Cheney's obliviousness to the facts, to this day

More evidence, from the Pentagon itself, that Cheney and the Administration deceived us in the buildup to the Iraq War. Further, Cheney CONTINUES to outright contradict the Pentagon's own reports. No wonder he had to set up the Feith intelligence group to find evidence to confirm his own prior suspicions. Any intelligence gathering worth its own salt should be just as vigorous in looking for evidence that contradicts suspicions. One wonders what kind of evidence one needs to convince this man that Al Qaeda and Iraq had NO working relationship.

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.