Josh Marshall: The Real Issue in the Run-Up to the War

The intelligence community was embroiled in the issue of whether Saddam had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. It was the Bush Administration that kept pushing this lie over and over again. Key graph:

[Among Bush's lies and distortions]

Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq maintained ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was always just a plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real fights with the Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the terror tie angle and much less on WMD.) The president and his chief advisors tried to leverage Americans' horror over 9/11 to gain support for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public the president was sworn to protect.

Remember, a substantial percentage of the American people are still convinced that Saddam orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. That misconception is OVERWHELMINGLY because Bush and his lying thugs kept spreading this lie. After the evidence became too overwhelming to ignore, Bush was forced (in a low-key statement not given the attention it deserved) to admit that he had been wrong. But the damage had been done.

Read Marshall's whole post. It's an excellent summary of the disgusting tactics Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all the rest of this contemptible administration used to drag us into an unneccesary war.