'Five Lies' Lives On

Editor's Note: This is a modified excerpt from the new edition of "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" by Robert Scheer, Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry.

The new edition includes an up-to-the-minute epilogue analyzing the series of important developments that have shaped the debate over post-war Iraq, and more importantly, the missing weapons of mass destruction. To buy advance copies of the latest edition, visit FiveLies.com.

On February 17, President Bush sought once again to extricate himself from the scandal that simply won't go away: the missing Iraqi WMD. "My administration looked at the intelligence and we saw a danger," he told thousands of U.S. soldiers at Fort Polk, Louisiana. "Members of Congress looked at the same intelligence, and they saw a danger. The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence and it saw a danger. We reached a reasonable conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a danger."

It's no surprise that the independent commission appointed by the president has been carefully instructed to only look into lapses in intelligence-gathering, and not at the ways in which the administration may have exaggerated or misused intelligence. Now that it has become clear that Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons programs simply "did not exist," as the outgoing chief weapons inspector David Kay put it, the White House is scrambling to cast its now exposed lies as the inevitable consequence of a massive intelligence failure. In other words, the flaw lay not in the "reasonable conclusion" of the administration, but the evidence it was based on.

Whatever the state of U.S. intelligence gathering, the Bush administration's sales pitch for the Iraq War relied on public displays of classified data to an unprecedented degree, a practice that has now come to haunt the White House. Scrutiny of the record since Bush assumed office shows a clear and disturbing pattern: the manipulation of intelligence data to fit the administration's preconceived theories to support a policy based on a political agenda rather than the facts at hand.

The practice, which far surpasses the usual political sleight-of-hand employed by previous administrations, was so pervasive as to alarm career intelligence analysts. "I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided," said Gregory Thielmann, a key whistleblower who was the former director of the State Departments Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) until September 2002. "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: 'We know the answers – give us the intelligence to support those answers, '" he said.

Remember the OSP?

Where Donald Rumsfeld went for his Iraq intelligence was to something called the Office of Special Plans that he himself had formed as a sort of personal intelligence agency. The day-to-day intelligence operations were run by ex-Cheney aide and former Navy officer William Luti, reporting to Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith, a former Reagan official. According to the Guardian, "The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war."

The OSP amassed huge amounts of raw intelligence from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job it is to cull credible information from reports filed by agents around the world. Under pressure from Pentagon hawks, the officers became reluctant to discard any report, however farfetched, if it bolstered the administrations case for war.