Bush Report: State of Denial

This is a quote from Bob Woodword's book on the Bush White House, State of Denial, which I'm listening to in my car. (I've only had a few near misses from trying to write down quotes while trying to stay in my lane. So far, so good.)

"White House spokesman, Ari Fleisher, said on September 5, 2002, 'The President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.' Fleischer announced again on January 9, 2003, 'We know for a fact that there are weapons of mass destruction there.' In his weekly radio address on February 8, Bush said, 'We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.'"

Meanwhile, the man in charge of searching for WMD, U.S. Army General James “Spider” Marks, was frustrated at how little information he had.

"The intelligence they had on the WMD just wasn't good enough. This is unsat(isfactory), unsat, unsat!' he said. 'This is not working.'"

Marks was told there were 946 sites in Iraq that had WMD and his men were supposed to go in and find and neutralize them, but there were given practically no specifics about what they were supposed to find. Maybe not surprising, since they found nothing; nada; zip. Maybe the guys in the Pentagon already knew what we all found out too late; the WMD was a big hoax. Marks has said in an interview with CQ, in 2006 that the people in the Pentagon responsible for planning the Iraq invasion "ostensibly" cared about WMD, but their "give-a-shit level was really low."

Want another 100 years of the same? Vote McCain.