In a stunning statement this morning, the 9-person presidential panel investigating intelligence failures claimed that "Intelligence operatives providing evidence for Iraqi hyper-weaponization are in actuality what the American people call 'Science Fiction authors'".
The panel goes on: "For example, claims that the Iraqi people are in posession of a mathematical process that would allow them to predict the actions of societies are in actuality the main plot device behind Aasimov's "Foundation" series, and not, in fact, a reason to invade and slaughter thousands of the dirty raghead bastards".
They conclude: "Oops. We probably shouldn't have written that last part into the statement."
As it turns out, evidence of Middle-Eastern weaponization over the years has been revealed as an enormous literary movement called Science Fiction. Accounts that the Iraqi people were in possession of a black hole generator, a quantum matter-disassembler, humanoid androids carrying atomic disintegration bombs and sentient tanks with human brains controlling their vicious, mettalic claws have all been revealed as false.
Says Oxford Professor Dr. Celery Carrotford: "Are you fucking kidding me? They actually didn't know what "Science fiction" was? You mean to tell me they've had police patrols looking for Valentine Michael Smith for 25 years?"
The manhunt for Smith, a terrorist wanted for excessive "grokking", was called off this morning.
When reached for comment, chief architeCt of the Iraqi war Paul Wolfowitz was stunned: "This explains a lot. Our assumption that the American people were to be greeted as liberators was based on the idea that Saddam Hussein could produce a beam of pure entropy, that would shatter causality itself, reversing cause and effect and smashing the temporal continuity of the universe."
He concluded: "Man. I must look like a fucking asshole now. Shit. I should tell Rumsfeld. He's still got intelligence agents trying to find hidden tanks of organic nanosymbiotic organisms that would give Iraqi soldiers superhuman strength and endurance."
The President himself weighed in on the issue: "My fellow Americans. Little could we have forseen that there would be a group of liberal intellectuals so bent on distorting our view of the Iraqi threat. We in the Whitehouse respect science so much that we couldn't imagine that a group of liberal terrorists that hate America could use this vaunted process to further their own twisted goals."
"These so-called 'Science Fiction' authors have been solely responsible for our misjudgement of our adversary, and will be prosecuted as enemy combattants."
He added in closing: "Oh, and the terrorist warning level has been lowered from magenta to sort of blueymagenta in the face of the decreased presence of liquid-metal polyformic carnobots. Thank you."