Watch A cover-up unfold in plain sight and real time:
WMD Report footnote 830 to chapter 1

There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were
given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the
public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider
it nor do we express a view on it.

Senator Pat Robert's Statement to the Press 3/31/05

Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was
pleased by the report and indicated that it concludes all inquiries into
intelligence used to make the case for going to war with Iraq.
"I don't
think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar
intelligence," the Kansas Republican said. "I think that it would be a
monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any further."

Yep, total waste of time to look into anything else, like say, Whether the Intelligence was deliberately manipulated to start a war


And that is what a cover-up in Washington really looks like.

We love to imagine shadowy figures in darkened offices making cryptic phone calls and surreptitious trips to the shredder. We love to trace down seemingly telling connections between corporations and people in power. But in truth, 90%of the time, that's not how things get done in real Washington where cover-ups happen in plain sight everyday.
Why go through all the trouble of hiding evidence when so much easier just to play the

Washington Report Game?:

1)Announce with great fanfare, a Blue Ribbon Commission to look into whatever makes you look bad. Talk up the resumes of the members and the wide-ranging scope of their mandate.

1a.)Of course, in the fine print of the authorizing order or legislation, be sure to carefully limit their mission to avoid uncovering anything actually damaging

2) Refuse to provide any answers to tough questions while the Commission is investigating. Simply say "The Commission is looking into that and we'll wait for their report" or the ever popular "We won't comment on an ongoing investigation". With luck you've made sure it will take many months for the commission to do even a halfway decent job. By the time they are finally done writing the report, its likely that most people will have lost interest and/or the election will be over

3) Embrace the report, no matter how critical in the details, secure in the knowledge that few if any reporters or members of the public have the stamina to wade through a 3,000 page government document. Have your allies on the commission spend all of their energy shaping the executive summary since most people will never get past that.

4)Even though you've carefully limited the scope of the commission, hold forth that their report complete and comprehensive, and that you now consider the matter closed.


Congratulations! You've successfully pulled off a cover up in full view of hundreds of reporters and the American people

That's just what happened today.

Thanks to our very thorough commissions we know Who screwed up the Pre-war intelligence, We know exactly How they dropped the ball, and we know What they failed to tell us. What we don't know, at least not officially, is Why. Unfortunately that's a question the Republicans have just publicly declared will never be answered.

We aren't going to be told WHY 50,000 American servicemen were wounded, and 1600+ killed, to Protect us from an enemy who posed no threat to us.

We aren't going to be told WHY The Office of Special Plans was created.

We aren't going to find out WHY Doug Feith, a man with no intelligence experience, was put in charge of this office and WHY A decorated former intelligence analyst who worked there has stated:

I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in
the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship
between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I
witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully
considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence
analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the
executive office of the president.

We aren't going to be told WHY, according to Bob Woodward Dick Cheney asked Clinton's defense secretary about invading Iraq BEFORE W was even inaugurated and WHY hours after the planes hit the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld was already planning an attack on Iraq:

Page 9: The first sign of the Bush administration's desire to attack Iraq comes
days before Bush's 2001 inauguration. Dick Cheney asks outgoing Defense
Secretary Bill Cohen to brief the president "about Iraq and different options."

Page 25: Hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld asks Pentagon
colleagues about the possibility of striking Saddam Hussein. An aide records in
his notes: "hit S.H. @ same time--not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]."

And we'll never be told WHY Richard Clarke has said that:

as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for

retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.
Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initially thought Rumsfeld
was joking.
and
"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of
other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did
this.'
Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation
left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a
report that said Iraq did this.
"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this
before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's
no connection.'
"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if
there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should
come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

And we'll never be told, WHY, instead of firing the people who lead us disastrously into a war over a lie George W awarded them the Medal of Freedom instead.

We'll never BE told, but we already know don't we?

Now the question is, what do we do about it?
Our only chance of getting an actual accounting of this disastrous adventure is to win back at least one house in Congress in 06. Otherwise the giant elephant of Deliberate lies and no accountability will have been very successfully hidden under this Rug of a report.