It now turns out that before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the CIA recruited Iraqi weapons scientists who told them that Saddam was not building any nukes. However, it turns out that the CIA threw this information out.
When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.
As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 -- and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.
And yet here was the then US secretary of state -- Tawfiq's television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam's spies next door -- waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.
"When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman.
Saad Tawfiq should have been an American hero. Instead, he risked his life and the lives of his loved ones for nothing, victim to a series of lies that the Bush administration told to make their phony case for war with Iraq.
The CIA could be our greatest asset, serving to obtain the information that we need to keep us out of such wars. Instead, we have had a systematic pattern of selectively using their information as we see fit.
There were about 30 such scientists who were betrayed by the Bush administration:
"I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: 'They know you have a programme,' and I was saying: 'There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing'," Tawfiq said.
"She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: 'No, no, no...' I kept swearing on the grave of my mother."
According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.
"I was Saddam's scientist," Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. "In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!"
As we go to the polls today, let us never again elect a candidate who will ignore reality. We need elected officials who will follow the evidence where it leads them, not people who will vote out of political calculation or fear.
People like Tawfiq will risk their lives because of the standing that this country has around the world -- there were countless such people like him who did so over the course of the last 50 years. They did so because they knew that we were a symbol of freedom and an example for the rest of the world to follow. People like that would be the last to lie about matters of importance. We need a candidate who will restore our standing around the world and once again hold us up as an example of freedom around the world.