Four former Bush administration officials involved in the run-up to the
Iraq war testified before the Democratic Policy Committee yesterday to explain
how and why the intelligence was manipulated.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin
Powell's former chief of staff, said he needed just three words to explain why
a small number of individuals in the administration “had more influence…than
the professionals.” "The
Vice President," he said.  

Wilkerson stated that Powell's Feb. 2002
presentation of the Iraqi threat at the United Nations was "the
lowest point in my professional life." Former Assistant Secretary of
State for Intelligence and Research Carl Ford said lawmakers share some responsibility for intelligence
failures, telling them “not
to accept the crap we give you.”

Paul Pillar, a former CIA official who
coordinated U.S. intelligence on Iraq, said he believes that that decision to
invade Iraq was made by summer 2002, "and instead of intelligence
informing a policy decision, it was used to justify
a decision already made."  

The fourth official, Wayne White, the former
deputy director in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
said he warned senior U.S. officials days into the war that Iraqi Sunnis would
strongly resist the occupation. "I quickly warned, around the first week
or 10 days of the war...that this
spelled danger as we moved farther north, especially into Iraq's Sunni Arab
heartland," White said. In his review of the hearing, The Nation's David
Corn wrote, "[A]ccountability
still awaits those who called it wrong - and those who misused the
intelligence."

elsewhere, Buzzflash updates us on some of the military
service avoidance expert’s many other tricky activities …..   

Dick Cheney Makes a
Rattle Snake Look Like Honorable

‘The depth of cynicism,
calculated betrayal of our troops, and dishonesty in the Bush Administration is
lower than Death Valley. 

It now turns out that at the same
time that Dick Cheney and the Republicans in Congress (along with the GOP
mainstream media) were virulently attacking Democratic senators for calling for
a troop redeployment -- well, it turns out that the Administration and the
Pentagon were officially "planning" just that. In short, if people
who have advocated saving our troops by exiting Iraq are traitors, then the
Bush Administration was covertly planning "traitorous" acts.

According to "Stars and
Stripes": 

"The head of U.S. forces in
Iraq has created a plan to reduce the number of U.S. brigades in that country
from 14 to about 5 by the end of 2007, according to the New York Times.

In the same time period, the
number of U.S. bases in Iraq would also shrink from 69 to 11, the newspaper
reported Sunday. 

Citing unnamed sources, the
newspaper reported that Gen. George Casey, commander of Multi-National
Force-Iraq, discussed his plan last week in a classified briefing at the
Pentagon."

There's no way that Casey was
"freelancing" his "plan." So that means Cheney and Bush
knew about it and authorized it, while they were unleashing their attack dogs
to vilify the Democratic Senators for promoting a tame version of a
redeployment resolution.

That is hypocrisy and playing with our soldiers lives. It is beyond forgivable. 

It is a double whammy when you
consider that the Bush Administration has clearly been encouraging -- despite
what they officially say -- the puppet Iraqi "Green Zone" government
to offer amnesty to people who have slain American GIs. Whatever one thinks of
the plan, it is hypocrisy for the Bush Administration to talk about how our GIs
are barbarically killed -- and this is why we can never "give up" in
Iraq -- while promoting amnesty for the very killers whom they are using to
justify a continued war.

How do we know that the Bush
Administration is behind the amnesty for killing American soldiers idea? 

Well, when a resolution came up
in the Senate last week to oppose the idea of giving amnesty to fighters who
had killed American GIs, the only senators who voted for amnesty were hardcore
Busheviks. And we mean hardcore, as in Lott, Coburn, Cornyn and Graham. So 19
Republicans voted for amnesty for killers of American GIs while denouncing
Democratic Senators as proposing a "surrender" in Iraq.

It is hard to imagine being more
dishonest, hypocritical, and despicable than the Bush Republicans. 

They betray our troops, and
betray our nation.

They are as dishonest as a
philandering preacher. 

Our soldiers deserve to be
honored and respected, not to be used as pawns in a White House effort to
maintain one-party control of the United States.’

Democrats
Cite Report On Troop Cuts In Iraq