On the record- of Congress and those British Frenchmen, anyway.

Will Pitt has made a couple of nice posts- and some links to the British press- about how the CIA warned Bu$hCo that there were no WMD, and how they pushed it anyway.

White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'

Bush's televised address attacked by US intelligence

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday October 9, 2002
The Guardian

President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.

Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.

"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence...

...and...

Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong
By Neil Mackay
The Sunday Herald

13 October 2002

The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his own security services don't agree.

GEORGE Bush was about to be hoist by his own petard. It was Monday last week, and the president was glad-handing with the great and the good at the Cincinnati Museum Centre in Ohio as he waited to give one of his most bellicose speeches yet.

In the audience were Ohio state governor Bob Taft and a host of business and political luminaries. As the deadline approached for the Senate and House of Representatives vote on whether or not to give Bush the backing he wanted to attack Iraq, this speech was to be the president's final flourish in the propaganda war to get the US marching in line behind him.

Calling Saddam Hussein a 'murderous tyrant', he made it clear why America had to finish off the Iraqi dictator. 'Facing clear evidence of peril,' he told the audience, 'we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.' He went on: 'We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from happening.'

What Bush could not have guessed was that his claims that Iraq was intent on attacking the USA had already began to unravel. The denouement started a few days before, on Thursday, October 3, when Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, metaphorically donned his hob-nailed boots and began delivering some well-aimed kicks to the head of George Tenet, the director of the CIA. The CIA, Graham said, were monkeying with democracy. The agency was not telling his committee what they needed to know about the Iraqi regime. Tenet was damaging the ability of Congress to assess the need for military action.

With one week until Congress voted on authorising Bush to use force, Graham was impatient. These are serious times, he said , and he needed serious answers. Graham and the committee had received an anodyne intelligence report from the CIA on the threat posed by Iraq the day before -- Wednesday, October 2. This, however, answered none of the questions the Senate committee wanted answered: would Saddam use weapons of mass destruction (WMD); how would his regime react if attacked; and what would be the consequences of war?

On October 9, almost a week after Tenet received his whipping at the hands of Graham, the senator's hardman approach paid off when the director of the CIA admitted that the only reason Saddam would use WMDs against the United States was if he was backed into a corner -- due to a strike by the American military -- and realised he was about to fall. Saddam, Tenet was saying, would only become the nightmare that Bush envisaged, if Bush attacked him first. Within two days, then, of Bush's flag-waving call to arms, his most senior intelligence officer had pulled the rug from under the biggest project of his presidency.

Tenet's admission left Bush in disarray with revelations making it appear as if the president was exaggerating the threat from Iraq, to say the least. Tenet, a loyal subject of the Bush administration, had no option but to come clean -- no matter how difficult a position it put the president in.

The CIA director's hands were tied on October 3 by Senator Graham, a democrat who represents Florida, when he told the CIA it was acting 'unacceptably', and added: 'We're trying to carry out a very important responsibility, and given the nature of this classified information, we are the only means by which the intelligence community can communicate to the legislative branch of government.'

There was no way that Tenet could play fast and loose with the Senate. Both the FBI and CIA have been attacked repeatedly in Congressional hearings since September 11 for a series of intelligence cock-ups.

Later on October 3, after Graham met with Tenet, his mood had changed -- Graham seemed to be cooler, calmer. He said the meeting had been frank and candid. What Graham wanted was a flavour of the classified National Intelligence Estimates, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, whose analysts report directly to Tenet. On Monday, October 7, around the time Bush was in Ohio cheerleading for war , Graham received just what he had been looking for -- it came in the shape of a letter from the CIA director. It made astonishing reading. Two days later, on Wednesday, October 9, the Senate intelligence committee voted to make the full text of Tenet's letter public.

Tenet's letter said he was declassifying selected material to help the Senate's deliberations on whether or not to support the president over attacking Iraq. 'Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical and biological weapons) against the United States,' the declassified material read.

'Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means ... or CBW.

'Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the US would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.'

Tenet went on to declassify formerly secret evidence given at a closed hearing of the Senate's intelligence committee in which democrat Carl Levin, was told by a 'senior intelligence witness' that the 'probability ... would be low' of Saddam initiating a WMD attack. The agent also said the chances were 'pretty high' that Saddam would launch a WMD attack 'if we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis'. Tenet's revelations left the entire basis of Bush's call to arms in ruins, and the CIA director swiftly became an embarrassment to the president as the propaganda war backfired . Tenet was not deliberately trying to undermine Bush -- he was simply forced into a corner by the Senate and compelled to reveal his true understanding of the Iraqi crisis.

It's a good thing some people have memories longer than the last 5 minutes.

So Bu$hie can set up all the Commissions to cover his tracks he wants.

It's on the record. Some of us take notes. Bu$hCo's caught in another whopper- but if a whopper lands on the floor, and the mainstream media won't report it, does it make a mess?