British inquiry into Iraq war turns toward Bush, officials: report
British inquiry into Iraq war turns toward Bush, officials: report Senior Bush administration officials, including former President George W. Bush himself, have been asked to give testimony before a British committee investigating the basis for the invasion of Iraq, according to a published report.
Other officials contacted by the panel include former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Bush adviser Stephen Hadley, among others.
"Members of Sir John Chilcot's panel are believed to be willing to travel to the US to take evidence – almost certainly in private – on the administration's policies between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2009," The Telegraph reported on Sunday.
The paper's lead is based on statements made by unnamed sources in Washington, D.C., and the story notes that even while the Chilcot has succeeded in obtaining testimony from high-ranking British officials, it does not have subpoena power in the U.K. or U.S.
....When American officials were forced to state publicly that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, they blamed the intelligence community and professed their personal honesty. A key British document called the "Downing Street Memo" later surfaced, detailing U.S. and British pre-war political strategy, noting that the decision to invade was made months before it was announced and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
There are still plenty of ordinary folks that believe every false word about WMD and Saddam somehow being connected to 9-11. Though there is a portion of right-wing Cons that know there were no WMD, connections to al Queda and 9-11. hey it was not their fault because the CIA and other intelligence agencies gave them poor information. Both schools of Conservative blame shifting have been proved wrong. Besides the Downing Street memos we have former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar, Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Intelligence 'Misused' to Justify War, He Says
The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.
"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."
