The Truth Dribbles Out
by tristero
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
Not even Claude Rains could pretend to be surprised by any of this, but that is no reason to get cynical. Everyone with half a brain – or less – knew Nixon was lying through his teeth long before the “smoking gun” was found. It wasn’t the damning evidence on that tape so much as the gathering momentum of the country’s disgust with the First Crook. Ditto with Blumenthal’s article.
Is it the final straw? Probably not. But it is impossible for anyone anymore to pretend that Bush wasn’t lying about the infamous 16 words. As for Bush lying to himself…it won’t wash. He knew. By the time Tenet briefed Bush about Sabri, two things prevented Bush from behaving like a sane human being. First, he was in too deep. By September ’02, Bush had geared up the country for war – the vote in Congress to come, the UN and the inspections, they were just meaningless diversions. The die was cast and nothing would stop Bush from going to war, let alone something as trivial as contradictory and credible intelligence that there wasn’t even the shadow of a casus belli.
Second, by 2002, Bush’s psychopathic personality was at its most floridly deranged. Riding incredibly high opinion polls, convinced God was speaking to him, having gotten away with stupendous lies and irresponsible behavior throughout his entire career, Bush was incapable of anything but lying when he dismissed the report from Tenet. But simply because he was at the height of mania, don’t make the mistake of thinking he didn’t know where the truth lay. Oh, he knew, all right.
But the truth, George W. Bush knows, can be magically nullified through the exercise of sufficient power. That – and only that – is his mad delusion, a delusion nurtured by his toxic upbringing where his family shielded him from the consequences of his failures and incompetence. It is a delusion that has led to the pointless suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people. But as deluded as he was, and is, he knew Sabri was telling the truth. And that is why Bush made sure no one found out about it until long afterwards