******* hell, it was a rhetorical question.
Because everyone knows it had NOTHING TO DO WITH IRAQ.
The excuse for invading Iraq just a year after 9-11 was to keep WMD's out of the hands of Jihadists....so it had a lot to do with Iraq and our mindset at that time...you see?...simple mined liberals have very short memories....9-11 put our nation on high alert...everyone thought the next attack would be on the streets of a major city...the CIA was wrong and led Bush down a rat hole but try and remember where our minds where back then....or maybe you were too young...
Not really at all.
Saddam wasn't with the Jihadists. You see?
The Ba'ath party was full of Christians.
Iraqi Christians
"
Tareq Aziz, Saddam's First Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister at the time of the Gulf War, is a Christian."
"Saddam had a trusted personal bodyguard who was a Christian,
Hani Gegeo"
So why would Saddam start handing out WMDs to Jihadists who he didn't like?
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies
From September 30th 2002.
"
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies"
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations - Wikipedia
"Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations were made by the U.S. government officials who claimed that a highly secretive relationship existed between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the radical Islamist militant organization Al-Qaeda between 1992 and 2003, specifically through a series of meetings reportedly involving the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS).[1] In the lead up to the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush alleged that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda might conspire to launch terrorist attacks on the United States,[2] basing the administration's rationale for war, in part, on this allegation and others. The consensus of intelligence experts has been that these contacts never led to an operational relationship, and that consensus is backed up by reports from the independent 9/11 Commission and by declassified Defense Department reports[3] as well as by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose 2006 report of Phase II of its investigation into prewar intelligence reports concluded that there was no evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda."
The "mindset" seems to be that Bush knew he could get away with making shit up because the people were angry and would believe what they wanted to believe. If they managed to convince people that Saddam was linked to al Qaeda, then they could go for war, and this is exactly what they did.
The CIA were wrong? Of course they were.
But the CIA weren't the only people going out there collecting information. The NSA was too. Bush IGNORED the NSA. Why? Why ignore one side over the other? Because he knew, or his people knew, that the CIA's evidence was what they wanted. And the CIA had been sent out there to COLLECT the data that Bush's people wanted.
Don't give me that Bull shit...Hind site is 20/20...try and remember how you felt on 9-12-01....the CIA purposely lied to Bush so he would go into Iraq....ruining his presidency....we all went along with it....Hillary...Senator Obama...even Sanders...and Reid and Pelosi....
The problem here is we don't need to look at how we felt back then.
How we felt only goes to show that the Bush administration knew they could manipulate the people.
Bush going into Iraq didn't destroy his presidency, he got re-elected, and with a large margin than before. His approval ratings were at their second highest when he went into Iraq.
Cheney was at the forefront of all of this.
The Vice President Appears on NBC's Meet the Press
He told the press that Iraq was harboring an al Qaeda suspect of the 1993 Twin Towers attack, Abdul Rahman Yasin. However it appeared that Yasin was a prisoner of Saddam.
"RUSSERT: What we do know is that Iraq is harboring terrorists. This was from Jim Hoagland in The Washington Post that George W. Bush said that Abdul Ramini Yazen (ph)"
"CHENEY: Well, the evidence is pretty conclusive that the Iraqis have indeed harbored terrorists."
"CHENEY: Over the years, for example, they've provided a safe harbor for Abu Nadal (ph),"
September 2003 Cheney was again saying that Iraq gave aid to al Qaeda.
By 2006 Bush was saying he never said there was a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq.
President Discusses War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom
Bush: "I don't think we ever said -- at least I know I didn't say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein. We did say that he was a state sponsor of terror -- by the way, not declared a state sponsor of terror by me, but declared by other administrations. "
"Like you, I asked that very same question, where did we go wrong on intelligence. The truth of the matter is the whole world thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It wasn't just my administration, it was the previous administration."
So, he's basically saying the whole world thought this, because his administration told everyone. They also call it the "Bush administration" because no one was actually sure that Bush was the guy in charge.
We can go back to Blackrock and Vanguard and see that they own a large portion of Halliburton. As did Cheney. He was a Halliburton man.
Who was telling the CIA to do what they were doing?
The funny thing is, there was a guy who lied, and everyone knew he was lying, and everyone wanted to believe him.
Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all
""Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"
"It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war."
"The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003."
"US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy"."
This guy was a known liar, he lied to gain asylum in Germany. He'd say whatever to get it because he was on the run because he stole money.
Iraqi: I'm proud my WMD lies led to war in Iraq
"Although some intelligence agents were skeptical of Curveball's story, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 2004 that the Central Intelligence Agency "withheld important information about Curveball's reliability" from analysts dealing with the case."
Another guy is Khidir Hamza, a nuclear scientist who left Iraq in 1994. He stood up in front of the Senate in the US and said Iraq possessed Uranium. But the problem was, he's left 8 years before that and could not have had a clue what the current situation was in Iraq.
This wasn't just the CIA making stuff up. It was the US govt actively using what people were saying and twisting it to fit.
They even twisted what the CIA said. So no matter how much the CIA said, the US govt WANTED it to happen.
