A former CIA analyst responds to Dick Cheney's speech on Iraq during Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now":

Well, this is the longest statement of disinformation that I think the American government has distributed to the American people. You know, the very obvious thing is where are the nuclear weapons. Why haven't we found the nuclear weapons? Why haven't we found the evidence that he was really trying to import uranium and enrich uranium for nuclear weapons? Where are the scud-type missiles that Cheney was talking about? Where are the hundreds and hundreds of tons of chemical agents that he said, and the C.I.A. said could fill 16,000 rockets.

Where are the huge numbers of materials that were supposedly produced for thousands of liters of Anthrax and botulinum toxin and all of the other biological agents that Colin Powell listed in his speech to the UN--which was written for him by the C.IA. after he turned down a version of the speech that was written for him by Dick Cheney's chief subordinate? Where is any of this material? The fact of the matter is that there was no clear and present danger, there was no imminent threat.

And for Dick Cheney just to recite these charges that we all know now not to be true, adds to the terrible politicization of intelligence that's created a scandal in the intelligence community unlike anything I ever saw in my 24 years in the C.I.A. That includes the period of Vietnam, the period of the intelligence failure on the Soviet union, and the incredibly contentious disputes over arms control.

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