We're going to need a bigger evidence locker...

It's happened yet again. The 'Downing Street Memos,' the campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson by outing his wife as a covert agent, the discredited intelligence, the informants who turned out to be unreliable at best and turncoats at worst, the evidence of Richard Clarke-- the list goes on and on. Now another veteran counterterrorism official from the CIA confirms it.

No one can deny it any more: This administration decided to go to war, then lied to the nation and the world to justify it with bogus intelligence. But everyone reading this blog already knows that. The only question is whether we can take back the legislative branch and finally see some justice done.

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.