Bush Manipulated Information?

According to an ex-CIA specialist Bush was manipulating information prior to the invasion of Iraq.

A former Middle East specialist of the US
Central Intelligence Agency has condemned what he called an organised campaign of manipulation by the Bush administration to justify the Iraq war.

Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst specialising in counter-terrorism in the Middle East and Asia, said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais that the United States had particularly wanted to prove a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

"That was not the case," he was quoted as saying. "I suppose by some definitions that could be called a lie."

"There was an organised campaign of manipulation," El Pais also quoted Pillar as saying. "That would be the proper way to define it."

I call bullshit right here. Don't try to sneak that shit past us because you, Mr Pillar, are dead wrong. By any definition it was a lie. Bush knew damn well Hussein and bin Laden were not chums. Let's shut down this nonsense before the wingers start blaring it all over and quoting this moron.

It is unlikely that the decidedly secular Baathist regime--which has savagely suppressed Islamists within Iraq--would be able to maintain close links with Osama bin Laden and his followers. In fact, Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal, his country's former intelligence chief, noted that bin Laden views Saddam Hussein "as an apostate, an infidel, or someone who is not worthy of being a fellow Muslim" and that bin Laden had offered in 1990 to raise an army of thousands of mujaheddin fighters to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.*

*Excerpted from "Seven Fallacies of U.S. Plans to Invade Iraq," August 2002 Foreign Policy in Focus policy report. Available at the Common Dreams website.

Note: the only pictures I could find of Hussein and bin Laden together were Photoshopped© like the one above.