This one’s huge. From Politico’s Mike Allen (Hat Tip: TPM):

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from [Iraq’s former intel director] Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

Obligatory quotes from the likes of Bill O’Reilly are included which helped spread the fabrication written about at the end of 2003 on the front page of the London Daily Telegraph the very day they (supposedly?) captured Saddam, and the reporter was interviewed on Meet The Press soon after. The letter was crafted by the CIA, but used to “prove” the 9/11 hijackers were connected and even trained by Iraq.

They absolutely lied us into a war. Suskind seems to concentrate on the angle that it was illegal to use the CIA this way, influencing domestic politics, and that’s grounds for impeachment. It seems to me there’s got to be a law somewhere out there that mandates the gas chamber for anyone who commits mass murder on the scale this represents. The invasion of Iraq was not an act of war, it was an act of homicidal mania.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

Evidently, they secreted Habbush to Jordan and paid him $5 million in hush money, even though he still has a $1 million bounty on his head at the State Department.

The legendary tone-deafness and refusal to listen to advice that didn’t match the White House’s pre-conceived notions is also explored as well as a study on the rise of “plausible deniability” to a high art form under Dick Cheney’s influence.

So just how much time and money and lives did it cost us to go through the motions and act like they were really looking for WMD’s they knew weren’t there?

And for that matter, do you really trust them when the likes of Osama bin Laden conveniently shows up on our TV screens on the eve of an election, his authenticity “verified” by a CIA who could also magically produce letters “proving” the biggest lie of the 21st century?

Somebody’s got to charge someone with a goddamn crime sooner or later dammit, or we might as well shut this charade we call Truth, justice and the American Way down.