Portrait of a Casus

As a mobile shithouse.

Does that look like a bio-weapons lab on wheels?

No?

Whassamatta? You don't wanna work in the White House?

Because I think the interesting part about this report from the AP is what's missing.

Report Raises New Questions on Bush, WMDs

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
The White House faced new questions Wednesday about President Bush's contention three years ago that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.

The Washington Post reported that a Pentagon-sponsored team of experts determined in May 2003 that two small trailers were not used to make biological weapons. Yet two days after the team sent its findings to Washington in a classified report, Bush declared just the opposite.

"We have found the weapons of mass destruction," Bush said in an interview with a Polish TV station. "We found biological laboratories."

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday that Bush was relying on information from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency when he said the trailers seized after the 2003 invasion were mobile biological laboratories. That information was later discredited by the Iraq Survey Group in its 2004 report.

The CIA and DIA publicly issued an assessment one day after the Pentagon team's report arrived in Washington that said U.S. officials were confident that the trailers were used to produce biological weapons. The assessment said the mobile facilities represented "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program."

McClellan said it was unclear whether officials at the White House were aware of the contradictory field report when Bush repeated the claim in the television interview.
"If and when the White House became aware of this particular issue, I'm looking into that matter," McClellan said. "The White House has asked the CIA and the DIA to go and look into that issue."

The Post did not say that Bush knew what he was saying was false. But ABC News did during a report on "Good Morning America," and McClellan demanded an apology and an on-air retraction. ABC News said later in a clarification on its Web site that Charles Gibson had erred. McClellan said he had received an apology.

"This is nothing more than rehashing an old issue that was resolved long ago," McClellan said. "I cannot count how many times the president has said the intelligence was wrong."

"The intelligence community makes the assessment," he said. "The White House is not the intelligence-gathering agency."
…
The trailers — along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was believed to be a nuclear weapons program — were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied claims that intelligence was exaggerated or manipulated in the months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Iraq Survey Group concluded in 2004 that there was no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991.

Oh, I remember this very well. It was all over the news.

No nuanced view here. No cautious, conditional statements. No “wait and see”.

No, what we got was the same simple, Evangelical certitudes that we always get from the Dear Leader and his loyal retainers.

"We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The same, blunt, in-your-face, absolutist, “I have no doubt” declaratives. It is Dubya Triumphant in full, “Mission Accomplished” regalia as he does what every stone drunk does when the party runs out and the bill comes due: belligerantly separates his saucer-section from reality.

The difference is, Dubya doesn’t beat his face to jelly in private, in some obscure, small-town drunk tank, shrieking out his terrors and delusions where only a bored deputy sheriff can hear.

No, the Most Powerful Man on Earth reels across the world stage chasing his Gin Genies, an in his wake, nations are ruined, armies die, and treasuries are bled white.

But for the worst and most perverse of reasons, war is good for Republican politics for the simple reason that moderns Republicans do not lay claim to extraordinary powers because they need them to fight a war.

No, Republicans go to war because they want extraordinary powers to ram through their extremist agenda.

War lets a weak little creep shut down dissent while his bag men loot the place. It is grotesque -- like carjacking an SUV full of children because you covet the lighter -- but it lets the GOP have a crack at the Hunny Pot they have always craved -- unlimited and unchecked power -- so Preznit Tipsy McStagger has a vast entourage of enablers and pilot fish.

It serves the bloody and depraved visions of a thug like Cheney.

It lets a Military Lysenko like Rumsfeld play out his insane theories of strategy and empire with real soldiers. (this from Wikipedia about Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, with a few, minor modifications from me for pointed emphasis.)

Such would be the pattern of Lysenko's success with the Republican Soviet media from 1927 until 1964—reports of amazing (and impossible) successes, which would be replaced with claims of new successes once the old ones became failures. What mattered more to the press was that Lysenko was a "barefoot scientist"—an embodiment of the mythical Republican military Soviet peasant genius.

Lysenko's "science" was practically nonexistent. When he had any clearly formed theories, they were generally a mishmash of Lamarckism and various confused forms of Darwinism; the majority of Lysenko's work consisted of so-called "practical directions" for agriculture…
…
Though scientifically unsound on a number of levels, Republican Soviet journalists and chickenhawks agricultural officials were delighted with Lysenko's claims, as they sped up warfare laboratory work and cheapened it considerably. Lysenko was given his own journal, Vernalization, in 1935, with which he generally bragged about forthcoming successes.

It lets chickenhawks and hucksters get dandied up in red-white-and-blue party clothes and pretend they don’t despise this country and work like the Devil to run it up on the rocks and replace it with Saudia Arabia v 2.0.

So what’s missing from this article?

How about any mention of exactly how Dubya became so convinced that a rotted out trailor with some steel drums and tubing was definitively “biological laboratories”?

Now that the doubts were emerging about the predicates for the war, what is the name of the person or agency who told George Bush that the ruins of some kind of hydrogen separation facility was such slam-dunk evidence of WMDs.

The name of the person or agency that framed the find in such black-and-white terms that President of the United States felt quite comfortable announcing the news as "We have found the weapons of mass destruction" on television.

One might wildly speculate that one of Dubya’s faith-based Brownie-finger-puppets – one of the Bush Fedayeen -- got wind that someone had found some kinda weird looking RV and ran to tell the old man that they had maybe struck WMD gold. And since we now know Dubya to be a man quite comfortable with torturing whatever conclusions he wants out of whatever “facts” he finds lying around, one might wildly speculate that he just grabbed that bottle with both hands and started pouring the next round of lies.

And since lies, half-truths and wild speculations are how this Administration makes policy and sends people off to kill and die, why shouldn’t I as an average citizen also be free to wildly speculate on what we have found and what it means as well?

Was Bush drunk off his ass on complimentary Polish vodka when he said this?

Was he hearing voices?

Did he have a mental breakdown of some kind?

Or did some person or agency in our government tell the President of the United States that definitive proof of WMDs had been found?

And, if so, what were their names and how did they reach their conclusions, especially since this happened two days after “a Pentagon-sponsored team of experts determined [in May 2003] that two small trailers were not used to make biological weapons.”?

Or is it just Chapter 1,227 of the same, sad story?

Bush is just a liar. Nothing more. He will continue to extrude whatever lies serve the needs of the moment, and his lies will continue to kill Americans, because the maggoty Tom DeLay/Bill Frist/Jerry Falwell/Ann Coulter thing that has replaced Republican Party will always put Party ahead of country, and is morally incompetent to stop him.

And since Bush will always find someone to help him cover up his lies -- "This is nothing more than rehashing an old issue that was resolved long ago," McClellan said. -- and he will always find someone else to blame when his lies go South -- "The intelligence community makes the assessment," he said. "The White House is not the intelligence-gathering agency." -- there is no incentive whatsoever for him to stop.

And as long as Republicans continue to remain sanguine about letting Dubya’s lies bankrupt this country and kill its citizens, the nightmare will just go on and on.