The new BushCo
dirt-o-rama hitting bookstores today offers some tasty nuggets o' revelation on Bush and Company's lead-up to the Iraq war:
1. Bush gets all Samuel L. Jackson on Saddam:
When told that reporter Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam by force, Bush snapped: "Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry mother fucking ass all over the Mideast?"
2. "Arlene, take a look out there 'top of the mesa--you see smoke?"
As part of an aggressive prewar covert action program--codenamed Anabasis (after an ancient text about a botched invasion of Babylon)--the CIA was authorized by the White House in the winter of 2002 to blow up targets in Iraq and engage in "direct action" (an agency euphemism for assassination) to weaken Saddam's regime and to prepare for his ouster by the U.S. military. For Anabasis, the agency smuggled Iraqi exiles to a top-secret site in the Nevada desert and trained them in sabotage and explosives. The Iraqi force, known as the Scorpions, was being trained to seize an isolated Iraqi military post-in order to create a provocation that could trigger a war with Iraq.
3. "WMD's? We don't need no stinking WMD's!"
When Bush was first briefed that no WMDs had been found in Iraq, he was totally unfazed and asked few questions. "I'm not sure I've spoken to anyone at that level who seemed less inquisitive," the briefer told the authors.
4. "Dammit, Powell! That's no cattle pond, it's a warhead!"
After the invasion, Dick Cheney's aides desperately sifted through raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify the war. On one occasion they sent the WMD hunters in Iraq a satellite photo that they suspected showed a hiding place for WMDs. But it was only an overhead photo of a watering hole for cows.
5. "We're not paying the bitch to do her job, for Christ's sake. Pack her bags."
At the time of her outing, Valerie Wilson was an undercover officer in the CIA whose mission had been to gather intelligence about WMDs in Iraq. She was the operations manager of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit in the clandestine service of the CIA. This unit desperately tried to obtain evidence to back up the Bush administration's assertions about Saddam's WMDs, yet it found no such evidence.
6. Turns out Rove is a swinger.
Rove even told MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that the Wilsons "were trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to screw them back."
*7. "So, Tommy, talkin' post-invasion now: how's about we put flower planters in all them lord mayor's offices? That oughta pacify 'em."
Before the invasion, Bush and General Tommy Franks only briefly discussed how Iraq would be secured after the invasion-and did so in the most general terms. The one idea they discussed--appointing a "lord mayor" in each Iraqi city and town--was not even shared with the military officers in charge of drawing up the plans for a post-invasion Iraq.
8. "I want that woman OFF the day ward and IN the War Room NOW, d'ya hear me?!"
An obscure academic, derided as a virtual crackpot by U.S. law enforcement and the intelligence community, greatly influenced top Bush administration officials, who adopted her farfetched theory that Saddam was the source of most of the terrorism in the world, including the 9/11 attacks. But, oddly, this researcher, Laurie Mylroie, had once been a Saddam apologist...
9. More Profiles in Courage:
Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle seriously doubted the case for war-and questioned the top-secret briefings they received directly from Cheney. One senior Republican, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, warned the President in a September 2002 meeting that Bush would be stuck in a "quagmire" if he invaded Iraq. But Armey and others were afraid for political reasons to challenge the White House on the prewar intelligence.
10. And finally, "I told you, lawman, the letter's in the fucking mail!"
Karl Rove and his lawyer did not turn over a critical piece of evidence in the CIA leak case (a document covered by a subpoena from the special prosecutor) for nearly a year.