Bush, himself, knew these assertions were unsupportable, especially after he received the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October, 1, 2002 which concluded that it was NOT certain that Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction at all, let alone was threatening to use them.  But Bush was so intent about attacking Iraq that he ordered critical sections of this NIE kept from most members of Congress in addition to the press and the American people, as W. Patrick Lang, a retired U.S. Army colonel and Middle East intelligence specialist, wrote in 2004:

There was also the subtle hiding of the objections of the Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the NIE of October 2002. One congressional source explained that the classified NIE was made available in its entirety to only a select few members of Congress. There were verbal briefings and an elaborate process to access the document in a secure location. But it was never clear that the 27-page unclassified version that was available to every office was missing any crucial information. (“Drinking the Kool-Aid” by W. Patrick Lang http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol11/0406_lang.asp)

At the CIA, doubts grew about WMD claims from Iraqi defectors, including one codenamed “Curveball” who had asserted that Iraq had mobile WMD labs, but who was suspected of fabrication.

Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA’s European Division, said his office had issued repeated warnings about Curveball’s accounts. “Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening,” said Drumheller, who scoffed at claims by Tenet and McLaughlin that they didn’t know about Curveball’s credibility problems. [Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2005]

As veteran Los Angeles County prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi makes clear in his recent book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (May, 2008), Bush received the classified CIA NIE on October 1, 2002, and its conclusion was that there was no solid case for suspecting Saddam Hussein and Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction which posed an imminent threat.  Yet, six days later, Bush intentionally released an unclassified version of this NIE to the press and public which deleted that significant conclusion, so that he could mislead us to believe there were grounds to fear Saddam Hussein.

Coupled with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s July, 2003 exposure of the Iraq-Niger “yellowcake” hoax, which resulted in his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, being outed in retaliation, thus ending her CIA career as well as, possibly, the lives of many overseas agents in her network, all of the preceding information has been known for at least three years.

But, on September 18, 2003, Bush himself had said there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11, 2001 attacks (see "Bush rejects Saddam 9/11 link" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3118262.stm).

And on June 17, 2004, the Washington Post had reported that "The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no ‘collaborative relationship’ between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq." (see "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html).

So where has Sarah Palin been during all these revelations which clearly debunk Bush’s reasons for attacking and occupying Iraq?  Aside from being deeply offending believers by claiming the Bush lies and supreme international war crime were “a task from God,”  these claims made by Palin in June, 2008 and then in September, 2008 prove how completely unqualified she is to be considered as a vice-presidential candidate when she clearly knows nothing of the truth about the most important historical events of our time.

Worse still, if she does, indeed, know these vitally important basic facts which are a prerequisite for national office, but is continuing to perpetuate the Bush lies and justifying his war crime by calling it all “a task from God,” who would want someone of that despicable character to be only a heartbeat away from the U.S. presidency, especially given John McCain’s advanced age and history of multiple occurrences of potentially fatal skin cancer?

Much worse than her repeated lies about opposing “the bridge to nowhere” and always fighting against earmarks and not firing her Commissioner for failing to fire her ex-brother-in-law, and visiting Iraq, these inaccuracies or, perhaps, lies, about the Iraq war and her attempts to cloak them in religious justifications reveal a desperately ambitious person whose extreme ideas present a danger to our republic.

Ed Ciaccio, a retired teacher, studied theology as an undergraduate.