No WMDs.

Hello dear readers. I have purposely avoided the situation in Iraq as a topic because it gets enough coverage from both political camps...I've felt the need to highlight less publicized issues that pretty clearly involve the people in power exploiting the people not in power. Unfortunately, I think the situation in Iraq falls distressingly squarely into this category. So, I thought it made sense to post this article from CNN that came out this morning.

Whether they lied or whether they were simply incorrect about the Weapons of Mass Destruction, it really is an abomination that so many people are dead and wounded and displaced and away from their families, when the reason we were told it was all happening wasn't even true. I will never forget hearing Donald Rumsfield on the radio one day, addresing reporters' questions. Someone asked about the possibility that there weren't any WMDs and he waved the question away saying "That's not even a question. We KNOW they have WMDs." and moved on to other questions. The way he said it, with such total confidence and without a shred of doubt....I have to say, I believed him. I still didn't think the war was a great idea, or even a necessary step. But I did believe him. I thought they were wrong about other things, and rash and hasty and overly aggressive in the process. But I really didn't question this big piece of the equation that was never even there. Will there be a trial? Whose fault is this? How many actual lies were there? And how many mistakes? What does justice look like in this situation? The fact is, every society that has ever been powerful has eventually fallen. America probably won't be what it is now, forever. Will we go the way of the Romans? Or the British Empire? Who knows...but we'd be crazy to not acknowledge that there is always a beginning to the end. That sounds a lot more doomsday-ish and weird than I mean for it to. But you feel me, right?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. intelligence community was "simply wrong" in its assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities before the U.S. invasion, according to a panel created to study those failures and recommend corrections to prevent them in the future.

"We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," said a letter from the commission to President Bush. "This was a major intelligence failure."

The panel -- called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction -- formally presents its report to President Bush Thursday morning.

A National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq put forth in October 2002 warned that Baghdad was still pursuing weapons of mass destruction, had reconstituted its nuclear weapon program and had biological and chemical weapons. The Bush administration used those conclusions as part of its argument for the eventual invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.

But the Iraq Survey Group -- set up to look for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or evidence of them -- issued its final report saying it saw no weapons or no evidence that Iraq was trying to reconstitute them. The commission's report says the principal cause of the intelligence failures was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence."
"The single most prominent a recurring theme" of its recommendations is "stronger and more centralized management of the Intelligence Community, and, in general, the creation of a genuinely integrated Community, instead of a loose confederation of independent agencies."
President Bush appointed the nine-member commission led by by former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and former Sen. and Gov. Chuck Robb of Virginia, a Democrat.