It is going to be interesting as HELL to see how the right spins this, the latest barrage of evidence to support the idea that the American Public and possibly even Colin Powell were bullshitted into believing war in Iraq was justified.

Powell's speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell's presentation initially came from a document he described as "sort of a Chinese menu" that was provided by the White House.

"(Powell) came through the door ... and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, 'This is what I've got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'" Wilkerson says in the program. "It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose."

Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says.

"There was no way the Secretary of State was going to read off a script about serious matters of intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically un-sourced," Wilkerson says.

In one dramatic accusation in his speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.

"In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator," says David Kay, who served as the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector who had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as "Curveball."

After searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true.

"George actually did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you're telling the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that? It's difficult to maintain any warm feelings."

The whole thing just reeks, stinks to high heaven, and it is beyond the pale to me that anyone can continue to justify this war. I believe very seriously, that the only way some Right Wingers will acknowledge that this war was based on unadulterated lies and deceptions, is if Bush wakes up one day and just says, "Sorry folks, the guy tried to kill my Daddy. It's a Texas thing, I had to get some payback. And we all know that Saddam was a loony so who cares why we went to war. We did, and in the end, the ends justify the means." And even if he did, I still think some people on the right would try to spin it.

You go to war when you have to. You weigh the dangers and you make a decision based on the imminent threat to the United States. It is clear to all but a rabid Bush Supporter at this point, that no such threat existed, and that the administration not only knew it, but sought to invent one.

UPDATE: Post makes the Daou Report.

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