Welcome to a community supported and guest-produced edition of the best of the left podcast, with clips

today from the BBC, Firedog Lake, The Young Turks, Countdown with Keith Olderman, Real Time

with Bill Marr, Ring of Fire, The Randy Road Show, and just for fun, some guy we found on YouTube.

Problem is, you really shouldn't be going to a preemptive war based on a suspicion or a belief.

I mean, you should have some proof. I mean, there was no proof. That's the point.

This is clearly a totally unsatisfactory, that the world's biggest governments can go ahead on the basis of such information.

I saw a former Jordanian Prime Minister for dinner, and I said, what if we don't find the weapons of mass destruction?

And he said to me, you'd better invent them.

With handsblicks out of the way, all that remained was to prove that Saddam Hussein had procured enriched uranium as part of a nuclear weapons program.

But such accusations had to come from an irreproachable source.

The White House put forward the name of Joe Wilson, a friend of the President's family.

Wilson was the last American diplomat to have met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.

His courage during the Gulf War had led him to be decorated by the first President Bush.

Dick Cheney asked the CIA to contact Wilson for a particularly delicate mission.

Joe Wilson was a very able ambassador, gave money to Bush one.

And Wilson was called by the CIA to go to a country whose people he knew and check out a rumor that the country of Niger had sold yellow cake,

which is a material you'd use in part of nuclear weapons production, to Iraq.

The neocons around the President, around President Bush, had been citing this, including Cheney, had been citing this as a reason to invade Iraq.

I told them when the decision was made that I would go, but only as a representative of the government.

In other words, as someone who asks questions on behalf of the government, not for the CIA, I'm not a spy.

So he went and he talked to several government officials and asked them how they, what type of businesses business they do with their any and what are the safe guards, what are the protections.

And came back and said that was in his view unlikely that such a deal could happen.

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