While reading Dave Winer's blog today I stumbled on a link to the New York Times editorial on the Sentate Intelligence Committee's recent report. Below is an excerpt

In a season when candor and leadership are in short supply, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons is a welcome demonstration of both. It is also disturbing, and not just because of what it says about the atrocious state of American intelligence. The report is a condemnation of how this administration has squandered the public trust it may sorely need for a real threat to national security.

The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat.

These assertions formed the basis of Mr. Bush's justifications for war. But the report said that they were wrong and were not a true picture of the intelligence, and that the intelligence itself was not worth much. The freshest information from human sources was more than four years old. The committee said the analysts who had produced that false apocalyptic vision had fallen into a "collective groupthink" in which evidence was hammered into a preconceived pattern. Their bosses did not intervene.

The report reaffirmed a finding by another panel investigating intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks in saying that there was no "established formal relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It also said there was no evidence that Iraq had been complicit in any attack by Osama bin Laden, or that Saddam Hussein had ever tried to use Al Qaeda for an attack. Although the report said the C.I.A.'s conclusions had been "widely disseminated" in the government, Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have repeatedly talked of an Iraq-Qaeda link.

Sadly, the investigation stopped without assessing how President Bush had used the incompetent intelligence reports to justify war.

It is now quite clear that GW Bush and his cronies started a war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis, cost the US and Iraq billions of dollars, and has increased the negative feelings towards the US across the world [especially in the Middle East] for no just cause. What I'd like to know is if anyone is going to go to is what the legal punishment for their transgressions actually will be.

Growing up in Nigeria, I saw first hand what happens when the government commits crimes against the people with no fear of accountability. Lack of accountability seeps into the national fabric and varying degrees of corruption follow. Hopefully, America won't follow the example of the tin pot dictatorships across the third world where everyone knows the governments lie and are corrupt but shrug it off as being a way of life.

Bush and his cronies are destroying America and everything it stands for one day at a time. I pray we don't get four more years of this disaster.