weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand
testimony of defectors—including Saddam's own son-in-law."
This was a lie.
Saddam's son-in-law told us just the opposite when he defected in 1995.
You can find it on page 13 of his debriefing report. He said: "All
weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed."
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons
of mass destruction...Many of us are convinced that [Saddam] will
acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon."
In a memoir published last year, then-CIA director George Tenet
complained that Cheney did not follow the usual practice of clearing
the speech with the CIA, and that what Cheney said "went well beyond
what our analysis could support." Tenet added his "impression" that
"the president really wasn't any more aware of what his number-two was
going to say." Yet, Tenet admits that he did not raise the issue with
either the president or vice president. Tenet was all too well aware
that the intelligence was being "fixed around the policy."
The Power to Intimidate
Intimidated by the vice president, Tenet ended up ordering his
analysts, my former colleagues, to prepare a National Intelligence
Estimate to Cheney's terms of reference—you remember, the one that said
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties with al-Qaeda; the NIE
that appeared just ten days before Congress voted to give the president
the power to make war on Iraq.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of
State Colin Powell, and who chaired the preparation of Powell's Feb. 5,
2003 speech at the UN, was asked about all this when Wilkerson
testified before Congress on June 26, 2006.
The question came from Republican Congressman Walter Jones of North
Carolina: Why was it that a small number of individuals got so much
power in the administration that they "had more influence than the
professionals?"
Wilkerson gave a three-word answer: "The Vice President."
Torture
It is an open secret that Vice President Cheney was, and continues to
be the prime mover behind torture. As some will recall, speaking on
open radio Cheney called the use of water boarding a "no-brainer."
It was his lawyer, David Addington, who prepared the Jan. 25, 2002
Memorandum signed by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales
recommending that the laws against torture could be circumvented.
George Bush applied that advice in his own presidential Memorandum of
Feb. 7, 2002, launching our country onto "the dark side," as Cheney has
put it. That memorandum opened the gaping loophole through which the
administration drove the Mack truck of torture.
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