BREAKING: Bush And Cheney MAY HAVE Said Some Lies In Lead-Up To Iraq War

Everybody with two brain cells to rub together at least SUSPECTS that there was some fishy business in the run-up to the war on Iraq, what with the fact Saddam had not attacked us, no WMDs were ever found, etc. And Iraq is back in the news right now, mostly because Jeb Bush, brother of brush-clearing, flightsuit-wearing George W. Bush, has been stepping all over his own dick for a week,   trying to explain how the Iraq war wasn't a mistake, except that it was, NO YOU SHUT UP, etc. Marco Rubio got in on the action too, dancing a jaunty jig on his own dick, because Questions Is Tough.

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Well now, we have some more concrete information as to exactly HOW the Bush administration may have done all its lying, in the form of Mike Morell, a high ranking CIA dude who used to be Dubya's CIA intelligence briefer. Morell appeared on Hardball Tuesday night and explained, under the duress of Chris Matthews's verbal waterboarding, that he would tell Bush and Cheney things, at which point they would go on television and instead say whatever they had wanted to say in the first place. For instance, he claims he did not tell them that Iraq had the capability to make a nuclear bomb, which to Dick Cheney's lying ears, apparently sounded just like "IRAQ HAS NUKES, BOMB BOMB BOMB!":

Host Chris Matthews asked Morell about a statement Cheney made in 2003: "We know he [Saddam Hussein] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Here's the conversation that followed:

MATTHEWS: Was that true?

MORELL: We were saying—

MATTHEWS: Can you answer that question? Was that true?

MORELL: That's not true.

MATTHEWS: Well, why'd you let them get away with it?

MORELL: Look, my job Chris—

MATTHEWS: You're the briefer for the president on intelligence, you're the top person to go in and tell him what's going on. You see Cheney make this charge he's got a nuclear bomb and then they make subsequent charges he knew how to deliver it…and nobody raised their hand and said, "No that's not what we told him."

Morell goes on to say that it is NOT his fault that Bush and Cheney went on teevee and made up their own bullshit, and it was not his responsibility to watch all their interviews and speeches to make sure they weren't lying or otherwise fucking up. And meh, that might be true, since he was sort of in a "serving at the pleasure of the President" situation. However, he outright admitted that yes, they did misrepresent his briefings "on some aspects." So, again, try to cloak the shock boner that this story just gave you, about how Bush and Cheney might be lying liars who lied. A lot.

Chris Matthews correctly noted that this revelation is a "big deal" and Morell agreed that it is also a "big deal," so we have consensus, on this being a big fucking deal, since Republicans just LOVE to fall back on the whole "all our intelligence was wrong, it was nobody's fault!"

How many people actually share the blame for the run-up clusterfuck that led to the actual-war clusterfuck? Who knows, but the answer is probably somewhere between WE'LL NEVER TELL and ALL OF THEM, KATIE!

[ Mother Jones / MSNBC ]