Crazy As a Loon

So, we've got a bunch of people who continue to believe that President Bush lied about the presence of WMD in Iraq, despite the fact that there was more than a decade of intel stating precisely that. Democrats and Republicans alike for more than a decade were claiming that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had WMD and was a persistent threat.

Only after the 2003 invasion did those intel reports turn out to be incorrect. That doesn't make them lies.

There were lies spun, however. Lies were spun not by the United States or President Bush, but by Saddam Hussein himself.

He lied about his possession of WMD in order to ward off a possible attack by Iran. That's what one of his chief interrogators says.

Saddam Hussein didn't believe the United States would attack Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction - so he concealed the fact that he didn't have any to prevent an Iranian invasion, his chief American interrogator has revealed in a bombshell interview.

"He told me he initially miscalculated . . . President Bush's intentions," FBI agent George Piro says in an upcoming "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday.

"He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 . . . a four-day aerial attack."

Piro, a Lebanese-American and one of the few FBI agents who spoke Arabic, was assigned to debrief Saddam after his December 2003 capture. He ended up spending seven months in the interviews, winning the dictator's confidence along the way.

When it became clear that the US military was about to come marching in, Saddam asked his generals if they could hold the coalition off for two weeks, "and at that point, it would go into what he called the secret war" - a reference to the insurgency.

Even then, the Butcher of Baghdad still wouldn't admit that he had no WMDs.

"For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong and defiant Saddam," said Piro. "He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq."

Piro also notes that Saddam did maintain the infrastructure necessary to reconstitute a WMD program as soon as sanctions were lifted.

Thus, we have Iraq purposefully seeking to portray itself as in possession of WMD and intel agencies around the world - not just those in the US - coming to the same conclusion.