Think Progress:

Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) sought to excuse his constant and vociferous cheerleading for the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003 by claiming that “every intelligence agency in the world” believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction:

I know why I supported [the war] because I believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as did every intelligence agency in the world and every assessment.

Unfortunately for McCain, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee released the final two sections of its report today on the White House’s use of prewar intelligence, which proves the wide discrepancies between war hawks’ claims and intelligence available at the time. Chairman Jay Rockefeller said his committee “has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence”:

In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed. … Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.

The report also notes that pre-war statements by Bush administration officials “regarding the postwar situation in Iraq” — including Vice President Cheney’s infamous declaration that the U.S. would be “greeted as liberators” — “did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.”

Like Cheney, McCain was not shy about assuring Americans that we would be “greeted as liberators.” Right before the war began, McCain told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that “absolutely” a “large number of Iraqis” will “treat us as liberators“:

MATTHEWS: Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the post-war scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq or at least a large number of them will treat us as liberators?

MCCAIN: Absolutely. Absolutely. [Hardball, 3/12/03]

In fact, the Senate Intelligence report on pre-war statements specifically notes a pre-war intelligence report that directly refuted this claim. A January 2003 Intelligence Community Assessment acknowledged that “Iraq was a deeply divided society that likely would engage in violent conflict unless an occupying power prevented it.”

Update: In a statement, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said that the Senate Intel report confirms that “the Bush Administration engaged in a misleading marketing campaign to rush the country to war.”

Update: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said in a speech today that it “rots the very fiber of democracy when our government is put to these uses.”

Update: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is also calling for a full review of congressional testimony by former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Raw Story:

The White House does not have archival copies of e-mails exchanged between administration officials during the weeks leading up to President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq nor for the first two months of the war there, according to a just-released filing concerning millions of e-mails alleged to have gone missing or been deleted.

“A White House declaration filed late last night … makes the stunning admission that the White House failed to preserve ANY backup tapes for the period March 1, 2003 through May 22, 2003, a period of time during which the U.S. went to war in Iraq,” says a release from Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, a watchdog group suing for public records concerning the disappearance of internal White House e-mails.

Without computer backup tapes from this critical pre-Iraq war period, future researchers may be deprived a vital resource as the delve into the inner workings of the Bush administration as it decided to invade a country that had not attacked the United States and possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

“The harm is that we’ve lost a huge piece of history,” says Anne Weismann, a lawyer for CREW.

Weismann estimated the total number of missing White House e-mails at “10 million-plus.”

Investigations into the missing White House e-mails already have shown that e-mails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office were not archived on critical dates during the Justice Department’s investigation of the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. The White House already has said it also does not have backup tapes for those dates, Sept. 30, 2003, through Oct. 6, 2003.

“I’m sure there are other holes,” Weismann told RAW STORY Tuesday. “We just can’t get in to have the kind of forensic review that needs to be done” of what the White House has.

E-mails were missing from internal servers on a total of 473 days, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee, including dates around when Saddam Hussein was captured and during a court battle surrounding Cheney’s energy task force.

CREW is joined by the National Security Archive, an open-government group at in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the White House Office of Administration, which maintains internal computer systems and archives.

The White House filing revealed it had 483 backup tapes from May 23, 2003 to Sept. 29, 2003. CREW has posted the court documents here.

ThinkProgress recently reported on Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) long friendship with Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, who drummed up claims that Saddam Hussein had WMD and helped lead the United States into war.But McCain isn’t the only one on his campaign with ties to Chalabi. Charlie Black serves as McCain’s (R-AZ) chief political adviser. He is also an uber-lobbyist, “chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses,” BKSH and Associates.

Black and BKSH represented Chalabi’s former group, the Iraqi National Congress, giving the Iraqi politician access to high-powered officials in Washington. Chalabi even scored a seat in First Lady Laura Bush’s VIP box at the 2004 SOTU address. This connection has also helped Black, who “touted” his ties to Chalabi to get work in Iraq:

– “Due to our past representation of the INC,” says Black, “we know and have worked with a lot of people who will be in the provisional government. We have a number of clients who are interested in doing business in Iraq.” Black adds that his firm is “strongly considering” opening an office in Baghdad. [National Journal, 8/7/03]

– When it comes to Iraqi connections, the competition is fierce. BKSH & Associates, the lobby firm run by GOP strategist Charlie Black, touts its connections to Ahmed Chalabi (until recently a Pentagon sweetheart), who formerly headed the exiled Iraqi National Congress and is currently on Iraq’s governing council. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10/1/03]

This PR paid off. In 2005, BKSH was hired by The Lincoln Group, which had a federal government contract to secretly pay Iraqi newspapers “to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.”

BKSH helped sell this misguided war to the American public. Francis Brooke, a BKSH employee who worked with Chalabi, helped focus on WMD in the case for war. Brooke and Chalabi’s group were specifically “enlisted to promote the danger posed by Saddam’s regime.” [New Yorker, 6/7/04]

In 1998, McCain pressured the Clinton administration to give Chalabi funding, and once called him “a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart.” In fact, McCain was Chalabi’s “favored candidate in the 2000 election.”

View London

The Foreign Office has been ordered to publish an early draft of the controversial dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

An information tribunal has ruled that the unpublished document, which was a precursor to the final dossier on Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs, must be made public.

The final document, which was issued by then prime minister Tony Blair in September 2002, was at the centre of a government scandal after accusations that the dossier had been ’sexed up’ in order to encourage support for an invasion of Iraq.

Weapons expert Dr David Kelly was also found dead shortly after he was named as a media source for a documentary into the composition and collection of the information contained in the papers.

On February 9th 2005, a request was made under the Freedom of Information Act by Christopher Ames, a researcher, to view the draft.

But the Foreign Office had previously refused to allow the document to be viewed and may yet appeal to the High Court in order to avoid having to relinquish its confidentiality.
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