the build-a-war workshop

or, more appropriately titled… “the lie factory“.

IHT: To understand this twisted tale, it is important to recall how Feith got into the creative writing business. Top administration officials, especially Cheney, had long been furious at the CIA for refusing to confirm the delusion about a grand Iraqi terrorist conspiracy, something the Republican right had nursed for years. Their frustration only grew after 9/11 and the CIA still refused to buy these theories.

Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

But the CIA kept saying there was no reliable intelligence about an Iraq-Qaeda link. So Feith was sent to review the reports and come back with the answers Cheney wanted. The inspector general’s report said Feith’s team gave a September 2002 briefing at the White House on the alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection that had not been vetted by the intelligence community (the director of central intelligence was pointedly not told it was happening) and “was not fully supported by the available intelligence.”