http://www.democrats.com/node/9116#comment-61481

"How the Bush administration misled Americans into war
Submitted by Jack Pott on September 3, 2006 - 7:30am.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was established in 1997 with the goal of promoting "American global leadership". Prior to Bush being elected president, several PNAC members (such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz) stated that an invasion of Iraq is part of a larger Middle East policy. Here's info about the PNAC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNAC

A document entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century" stated that: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Here's the document:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/Rebuildi...casDefenses.pdf

In 1998, members of the PNAC (including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz) wrote to President Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The letter argued that Saddam would pose a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies and oil resources in the region if he succeeded in maintaining his stockpile of WMD. The letter argues that an Iraq war would be justified by Hussein's defiance of UN "containment" policy and his persistent threat to US interests. Here's the letter:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

In August 2002, the White House created "The White House Iraq Group" (WHIG). WHIG was the marketing arm of the Republican Party whose purpose was to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the public. The task force was set up by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and chaired by Karl Rove to coordinate all the executive branch elements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. One example of the WHIG's functions and influence is the escalation of rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the US, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud". Here's info about WHIG:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...ouse_Iraq_Group

In September 2002, the Bush administration created an agency called Office of Special Plans (OSP) to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction and links with al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq. The agency was set up by Donald Rumsfeld to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hard-line conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Dick Cheney. Here's info about the OSP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans

Seymour Hersh wrote that, according to an unnamed Pentagon adviser, "OSP was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States." Here's Hersh's article:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/030512fa_fact

According to former Officer Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked from May 2002 through February 2003 in the Pentagon, the OSP was created to produce more threatening intelligence reports and to find a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Other intelligence agencies had no or little influence on the reports sent from the OSP to the White House.

Kwiatkowski observed how the OSP manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists: "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda. They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." Here are two articles by Kwiatkowski:

http://amconmag.com/12_1_03/feature.html

http://archive.salon.com/opinion/feature/2...p/index_np.html

Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating OSP, said: "The office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees".

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...ed_intelligence

Much of the pre-war information came from The Iraqi National Congress. The INC was an umbrella Iraqi opposition group led by Ahmad Chalabi, who enjoyed a cozy political and business relationships with some members of the US government, including some prominent neoconservatives within the Pentagon. Chalabi is said to have had political contacts within the PNAC, most notably with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Here's info about Chalabi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Chalabi

Before the war, the CIA was largely skeptical of Chalabi and the INC. In December 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the Bush administration actually preferred INC-supplied analyses of Iraq over analyses provided by long-standing analysts within the CIA:

http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/pri...dreyfuss-r.html

A DIA report concluded that the testimonies made by the INC defectors were mostly false:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1052334,00.html

An Iraqi informant named "Curveball" was the source of pivotal information concerning WMD. He was described by German intelligence as an individual not living in Iraq and as an "out of control" and crazy alcoholic. The informant's German handlers said they had told U.S. officials that his information was not proven and were shocked when Bush and Colin Powell used it in key prewar speeches. According to the Germans, Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Here's info about Curveball:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_%28informant%29 "