Oh, look! Karl Rove is admitting a mistake. It seems that he regrets not spinning Iraq better, and is spilling his guts to the Wall Street Journal and anyone else who will publish it in an effort to rewrite the Bush Years to a kinder, gentler age.

His WSJ column title: My Biggest Mistake in The White House. Actually, I can think of other mistakes that were much bigger than failing to lie better to the American people. In classic Rovian spin, he writes:

Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.

The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, "It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth." Mr. Edwards chimed in, "The administration has a problem with the truth."

The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism. All these Democrats had said, like Mr. Bush did, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Of the 110 House and Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force against his regime, 67 said in congressional debate that Saddam had these weapons. This didn't keep Democrats from later alleging something they knew was false—that the president had lied America into war.

What someone says and what someone knows are entirely different things. As President, George W. Bush knew in 2002 -- before troops were sent to Iraq -- that Saddam Hussein did NOT possess weapons of mass destruction.

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Washington Post Does First Hit Piece On Rice

In an unusually pointed critique of Rice's failings as a NSA and her management shortcomings, check out this story in Tuesday's Washington Post by Glenn Kessler and Thomas Ricks. What is interesting here is that Ricks covers the Pentagon, while Kessler gets stuff from Bob Woodward, who is close to Powell. And note that George Tenet may be trashing Rice in his upcoming memoirs.

Bob Kerrey former 9/11 commissioner puts some blame on President Bush for 9/11 attack!

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Dick Cheney is still making the rounds and last night he was on FOX with Greta only he was accompanied by his outspoken daughter Liz. I wonder if he's been feeding her classified data since she is an expert now on all things secret within the intelligence community? In this short video mash-up, I have video of Cheney repeatedly pushing the notion that Saddam and al-Qaeda were linked up and Iraq had a hand in the 9/11 attacks when he was a frequent guest on Meet The Press during the push for war. It's followed up by his Greta bit where he now says that there was no connection between Saddam---al-Qaeda and 9/11. he also pushed that Saddam had WMD's lest we forget that too.I know he feels that Americans are too stupid to remember his act, but some of us aren't. He's also now blaming ex-CIA leader George Tenet for the mistake.

Raw Story:

On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that,” he told the Fox host. “There was “some reporting early on … but that was never borne out… [Former CIA Director] George [Tenet] … did say and did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9-11.”

Cheney didn't need proof to whip up the American people that has cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis and American troops. In the new Dick Armey book, Armey says that Cheney lied to him about Saddam and al-Qaeda.

The threat Cheney described went far beyond public statements that have been criticized for relying on "cherry-picked" intelligence of unknown reliability. There was no intelligence to support the vice president's private assertions, Gellman reports, and they "crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation."

"Did Dick Cheney . . . purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?" Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case. . . . Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."

Then of course there was this 2003 Washington Post article that says Cheney was constantly pressuring the CIA to link al-Qaeda to Saddam:

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"At least Bush kept us safe," is the war cry from conservatives whenever they try to find something good to say about the Bush Administration and their eight disastrous years of rule. They forget about everything that came before Sept. 11th apparently. That's not supposed to count. It's true that it's difficult to keep a nation completely safe and it's hard to assign blame, but let's not forget that George Tenet seemed to know a little about who the hijackers were after we found out who hit us.

According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, on the morning of 9/11, as aides rushed over to George Tenet’s table at the St. Regis Hotel restaurant to tell him the news of the World Trade Center strike, the CIA director was overheard to say: “I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

That being said, the media is very afraid to ever bring the facts up that Richard Clarke pointed it out in the Washington Post in a column called: The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

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Announcing his Christmas 1992 pardons of Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra figures, President George H.W. Bush introduced a time-honored Republican scandal evasion by decrying "the criminalization of policy differences." Now, 22 years after his own role in a Congressional minority report which blasted the allegations of Reagan administration abuses of power as "hysterical," Dick Cheney is back to defend the "little guys" now at the center of the Bush 43 administration's regime of detainee torture.

In an interview with 9/11-Iraq fabulist and chief Cheney hagiographer Stephen Hayes, the Vice President explained why he was not following George W. Bush's guidance that President Obama "deserves my silence." Just like Oliver North and Cap Weinberger all those years ago, the "little guys" who architected and carried out waterboarding and other potential war crimes, Cheney insisted, deserve his protection:

"I went through the Iran-contra hearings and watched the way administration officials ran for cover and left the little guys out to dry. And I was bound and determined that wasn't going to happen this time. I think to George Tenet's credit-I don't agree with George on a lot of stuff-but I think he was of the same view and that's why we had all of these requests coming through for policy guidance and for legal opinions. And this time around I'll do my damndest to defend anybody out there-be they in the agency carrying out the orders or the lawyers who wrote the opinions. I don't know whether anybody else will, but I sure as hell will."

Looking back on then-Representative Dick Cheney's hand in the 1987 Congressional Iran-Contra Committee minority report, one could be excused for performing a mental copy and paste. Substitute Bush for Reagan and torture for Iran-Contra, and you'd thnk you were reading an excerpt of Cheney's upcoming book:

"The bottom line, however, is that the mistakes of the Iran-contra affair were just that - mistakes in judgment, and nothing more. There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for ''the rule of law,'' no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or coverup. In fact, the evidence will not support any of the more hysterical conclusions the committees' report tries to reach."

Then as now, Cheney and his allies insisted Democrats were "criminalizing politics." Rep. Cheney even anticipated Michael Mukasey's claim that "the Bybee memo, to paraphrase a French diplomat, was worse than a sin, it was a mistake." Which makes the use of the same language by Attorney General Eric Holder ("we don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist") and President Obama ("whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake") all the more disconcerting.

Karl Marx famously said that historical events occur twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce. Of course, Karl Marx never met Dick Cheney.

George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews.

- Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

Following up on the Ron Suskind bombshell in his new book, I think the Medal of Freedom winner, you know -- the Slam Dunk King -- wouldn't forget this kind of information.

SUSKIND: What we now know from this investigation is that a secret mission was conducted in which a British manager, intelligence agent, met with the head of Iraqi intelligence in a secret location in Amman, Jordan. And what the Iraqi intelligence chief told the British-and essentially the Americans, because we're all in this together-is that there were no WMD in Iraq. And what that meant is that we knew everything that became so obvious by the summer after the invasion. And the president made a decision essentially to ignore that intelligence...

NPR: We have called key players in Ron Suskind's account...George Tenet says the Iraqi failed to persuade, and a White House spokesman adds that any information the Iraqi may have provided was, quote, "immaterial."

Jonathan has much more in the post.

Sidney Blumenthal writes that President Bush knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq. Or, at least, he was briefed on this but chose to disregard the briefing.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Note in particular (emphasis added):

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD. …

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Today through Wednesday, progressive talk show host Stephanie Miller gets her chance to shine in Imus's old slot on MSNBC. If this morning's show was any indication, she could easily impact their ratings in the same way Keith Olberman has.

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Former CIA officer Larry Johnson was Stephanie's guest this morning to give his reaction to George Tenet's appearance last night on 60 Minutes. Larry and a group of former intelligence officers have written a letter to Tenet demanding that he donate a portion of the proceeds from his new book to the families of soldiers who have died in Iraq and to give back the Medal of Freedom he was given by George Bush.

Watch the clip and if you like what you see, send a note to General Manager Dan Abrams and VP Bill Wolff at MSNBC. Let them know that you'd like to see Stephanie Miller on MSNBC in the mornings instead of another Fox wannabe like this guy. Remember, be polite. Personally, I would tune in five days a week....