I can’t be the only one who gets that pit-of-the-stomach disgusted feeling when once again we read President George Bush’s answer to a reporter’s question about weapons of mass destruction. This time it’s The Observer in London, and Bush says, “We didn’t realize, nor did anyone else, that Saddam Hussein felt like he needed to play like he had WMDs.”

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet briefed Bush in the Oval Office on top secret intelligence gained from Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, that Saddam did not have any WMDs. Bush dismissed this information as worthless, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. It never made it into the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, and Congress was never briefed on it.

CIA officers kept collecting information, including shared wiretaps, that validated Sabri’s claims. Bush saw this information as the same old thing, or in other words, it didn’t support the policy. Instead, the Bush administration embraced the darling of the Office of Special Plans, Iraqi defector, fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer, Ahmad Chalabi.

Never heard of the Office of Special Plans? It was a secret committee set up in 2001 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and headed by Paul Wolfowitz, Abrum Shulsky and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Rumsfeld had become increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program or any link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And for a very good reason, because they didn’t exist.

The committee’s job was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover and present it to the White House to build a case for war. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Chalabi.

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview that the Office of Special Plans “started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It’s not intelligence. It’s political propaganda.”

By the fall of 2002, the White House had virtually dismissed all the intelligence provided by the CIA in favor of the more critical information provided by the Office of Special Plans.

No matter what you think of Scott McClellan and his book, there is one thing he has said that was an “Aha!” moment for me. The Bush administration never switched from the campaigning mode to the governing mode.

Soon Bush can return to Texas and the ranch, except for hot days, when he can go to the family retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine. He is a man of privilege, after all. He won’t have to drive the streets of America, where the ever-increasing number of homeless veterans from the Iraq War are joining the homeless veterans from Vietnam.

Patrick Lines

Seaside