IRAQ -- BUSH KNEW BEFORE INVASION THAT SADDAM HAD NO WMD: Two former CIA officers have confirmed to Salon that President Bush was told in Sept. 2002 that Saddam Hussein did not possess any weapons of mass destruction. According to the officer, CIA director George Tenet provided Bush with top-secret information that "detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissible material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons." Bush reportedly dismissed the warning immediately. According to one of the officers, "Bush didn't give a f*ck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up." Tenet never brought up the information again; in fact, only a few months later he infamously referred to the case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction as a "slam dunk." The intelligence about the lack of weapons of mass destruction was never provided to Congress before their vote to authorize military operations in March 2003, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair depended on this faulty information to make his decision to support the Iraq war. "Blair was duped," said one of the CIA officers. "He was shown the altered report." Even though Bush finally publicly admitted in 2004 that "Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there," he continued to believe that they were. In his new book on Bush, Robert Draper writes that the President repeated conviction that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction "to Andy Card all the way up until Card's departure in April 2006."

JUSTICE -- SEN. WHITEHOUSE SEEKS TO RESTRICT EXCESS WHITE HOUSE INTERFERENCE IN DOJ INVESTIGATIONS: In April, during testimony by outgoing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) revealed that during the Bush administration, the number of White House officials allowed to intervene in pending criminal investigations by the Justice department increased by 10,325 percent, from four to 417. In a subsequent hearing in July, Whitehouse also revealed that Gonzales had given Vice President Cheney's office increased access. Whitehouse is now seeking to limit "the number of people in the White House who can be briefed by Justice on pending criminal matters." His bill, which is co-sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), "states that only certain 'covered officers' in both the Justice Department and White House may discuss ongoing criminal or civil investigations carried out by the Justice Department. The bill also requires the Attorney General and President to notify the Senate and House Judiciary Committees when new covered officers are designated." The Senate Judiciary Committee will discuss the bill in a business meeting today.

IRAQ -- UPSET OVER GAO'S FINDINGS ON IRAQ, CONSERVATIVES ATTACK AGENCY'S QUALIFICATIONS: Now that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported little to no progress in Iraq and the administration may be cooking the books on levels of violence, conservatives are desperately trying to attack the agency's credibility. Yesterday at a House International Relations Committee hearing, ranking member Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) complained, "I just feel uncomfortable listening to a report by the Government Accountability Office about a war effort." GAO Comptroller General David Walker explained the work his agency does is based on "looking at hard data, interviewing qualified individuals, and appropriate parties have an opportunity to review and comment on our work," he said. "It's my understanding that Secretary of Defense Gates does not have any military experience either." Ros-Lehtinen has had no problem citing the work of the GAO in a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff or enlisting the GAO's resources to pursue her agenda. Similarly, Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon, a staunch war supporter, attacked the GAO's work as "flat-out sloppy." It's only when the right wing doesn't like the agency's conclusions that it finds fault with the work of the office.


(Excerpted from a mailing from the Center for American Progress.)


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