It's just been one giant dick-measuring contest, from the very first day

The Senate Intelligence Committee today released the final two sections of the Phase II report on prewar intelligence, and I just want to say...I feel physically ill and personally betrayed.

What emerges is a picture of different areas of the government, all ultimately charged with a sacred duty to the American people, abdicating that responsibility. The Rumsfeld Pentagon was a petty, vindictive place and comes under harsh scrutiny in the report.

Additionally, the Committee issued a report on the Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The report found that the clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranians in Rome and Paris were inappropriate and mishandled from beginning to end. Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz failed to keep the Intelligence Community and the State Department appropriately informed about the meetings. The involvement of Manucher Ghobanifer and Michael Ledeen in the meetings was inappropriate. Potentially important information collected during the meetings was withheld from intelligence agencies by Pentagon officials. Finally, senior Defense Department officials cut short internal investigations of the meetings and failed to implement the recommendations of their own counterintelligence experts.

In plain English: The Pentagon withheld intelligence from the CIA and DIA, because to Rummy it was all just one big pissing contest and he was going to get his war.

It is all so wrong on so many levels. I can not believe that we haven't arrested and tried some of these war criminals. The one thing that they all, every last one, have in common is an almost sociopathic depraved indifference to others.

The Iraqis who would suffer and die, the American soldiers who would be lost or broken, none of them crossed the minds of any of these fuckers.

And by the way - We have known this all along. The Senate report merely puts in the public record what a hundred intel-savvy left-leaning blogs - this one included - have been saying all along.

We have known all along.

And so did Pat Roberts. He was in a position to do something all along, when he was the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, but he was blinded by ideology and he did nothing. He withheld the information, at great harm to national security. Where I come from, we call that obstruction, and we have laws against it.

Jim Slattery has a chance of taking Roberts Senate seat. To do that, he needs to seize on this issue and beat Roberts' bald, addled pate bloody with it. Roberts' tenure as committee chairman is deplorable and it has the potential to sink him if Slattery will play hardball with the old prick. I spent a lot of my adult life among Kansans. Some of my best friends are Kansans (honest!) And they are pissed at Roberts right now. They will vote for Slattery if he gives them a reason.

Give them a reason, Jim. Please.

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You knew this already…

Unless you have been in total isolation for the last five years, but now it’s official, because the Washington Post says so.

There was no connection between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the terrorist network al Qaeda. The report by Inspector General Thomas Gimble was released the same day that vice-president Dick Cheney appeared on the Rush Limbaugh’s right-wing talk radio show reiterating the repeatedly-debunked false claim of a connection yet again. He still insists that Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi were bedfellows, despite all evidence to the contrary.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed. (emphasis added)

In September of 2002, Feith’s office in the Pentagon produced a piece of fiction that asserted the relationship between al Qaeda and the Hussein regime was both “mature” and “symbiotic” distinguished by common interests and cooperation in multiple areas, including financing, logistics and training.

The briefing, a copy of which was declassified and released yesterday by Levin, goes so far as to state that "Fragmentary reporting points to possible Iraqi involvement not only in 9/11 but also in previous al Qaida attacks." That idea was dismissed in 2004 by a presidential commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, noting that "no credible evidence" existed to support it.

When a senior intelligence analyst working for the government's counterterrorism task force obtained an early account of the conclusions by Feith's office -- titled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case" -- the analyst prepared a detailed rebuttal calling it of "no intelligence value" and taking issue with 15 of 26 key conclusions, the report states. The analyst's rebuttal was shared with intelligence officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but evidently not with others.

Zarqawi was a terrorist, he did have a couple of loose associations with al Qaeda, and he did take refuge in Iraq; but Saddam Hussein pursued him and attempted to arrest him, finding him a threat to Iraqi interests. Zarqawi only completely allied himself with the terrorist network al Qaeda in early 2004, nine months after the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

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