Bush pre-War Intelligence Failure was no accident

In this fiasco called Iraq, the strongest defense the Right had been able to muster was that they were "mistaken" because of faulty pre-war intelligence. It's a believable scenario. After all, previous Presidents made the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. None of them believed the danger was enough to go to war however, but they did believe it. The Bush administration sold that argument ferociously but knew that would have to do more to gain public support for starting a war in the middle east. Thus was born the Saddam/al Qaeda connection. The Bush administration loudly and repeatedly tied Iraq to 9-11 (after the war was underway they quietly admitted it was untrue). Some doubted it from the start (Barack Obama for one) but as we frequently heard from the Right at the time, only the President has ALL the information. So the majority of the American people and Congress gave him the benefit of the doubt and supported the Iraq invasion.

Well, the public now has more information and it turns out that the "bad intelligence" defense no longer can be offered. A report from the Defense Department's Inspector General himself (!)says that the Pentagon manipulated Iraq intelligence to create al Qaeda link.

Let's read that bolded sentence again. The Pentagon manipulated Iraq intelligence to create an al Qaeda link. This war, which has killed thousands of Americans, wounded tens of thousands more, killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and destroyed the reputation of our once great nation - was unleashed by people who intentionally manipulated information to gain public support.

If anyone can think of a more serious Abuse of Power - please let me know. Finally, who can still doubt that a political movement that would purposefully mislead the public to go to war would also blatantly lie about other things in order to force their agenda?

I get no joy in talking about this all the time. In fact, it's depressing. But there is a line of thinking that says that when you are going through a difficult time, instead of complaining you should seek out what you are meant to learn from it. Well, it is surely difficult to realize that there are some* people among us who are willing to sacrifice the certain death of Americans and other innocents in order to do what they want. The lesson to learn, I think, is that these people, unless stopped, will continue to ignore facts and mislead the public in order to promote their narrow political agenda. So, I guess I rail on this point so much because I think that once folks realize this sad truth about some of our fellow Americans, we can finally unite to reject these ideologues and try to get this nation back on it's feet.

*I think that those actively promoting this agenda and consciously manipulating facts number only in the hundreds. However, there are millions who have bought into it. These are two different groups of people (perhaps unwittingly) working toward the same goal.