One more time: What did the president know and when did he know it?

Murray Waas at the National Journal has an article called What Bush Was Told About Iraq which puts the lie to WH claims about the case for war. As ReddHedd at FDL says, there are only two conclusions now:

(1) the President either knew that Saddam posed no immediate threat to the United States and repeatedly lied to the American public and leaders around the world (and allowed multiple members of his Administration to lie about it as well) or (2) he doesn't bother doing his job, and had no idea what information was contained in multiple sensitive national security briefs that he was given over a long period of time, and no one in the Administration bothered to clue him in on this.

Never one to hold back, ReddHedd calls them on their pre-war claims:

These were all lies. All of them. The President and his staff knew -- or damn well should have known -- that the information they were feeding all of us, on talking head pundit shows or during national speeches or in testimony to Congress, all of it was lies.

And these lies were fed to a nation already reeling from the horror of 9/11, living in the ghostly shadow of the fallen towers in Manhattan, and looking to this Administration to keep them safe.

This Administration spit on the nation's trust, lied to our faces, and chose to start a war that we never needed to fight.

Because the scary threat that the Administration built to a fever pitch was a precariously balanced house of cards, on a false foundation of mis-used intelligence, cherry-picked so that no opinion that contradicted what George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted ever got into the public domain until we were already in Iraq.

Public statements made by officials in this Administration -- including by the President himself -- were unwavering in their accusations of wrongdoing on the part of Saddam Hussein. On the threat he posed to this nation. On the possibility of a "mushroom cloud." On the potential for nerve agents or other biological toxins being in his possession and being unleashed on the United States by Saddam's ties to al qaeda.

All lies. And all lies that the Administration knew -- or should have know, had they been doing their damn jobs -- were false before they were ever publicly uttered.

She finishes up with:

All that false caring about the troops, the praying with the families of the dead, the false bravado of the boo-yah in a speech on a base, is worthless if you didn't care enough about their lives to do the work to start with before they went into battle.

Just as all that false caring about the people in the Gulf Region here in the US is meaningless when you stay on vacation for days after you know how dire the situation is. All of the public staging, the spin, the Mighty Wurlitzer storylines about what a great, genial, wonderful man you are doesn't mean squat if you aren't man enough to listen to criticism when it is warranted -- and to information that contradicts what you want to hear. A real man faces reality, a coward hides in his bubble surrounded by sycophants who tell him only what he wants to hear and feeds him hand-picked audiences to stroke his ego.

To say that I am disgusted doesn't even come close today. No more lies without accountability.