovered a picture (though not the name) of Curveball, the Iraqi emigre who peddled the phony stories of mobile biological labs that ended up in Colin Powell's speech to the UN. Tyler Drumheller, former chief of European operations at the CIA, says the agency knew all along that the information was unreliable:

"We said, 'This is from Curveball. Don't use this,'" Drumheller says. Powell says neither he nor his chief of staff Col. Larry Wilkerson was ever told of any doubts about Curveball.

....Drumheller also says he met personally with the then-deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, to raise questions about the reliability of Curveball, well before the Powell speech.

"And John said, 'Oh my, I hope not. You know this is all we have,' and I said, 'This can't be all we have.' I said, 'There must be another, there must be something else.' And he said, 'No, this is really the only tangible thing we have.'"

McLaughlin adamantly denies any such meeting or warning from Drumheller and also denies knowing that Drumheller had attempted to redact the Curveball portions of Powell's speech.

They knew Saddam didn't have a nuclear program. They knew he didn't have mobile bio labs. They knew he didn't have drones. They knew.