A WMD-fit

Most of the time I could restrain myself, but there is one general observation I have to get off my chest. The discussion on the reason for the US and Britain to start the war with Iraq, their illusive 'weapons of mass destruction" have caused already many comments. Now even the intelligence community in the US is denouncing the statements of its own administration regarding those WMD. How far does a country have to go that even its own spies lose confidence in their government?
Anyway: all this causes a crisis that touches anything the current US government is telling us. How could be believe that what they tell us is true? I know that almost half of the US citizens think it is not a big deal, but I do think it is.
I will try to ignore possible new lies of the US government, even when it concerns other issues. Trying to make a distinction between facts and fiction should be one of my tasks, isn't it?

A quote from today's mediachannel.org's newsletter:

Former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal is saying bollocks to the charge that the CIA did it - or failed to do it - however you want to put it and instead blames the Neo-Cons in the Pentagon. In a column today on Salon.com He writes, in part:

"The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings that were overridden and suppressed. On virtually every single important claim the Bush administration made in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views -- not from individual analysts but from several intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war resolution.

"Precisely because of qualms the administration encountered within, it created a rogue intelligence operation -- the Office of Special Plans, located within the bowels of the Pentagon. The OSP was under the control of neoconservatives; it roamed outside the regular interagency intelligence process, stamped its approval on stories retailed by Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and directly piped them into the president through the vice president's office. It was fail-safe in producing disinformation and feeding the impulses of a self-isolated president, but it was not what anyone involved in the craft of intelligence calls intelligence.

"There was no general intelligence failure; on the contrary, there was a successful effort by the Bush administration to intimidate, subordinate and punish intelligence to fit its political objectives.

end of quote