After all these years of being told “Bush lied. People died.” over and over again we see a CBS 60 Minutes excerpt of an interview with Saddam’s handler while in custody.

The question has always been that if Saddam had no WMD why did he persist in allowing everyone to believe he did, even to the point of war?

Here’s some information on that:

Saddam still wouldn’t admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, “For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” he tells Pelley.

He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. “Saddam] still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” says Piro. “He wanted to pursue all of WMD…to reconstitute his entire WMD program.” This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

[Emphasis mine]

This, after he realized the United States wasn’t going to conduct four days of a bombing campaign and then leave as we did in the first Gulf War.

The people with the knowledge and ability to reconstitute WMD are still in Iraq according to Piro, who was the only outsider to see Saddam while he was in prison.

We heard the other day of the “non-partisan” report that Bush lied 935 times in order to get us into this war, but everyone in the intelligence communities around the world believed Saddam had WMD. The Senators on the Intelligence Committee, including Jay Rockefeller and John Edwards believed it. Madeline Albright believed it, as did both former President and Mrs. Bill Clinton.

In fact, Mrs. Clinton acted as though she had some inside knowledge confirming that Saddam had WMD and now tiptoes through the tulips of memory lane, denying she ever thought so in the first place.

I sometimes wonder if we are living in an Alice in Wonderland world where everyone has gone down the rabbit hole and now right is wrong and wrong is right.

Now we know for a fact that Saddam led us to believe he had WMD in order to keep the Iranians off his back. And we know it to be true because 60 Minutes tells us so.

Does this change anything in the way people think about our president? No, because they want to believe he deliberately lied to us. It has worked so well for the opposition they plan to keep up this facade and do “whatever is necessary” to win back the White House.

I’m not so sure the prize is worth the price if the wrong people win. They have managed to drag a good man through the mud with them for over seven years now and won’t be happy until or unless they leave him a completely broken man. Lotsa luck on that one.

The title of this post would make it seem as though I’m an idiot who doesn’t know right from wrong, so please allow me to explain.

First of all, I have no idea what conclusions will be drawn by 60 Minutes on this report scheduled for Sunday evening.

If someone you trust comes to you and vouches for the truth of a report by a spy and you use that information as the basis of a claim of WMD held by Iraq, if you believe what was told and you repeat it only to find out later it was not reliable information, are you guilty of telling a lie? Or are you guilty of trusting your security people to tell you the straight facts?

He eventually wound up in the care of German intelligence officials to whom he continued to spin his tale of biological weapons. His plan succeeded partially because he had worked briefly at the plant outside Baghdad and his descriptions of it were mostly accurate. He embellished his account by saying 12 workers had been killed by biological agents in an accident at the plant.

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar - along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons - for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter - a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained - addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Through a spokesman, Tenet denies ever seeing the letter. “[Tenet] needs to talk to his special assistants if he didn’t see it,” says Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official. “I am sure they showed it to him and I am sure … it wasn’t what they wanted to see,” he tells Simon.

Other CIA officials doubted Curve Ball’s authenticity, including former Central Group Chief Margaret Henoch, who speaks publicly for the first time, telling Simon she openly refuted Alwan’s story. “And it was like ‘Whack a Mole.’ He just popped right back up. It was unbelievable.”

Alwan was caught when CIA interrogators were finally allowed to question him and confronted him with evidence that his story could not be as he described it. Weapons inspectors had examined the plant at Djerf al Nadaf before the fall of Baghdad and found no evidence of biological agents.

Obviously someone lied, but was it the President of the United States or the CIA Director at the time, Bill Clinton’s appointee George Tenet, who said the information was a “slam dunk”?

Whatever the case, I hope 60 Minutes can be fair and objective in this story and point the finger of blame where it belongs. Wherever it may point.

I do not normally watch 60 Minutes but I will set my TiVo to record it this week to see this report.