and you know...

As I sit here looking at the rain outside (a nice cool, rainy day again--yay!), writing about an evening with good friends, with unread books piled nearby, and cats alternately wreathing around my legs softly or rubbing their cheeks against my face, I have to say, I have a pretty good life. :-)

Yeah, really, at this point nothing would surprise me

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

...

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., [remarked] "I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."

Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

from the McLatchy Newspapers

All I can say is, if people are not brought to account before the law for this, American justice will have failed signally, and it will be hard for people to believe that American really stands for any of the ideals it claims.