I'm not even angry anymore, just sort of dejected.

One can be struck on the back of the head with a roll of quarters by the terrifying truth of the world we live in. A new Senate report has once and for all just ruined the idea that Saddam Hussein had any operational--or even ideological--relationship with Al-Qaeda. From the Associated Press.

The report, released Friday, discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, President Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."

...

The report said that al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader killed by a U.S. airstrike last June, was in Baghdad from May 2002 until late November 2002. But "postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."

The 9/11 Commission report already pointed this out. The State Department's Intelligence Bureau said so too, before the war. I mean, you just have to pay attention.

Of equally stupefying character, former CIA Director George Tennet testafied that he caved to the administration in not exposing this lack of a connection.

"Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee that the policymakers wanted him to 'say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said,'" Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Friday.

And lest you think that this has nothing to do with the war I would merely point out to you that 43% of Americans in general and 85% of troops in Iraq believe that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. They got that idea somewhere. And that idea served the political purposes of the White house. The cynical, even dangerous, manipulation of foreign intelligence and domestic opinion in order to implement policy whose cheif aim is the political survival of the Republican Party rather than positive substantive outcomes for American interests is the hallmark of the Bush Administration and it's dangerously imperilling the nation. And we swallow this shit like ice-cream. It makes me despair.