In the lead-up to the Iraq war, US President George Bush was given top-secret intelligence from the CIA showing that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence came from an impeccible source - Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri - and was judged to be accurate and reliable by CIA analysts (and coincidentally, turned out to be completely accurate). Instead, Bush chose to believe a source named "Curveball", assessed by his handlers as a con-man, "crazy", and a "congenital liar", because he said what the President wanted to hear. The President's chosen lies were then fed to Congress, the British, and the UN, while the reliable intelligence was quietly buried and kept from everyone.
A few years ago, I would have been outraged by this. But now, with so much already published about how the Bush administration misused intelligence to push for war, it's just telling us what we already knew. Yes, the President is a faith-based loon more interested in his gut than reality, who lied his way into a war which has killed over 655,000 people, and for which he should be dragged to The Hague and Prosecuted. We know that. The most powerful man in the world's corruption, mendacity, and stupidity has just become part of the background noise, an accepted fact of reality, like the sky being blue or instant coffee being crap.
Obviously I am suffering from Bush fatigue.
