Commission: Bush Got What he Wanted Out of Blatantly Bad Iraq Intelligence

It found no evidence that intelligence had been politically twisted to suit preconceptions about Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and made no formal judgments about how top policy makers had used that intelligence to justify war. Yet in its own way, the presidential commission on intelligence left little doubt that President Bush and his top aides had gotten what they wanted, not what they needed, when they were told that Saddam Hussein had a threatening arsenal of illicit weapons. President Bush's election-year order creating the commission (and a schedule that assured it would report well after the election) did not authorize it to investigate how policy makers had used the intelligence they received. [more]

• Doubts on Source for Key Piece of Data Were Suppressed, Report Says. [more]
• Former UN Weapons Scott Ritter: "Paul Wolfowitz was a salesman; his job was to sell a war. He acknowledged this in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, in which he acknowledged that WMDs and the threat they posed, was nothing more than a vehicle to sell this war to America. Now you come to the war itself and selling it to Congress and questions: How long will this take? Or how much will this cost? Paul Wolfowitz lied to Congress about the costs of war. There is not a responsible member of government who thought this would be quick and cheap. There was nobody who believed that Iraq oil would pay for itself, no one in the oil business thought so." [more]
• Manufacturing Consent So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name. And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat. [more]
  
• PIMPED U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (Pictured above) tells the UN Security Council that Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons and developing rockets and aircraft to deliver them. Using tape recordings, photographs and diagrams in an attempt to persuade a reluctant U.N. Security Council that war is the only answer to deal with Saddam Hussein's defiance of UNSCR 1441 [more]. The full text of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations on Iraq is [here]