[.ca] Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the ... (ISBN 0786168420)

There is literally a myriad of information revealed:
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff and Nation Washington editor David Corn reveals new details on the inner workings on the Administration in the lead-up to the Iraq war--many of which cast unflattering light on the aggressive nature of the Bush-Cheney team that discounted facts from the intelligence community in favor of a policy that involved attacking Iraq. Details duch as: -- President Bush was driven by a visceral hatred of Saddam Hussein, which he privately demonstrated in expletive-laden tirades against the Iraqi dictator. In May 2002--months before he asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam-Bush bluntly revealed his ultimate game plan in a candid moment with two aides. -- As part of an aggressive prewar covert action program--codenamed Anabasis--the CIA was authorized by the White House in the winter of 2002 to blow up targets in Iraq and engage in "direct action" to weaken Saddam's regime and to prepare for his ouster by the U.S. military. For Anabasis, the agency smuggled Iraqi exiles to a top-secret site in the Nevada desert and trained them in sabotage and explosives. -- When Bush was first briefed that no WMDs had been found in Iraq, he was totally unfazed and asked few questions. -- Colin Powell remains intensely bitter and angry about his UN Security Council Speech, during which he presented the case for war. After it became clear that much of his speech was wrong, he refused to have anything to do with CIA director George Tenet. "It's annoying to me," Powell said. -- After the invasion, Dck Cheney's aides desperately sifted through raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify the war. -- Many of the White House's most dramatic claims about the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction were repeatedly questioned by senior members of the U.S. intelligence community-but these dissents and views were suppressed or ignored by the White House. -- U.S. intelligence officials suspected Iranian intelligence was trying to influence U.S. decision-making through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress-yet they felt they could do nothing about it because the INC had support within the White House and Pentagon. -- The intelligence community's top nuclear experts were afraid to challenge publicly the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had obtained aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program, though they disagreed with this assessment. The tubes case was relentlessly pressed by one CIA analyst whose technical expertise did not match those of these scientists and whose name is revealed for the first time in Hubris. -- The CIA came close to recruiting Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, to be an American spy. Through a Lebanese journalist, Sabri passed word to the CIA's station chief in Paris that Iraq had no active nuclear or WMD programs. But senior CIA and White House officials dismissed the intelligence and opposed the effort to recruit Sabri, fearing it would undercut the case for an invasion. -- CIA analysts, over the objections of other intelligence community analysts, rigged a post-invasion report to show that a trailer found in Iraq was a mobile bioweapons lab. I could go on and on, there is literally a myriad of information revealed in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Michael Isikoff and David Corn do a remarkable job in exposing all the secrets never unveiled by the White House.

Essential reading on Iraq:
This book is extremely well written and researched. The authors provide a comprehensive analysis of the work of the US intelligence services and the information they provided to the White House prior to and on an ongoing basis during the Iraq war. The authors also outline through a variety of sources, how the key players from the White House interpreted this information and came to the decisions that have led to this point in history. Hubris is essential reading for anyone who wishes to know more about the decision making that led to our current state of affairs in regards to Iraq and the war on terror. I highly recommend this book.