When I talk about impeaching Bush (and Cheney) for their Iraq War lies, I am frequently asked if I can prove that Bush lied.

I can answer that question in a number of ways, depending on the level of proof required by the individual who is asking the question.

For 99% of Americans - say a soldier in Iraq who has held a dying buddy in his arms, a grieving relative of a soldier killed or maimed in Iraq, or a parent of a child nearing 18 who is considering military service - the answer is simple: where the hell are the WMD's that Bush and Cheney spoke about with such certainty when they sent our bravest sons and daughters to face death in Iraq?

For the remaining 1% who insist on knowing what was exactly in Bush's mind when he lied, I point to the smoking gun - the Downing Street Memos, in particular the famous quote from the head of British intelligence reporting on his July 2002 meetings with top officials in Washington:

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Of course, the "solidity" of this evidence has never been crash-tested in the U.S., because the Republican Congress refuses to even hold hearings and hear witnesses like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, and Powell under penalty of perjury. (That's why House Democrats led by John Conyers had to hold their own unofficial hearing without subpoena power in the Capitol basement on June 16, 2005.)

But now the superb investigative blogger eRiposte has unearthed powerful new evidence that Bush & Co. intentionally lied. It comes from an overlooked paragraph from Phase I of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report, a one-sided Republican investigation of how the intelligence community got its facts wrong. (Phase II was supposed to investigate how Bush & Co. "fixed the intelligence and facts... around the policy" of invading Iraq, facts or no facts. Of course, Phase II was blocked by Senate Republicans in 2004 to avoid exposing Bush's lies before the election, and continues to be blocked despite Republican promises when Harry Reid led Democrats in a shutdown of the Senate on November 1.)

The crucial paragraph explains why the unclassified version of the crucial National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 (which was released just before Congress voted to authorize the "use of force" in Iraq) left out all of the crucial disagreements over WMD evidence that were contained in the authoritative classified version. eRiposte discovered these omissions were not accidental, but rather the deliberate policy of the Bush administration to keep Congress and the American people entirely in the dark.

The Vice Chairman of the NIC and the NIOs who drafted the classified NIE told Committee staff that the statement in the unclassified white paper - "most intelligence specialists assess" the tubes are intended for a nuclear program - was used because the NIC does not refer to disagreements between intelligence agencies in unclassified documents out of concern that the country being discussed would be tipped off to a potential cover story. For example, by publishing in an unclassified paper that a U.S. intelligence agency believed the tubes were intended for a rocket program, Iraq could learn that such a use was believable and could plausibly argue to the international community that the tubes were intended for rockets, even if they were really intended for a nuclear program. [page 291 of PDF file]

eRiposte calls this the "White House Iraq Protocol (WHIP)," the goal of which "was to hide or suppress accurate intelligence from public view if such information might possibly provide the enemy a 'cover story.'"

This protocol explains how Bush and his cabinet stage-managed the run-up to the Iraq war by deliberately cherry-picking the stove-piped, dubious or false reports that allowed them to falsely portray a worst case scenario, while hiding from the public (classifying) information they received from the IC that challenged those misleading or false claims.

eRiposte explores the significance of this policy in great detail, including

1. This was official policy
2. This was official policy set by George Bush
3. Saddam Hussein was Bush's cover story to use the WHIP
4. As long as the WHIP is in effect, the disinformation will continue

This is a very long nail in what will ultimately be a very large coffin...