Cheney: SYFPH

I am getting pretty tired of listening to Dick Cheney make false accusations and assertions. He went to the American Enterprise Institute this morning and spewed forth several gallons of bile. According to Big Time:

“What is not legitimate and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible is the suggestion by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence. Some of the most irresponsible comments have come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence materials. They are known to have a high opinion of their own analytical capabilities. And they were free to reach their own judgments based upon the evidence.”- Dick ‘Big Time’ Cheney, November 21, 2005.

But according to Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6:

A British official identified as “C” said that he had returned from a meeting in Washington and that “military action was now seen as inevitable” by U.S. officials.

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”- Downing Street Minutes, July 23, 2002.

That’s pretty straightforward. The facts were being fixed. I can think of no better source for this than the man in charge of British intelligence. I can’t think of any innocent meaning for the word ‘fixed’ in this context. And we already know that intelligence was used in spite of debunkings and strong reservations within the American intelligence community. We have seen examples related to the aluminum tubes, the Niger forgeries, the source on mobile labs, the source on Iraqi/Al-Qaeda joint training, and the purported meeting of Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

Cheney should shut his fucking pie hole.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.