Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

That’s your Washington Post reporting. I also feel like this directly contradicts reporting that was in major papers just last week. Persona issues and local controversies are, of course, always good campaign fodder. Spending the “vast majority” of one’s war chest on that, however, does seem like a bit of a desperation move.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated the false assertion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had a relationship before the 2003 invasion, despite the recent Senate Intelligence Report that found U.S. intelligence analysts strongly dispute that claim. Watch it:

Rice tried to pin the blame on then CIA Director George Tenet, saying he said, “there were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime going back for a decade.” But in July, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration’s case for war despite his own agents’ doubts about the intelligence it was based on.”

Rice also tried to dismiss the Senate report as being after-the fact, stating, “Now, are we learning more now that we have access to people like Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services? Of course.” But as Wallace pointed out, a Defense Intelligence Agency report from Feb. 2002 — before the U.S. invasion — also concluded that Iraq and Al Qaeda had no relationship: “Iraq is unlikely to have provided bin Laden any useful CB, that’s chemical or biological, knowledge or assistance.” Rice said she did not remember seeing that report.

Digg It!

Full transcript below: Read more

Today on ABC, former 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman (R) defended Path to 9/11. Lehman said, “if you don’t like the hits to the Clinton administration, well, welcome to the club.” According to Lehman, any defamatory material is acceptable because conservatives “have lived with Michael Moore” and “most of Hollywood.” Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

Long delayed, heavily censored and only partially complete, the new Senate Intelligence Committee report is still devastating to the administration: President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and other senior officials systematically misled the American public on the ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

The two sections of the report released late Friday also shows finally and definitively that there were not any nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in Iraq at the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to invade the country; that there were no programs to produce such weapons; and that the programs had been shut down years earlier.

The report also reveals for the first time that the CIA’s own internal review concluded last fall that there was no pre-war connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Committee Vice-Chairman Senator Jay Rockefeller (D.-AK) summed it up:

The Committee’s investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq has revealed that the Bush Administration’s case for war in Iraq was fundamentally misleading. The Administration pursued a deceptive strategy of using intelligence reporting that the Intelligence community had already warned was uncorroborated, unreliable, and in critical instances, fabricated.

The deceptions continue. On August 21, President Bush, who must have known about the CIA review and the Committee report, again claimed that Saddam Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.”

– Joe Cirincione