Holy Mother of God, The Bush Administration has conspired with Republican Senators (especially Pat Roberts) to "fix" the Iraq WMD intelligence and hide the truth. Raw Story has the goods in a well sourced
story:
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush issued an order to the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, and his cabinet members that severely curtailed intelligence oversight by restricting classified information to just eight members of Congress.
"The only Members of Congress whom you or your expressly designated officers may brief regarding classified or sensitive law enforcement information," he writes, "are the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Chairs and Ranking Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate."
The order is aimed at protecting "military security" and "sensitive law enforcement."
But what was said to be an effort to protect the United States became a tool by which the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Pat Roberts (R-KS) ensured there was no serious investigation into how the administration fixed the intelligence that took the United States to war in Iraq or the fabricated documents used as evidence to do so.
Coupled with limited access to intelligence documents, RAW STORY has found that Roberts and a handful of other strategically-placed Washington players stymied all questions into pre-war intelligence on Iraq and post-invasion cover-ups, including the outing of a CIA covert agent, by using targeted leaks and artfully deflecting blame from the White House.
This is a story of extraordinary importance. It goes to the heart of the corrupt dishonesty of the modern day republican party, and how they used a veil of secrecy and lies to push the country into a war which has harmed our national security, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and killed tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands), of people, including nearly 2,000 members of the American Military.
Read the whole thing.
Update [2005-8-11 16:11:59 by pontificator]: And don't miss the timeline!
Update [2005-8-11 17:29:45 by pontificator]: I'm puzzled by the commenters who complain that there is no "breaking news" or "smoking gun" in this article. First, I disagree. There is much new news here, such as, for example, Steven Hadley's central role in the cover-up. Second, and more importantly, however, "breaking news" is not why this story is so important. SusanG explains:
Excellent news analysis (4.00 / 4)
It doesn't matter that none of this is exactly breaking news and is coming from previous sources.
What matters is that Raw Story has done a connect-the-dots, in-depth, terrific news analysis, which puts the facts together in a coherent, easy-to-understand way.
This is exactly what's missing in today's mainstream media ... a willingness and ability to create a narrative that makes sense of a bunch of seemingly unrelated facts.
To me, this is worth a dozen "breaking news" gotcha items. They've done a tremendous job on shaping the story -- now it's up to us to start emailing this account to potentially interested mainstream media and see if it gets picked up.
I agree.