Look out behind you!

The attempts to shift blame for the prewar lies about Iraq continue. The Toronto Star for February 18 tells us that

Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency to step down because of their faulty conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed mass-killing weapons.

Perle, a close adviser to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said top officials made no attempt to skew the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he implied, top policymakers relied in good faith on the conclusions of the intelligence agencies.

Never mind the fact that before the war, the White House hawks - I wish there was a word not so insulting to a noble bird, wait, I have one - the White House warmongers set up their own shop, the Office of Special Plans, to comb through intelligence reports to pluck out the most damning indictments they could find, never mind that they fawned over ever hyped-up story from Iraqi exile groups, never mind that they swallowed whole without even chewing every bit of unverified even known-to-be-unreliable tidbit if it was droolingly anti-Saddam, never mind all that was because they were convinced the CIA and DIA were "soft" on Iraq, never mind any of it.

No, we're told now, never mind all that. The truth is, they were taken in, fooled, overwhelmed, their innocent trusting natures cruelly exploited, by those mean old intelligence services. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Let's not forget, of course, that the intelligence sources were indeed wrong. They did conclude that Saddam had WMDs. But what's more important not to forget is that they did that on the preponderance of the evidence, not as a positive determination. The reports were full of "probably," "could be," "likely," "no conclusive evidence," and similar hesitations, all of which the White House stripped out in pitching the war, presenting every "maybe" as a "yes" and every "we think" as an "incontrovertible" to stampede us into a useless war.

That is, they lied through their flaming teeth. Don't let's let them get away with doing it again.