As you may be aware, the Bushies have been pushing back hard against the notion that they lied about the intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Bush position, has been summed up thusly by supporters like Marcus Gee of The Globe and Mail: "There is no evidence that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the American people, and many Democrats also believed Iraq was a threat. Think what you like about him: He is right on both counts."

(Question: What if Bush deliberately misled himself first?)

Anyway, on the Daily Show tonight, former U.S. counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke offered some context.

For example, to the Bushie claim that Congress had the same information the administration did, Clarke said Congress doesn't get to see the raw intelligence, they got to see what the Bushies cherry-picked -- and they usually picked the most hair-raising stuff regardless of whether it was true or not.

Take two claims:

Mohammed Atta, the team leader of the 9/11 suicide bombers, allegedly meeting with Iraqi agents in Prague in April 2001. "The guy was a drunk!" Clarke said of the source on that claim.

The famous Niger yellowcake. Clarke said the document on which the claim was based was such a bad forgery that it was practically drawn with crayons.

In any event, the war was sold on the basis of Iraq being an imminent threat to the U.S. But Clarke noted that Iraq didn't use its WMDs against U.S. troops when they were inside his country during the 1991 Gulf War.

I'll try and find a link to the video of the Clarke/Stewart chat later today so you can see for yourself (check this page and see if they added the Clarke video. You might also want to go here and click on 'weakened update').

Clarke said the Bush administration clearly made the decision to invade Iraq first -- then they looked for a pretext upon which to do it.

He noted that an interviewer asked Colin Powell, secretary of state in the first Bush administration, when the vote on the war took place. Powell said there was no vote.

In addition, Clarke said of all the administrations he's worked for, the Bushies are the least tolerant of dissent.

David Wilkerson, who worked for Powell at the State Dept., was quoted as saying the following in an Oct. 21, 2005 NYT story:

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

In a May 19, 2005 Salon article, writer Juan Cole notes the Downing Street memo made clear that by July 2002, the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq -- even though it publicly continued to deny it.

In a Nov. 17, 2005 Salon article, writer Sidney Blumenthal wrote:

 The Senate's decision last week to launch an investigation into the administration's role in prewar disinformation, after the Democrats forced the issue in a rare secret session, has provoked a furious presidential reaction.

On Veterans' Day, Nov. 11, Bush addressed troops at an Army base: "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." He charged that "some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people," even though they knew "a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs." In fact, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction was not authorized to look into that question, but only whether the intelligence community was correct in its analysis. Moreover, the Senate Intelligence Committee under Republican leadership connived with the White House to prevent a promised investigation into the administration's involvement in prewar intelligence. Its revival by Democrats is precisely the proximate cause that has triggered Bush's paroxysm of revenge.

The NYT's editorial board has also weighed in on Bushes protesting too much. Here is what it had to say on Nov. 15, 2005:

Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

To me, the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq represents faith-based decision-making at its worst.

Oddly enough, I never doubted there would be a war. To my mind, there was nothing Saddam Hussein and Iraq could have done to prevent it, short of total capitulation.

For the Bush administration to say it didn't lie can only mean one thing -- They were totally incompetent in their decision to invade Iraq and should resign.