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The long-awaited and much-delayed Senate Intelligence Committee report on pre-war intelligence has finally been released. Two major findings I'd like to call your attention to.

First, I've been saying this for years now, but I now finally have concrete evidence provided by a bipartisan committee to back this up. Saddam Hussein Saw Al Qaeda as a threat, not an ally:

Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a possible ally, a Senate report says, contradicting assertions President Bush has used to build support for the war in Iraq.

Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that before the war, Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

Saddam told U.S. officials after his capture that he had not cooperated with Osama bin Laden even though he acknowledged that officials in his government had met with the al-Qaida leader, according to FBI summaries cited in the Senate report.

"Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden," Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi leader's top aide, told the FBI[...]

According to the report, postwar findings indicate that Saddam "was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime."

It said al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad from May until late November 2002. But "postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."

In June 2004, Bush defended Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Saddam had "long-established ties" with al-Qaida. "Zarqawi is the best evidence of connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida," the president said.

From the beginning, it was Bush's claims of a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam that most infuriated me. Saddam's regime was a secular dictatorship, and it sat smack in the middle of the Middle East. Bin Laden, on the other hand, wants to see a religious caliphate arise to unite all of the Middle East under his vision of Islam. By definition, these two could not possibly be allies. It's a simple observation, one that apparently even our own intelligence services were making before the war. But now we have confirmation from Saddam and Aziz themselves, confirmation accepted by our intelligence community and deported to the nation in a bipartisan Senate report.

Yes, al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad. But Hussein wasn't supporting him. He was trying to capture him.

And as the Post points out in a separate article, this falsehood was central to the administration's argument for the necessity of immediate war:

In a classified January 2003 report, for instance, the CIA concluded that Hussein "viewed Islamic extremists operating inside Iraq as a threat." But one day after that conclusion was published, Levin noted, Vice President Cheney said the Iraqi government "aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda."

Intelligence reports in June, July and September 2002 all cast doubts on a reported meeting in Prague between Iraqi intelligence agents and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Yet, in a Sept. 8, 2002, appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press," Cheney said the CIA considered the reports on the meeting credible, Levin said.

In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that "Iraq is unlikely to have provided bin Laden any useful [chemical and biological weapons] knowledge or assistance." A year later, Bush said: "Iraq has also provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training."

Second point: Saddam had no WMD. Following the 1991 war, he dismantled his nuclear, chemical, and biological programs. But with enemies on all sides, he continued to publicly portray his regime as possessing them.

This is, you should recall, what the UN weapons inspectors were beginning to discover when our president rushed our nation and the world off to war. They weren't finding WMD because they weren't there, and they were gradually accumulating the evidence that would demonstrate that fact:

One surprising conclusion from the CIA retrospective is that the agency now believes that aggressive U.N. inspections in Iraq in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War led Hussein to what it describes as a "fateful decision." He covertly dismantled and destroyed the undeclared nuclear, chemical and biological facilities, materials and actual weapons he had put together in the preceding decade -- along with "the records that could have verified that unilateral destruction."

As a result, there was no proof in 2002 and 2003 when the Iraqis claimed they had no weapons of mass destruction, and Hussein could not demonstrate he was in basic, if not complete, compliance with U.N. resolutions. Noncompliance with the Security Council's October resolution was the main U.S. public rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

So why was the administration so convinced? Because it was listening to intelligence sources who had a direct, personal interest in seeing Saddam removed:

One 208-page chapter from the Senate committee report covers the use of intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi. The panel wrote that three Iraqi exiles gave the Pentagon inaccurate information about Hussein's alleged training of al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as about the existence of mobile biological weapons factories and an alleged meeting between the Iraqi leader and Osama bin Laden. All three exiles passed lie detector tests given by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), adding credibility to their stories.

In each case, the information proved to be questionable, if not inaccurate. But in the case of the mobile labs, the source's information was used to corroborate data in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq even after the informant had been tagged as a fabricator.

The report notes that a DIA official who knew that the source was unreliable sat in on two meetings in which the mobile labs information was incorporated into the speech Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered in February 2003 to the U.N. Security Council, but that the official did not realize the information was based solely on the word of the untrustworthy source.

According to the Senate panel's report, another Iraqi National Congress source, recommended to the DIA by Chalabi through a high-ranking Defense Department official, passed two lie detector tests after "claiming to have seen Saddam meeting with a man, who Uday Hussein [Saddam's son] identified as bin Laden." The source said Uday Hussein told him that bin Laden was there "to discuss training of some of his people in Iraq."

The DIA subsequently distributed the information but pointed out that the source was connected with the Iraqi opposition and that the information "may have been intended to influence as well as inform decision makers." The CIA later noted in its assessment of the information that the meeting between Hussein and bin Laden had "not been corroborated" and that "other sensitive reporting . . . provides no indication that Saddam and bin Laden have met each other."

Although the Senate report raises questions about the reliability of the information provided by Iraqi exiles, it notes that the information had little direct impact on the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in October 2002. Many of the Iraqi National Congress claims, however, were passed on to the White House and the office of Vice President Cheney through reports by a separate intelligence analysis group established by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith.

My copy of Fiasco is at my office, so I won't be able to locate the exact quote now, but... In the book there is the report of a post-war, on the record interview by a journalist with Ahmed Chalabi. When asked about the unreliability of pre-war intelligence, and his potentially crucial role in providing the most misleading parts of it, he simply shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and said 'we're here now, so it doesn't matter."

The man had been promised by our administration that he would be the next leader of Iraq. Meanwhile, there are accusations and investigations into whether or not he may have also been working with Iran. If you're looking for motives for him to lie, you really don't need to look any further that that.

Yet despite the warnings, the VP continued to trumpet him as a reliable source. In fact, following the war he was so well thought of that he was invited by the president himself to sit next the the First Lady at the State of the Union address.

Following release off the report on Friday, Tony Snow tried to claim that this was all "nothing new." He didn't attempt to dispute the findings in the report. He merely dismissed them as old news. And although he report may not directly claim pre-war intelligence was misused for political purposes, it does in fact provide concrete evidence that this is precisely what was done. Which Snow does not dispute. Let that sink in...