Morning Must-Read: Marcy Wheeler: Dick Cheney Lied Us into War

…demonstrating what a liar Dick Cheney is…. Levin has been trying to get the CIA to declassify a March 13, 2003 cable…. Brennan still refuses to declassify the cable, but his letter does explain some of CIA’s assessment of that source:

On 13 March 2003, CIA headquarters received a communication from the field responding to a request that the field look into a single-source intelligence report indicating that Mohammed Atta met with former Iraqi intelligence officer al-Ani in Praque in April 2001. In that communication, the field expressed significant concern regarding the possibility of an official public statement by the United States Government indicating that such a meeting took place. The communication noted that information received after the single-source report raised serious doubts about that report’s accuracy….

Brennan’s letter goes on to quote on line from the report:

The field added that, to its knowledge, ‘there is not one USG [counterterrorism] or FBI expert that… has said they have evidence of ‘know’ that [Atta] was indeed [in Prague]. In fact, the analysis has been quite the opposite. [brackets original]

Four days after this report, Cheney fought mightily to make the Atta claim once more….

I raise all this when I should instead be talking about the torture report because it gets to the point…. This all was about exploitation, not intelligence. And for over a year, Dick Cheney’s goal for exploitation was to create a fraudulent case for the Iraq war, whether via torture or dubious single source claims in Prague. As Cheney complains that the torture report (which reported on the anal rape done in the guise of rectal rehydration done on his order) is ‘full of crap,’ we should never forget that one end result of this was the disastrous Iraq war…