Tenet tells us more things we already know.

More is coming out about George Tenet's new book, due to be released on Monday. Most of what he is saying simply confirms what many of us have long thought.

White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, according to a new book by former CIA director George J. Tenet.

Although Tenet does not question the threat Saddam Hussein posed or the sincerity of administration beliefs, he recounts numerous efforts by aides to Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to insert "crap" into public justifications for the war. Tenet also describes an ongoing fear within the intelligence community of the administration's willingness to "mischaracterize complex intelligence information."

It is simply astonishing to me that there are still people on the planet for whom this news might be regarded as controversial or even as news, but from arguments that I have within the comments section here I know that such people still exist.

There are a number of Bush devotees who still believe that Bush and his cohorts were somehow misled by the intelligence - which Bush and Co sincerely believed - and that they and every other intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam represented a threat. This ignores the fact that no other intelligence agency in the world - with the exception of dear Tony - regarded this threat as serious enough to warrant an invasion, or even serious enough to grant UN permission for the US and UK to invade on their own with no risk whatsoever to the troops of other country's.

And, of course, the implication that other country's shared the intelligence that the US and UK shared on Iraq implies that there was even such a thing as intelligence on Iraq. Robin Cook, who had once been British Foreign Secretary and had therefore seen all our available intelligence on Iraq, quit the government in protest over the impending war because he had seen nothing that implied that Iraq had the WMD that Bush and Blair were claiming.

Indeed, he made the position clear when he spoke before the foreign affairs select committee inquiry.

Mr Cook cast doubt on both dossiers of evidence against the Iraqi leader, revealing that "Iraq was an appallingly difficult intelligence target to break".

The truth is that there was almost no intelligence to speak of regarding Iraq. Indeed, even Blair, despite having labelled the intelligence "extensive, detailed and authoritative" before the war, admitted afterwards that it was actually "sporadic and patchy".

So Tenet's revelations that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney were vastly overselling their case should come as a surprise to no-one.

And yet, they still have their believers. Despite voluminous evidence to the contrary they continue to insist that Bush and Co somehow acted in good faith and were thwarted by faulty intelligence that they sincerely believed in. This ignores almost everything that these people engaged in before this war began.

A speech by Cheney in August 2002 "went well beyond what our analysis could support," Tenet writes. The speech charged, among other things, that Hussein had restarted his nuclear program and would "acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon . . . perhaps within a year." Caught off-guard by the remarks, which had not been cleared by the CIA, Tenet says he considered confronting the vice president on the subject but did not.

"Would that have changed his future approach?" he asks. "I doubt it but I should not have let silence imply an agreement." Policymakers, he writes, "have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts."

Cheney continues, even now, to insist on facts that are known to be untrue. He continues to repeat allegations that have been proven to be false. And yet he keeps saying them.

If he continues to take this course of action even though the facts have now been long established, how can anyone doubt that he attempted to create his own reality devoid of facts before the war?

These people were always intent on invading Iraq and set out to find evidence that supported a decision that had already been taken. This led them to accept anything that supported invasion and to dismiss anything that stood in it's way.

So the Iraq war was not a failure of intelligence, it was a deliberate misuse of intelligence by a group of ideologues who were long predisposed to invade. And after the invasion proved their presumptions false they simply set out to blame others for them arriving at conclusions that their own warped ideology had led them to.

It's quite one of the most shameful periods in American history. Future generations will look back at the Bush period in office and shudder. In this way his Presidency might actually have a value. If only that people will be able to look back at an America that suspended Habeas Corpus, detained prisoners without trial and engaged in torture and say: Never again.

That may very well be the Bush legacy. A mistake never to be repeated. It's actually the best legacy he can hope for.

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Tags: George Tenet, WMD, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Iraq war, intelligence failure, CIA