The Daily Sandwich

"We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish." -Sir Karl Popper

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Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Oh, yeah--- and NINE-ELEVEN!!!!!

Today Bush gave what will hopefully be his last recitation of the phony-baloney rationale for invading Iraq. And in addition to summoning the specter of 9/11, which of course had nothing to do with Iraq, he tried to re-float a talking point we haven't heard in a while (but oh, yes, we've heard it before).

This time it was the bogus line that it was all the fault of intelligence gathering. From 'Curveball,' to reliance on convicted swindler and suspected Iranian double-agent Achmed Chalabi, anyone who pays attention to actual news knows that the administration continually chose to present highly questionable intel as incontrovertible fact. When warned by the CIA that intelligence that apparently bolstered the case for war was actually untrustworthy and shouldn't be relied upon, the administration ran with it anyway.

Fearless Leader, speaking today: When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of governments who did not support my decision to remove Saddam. And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq _ and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that. At the same time, we must remember that an investigation after the war by chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer found that Saddam was using the U.N. oil-for-food program to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions, with the intent of restarting his weapons programs once the sanctions collapsed and the world looked the other way. Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat _ and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power. We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place.

I won't be holding my breath for the mainsstream press to actually point out that this is a pack of lies. Why start now?