Why Zarqawi is Loose

Via Daily Kos, I find yet another reminder that before the war, President Bush let Zarqawi escape to bolster his case for invading Iraq:

"Mr Scheuer was a CIA agent for 22 years - six of them as head of the agency's Osama bin Laden unit - until he resigned in 2004.

"He told Four Corners that during 2002, the Bush Administration received detailed intelligence about Zarqawi's training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.

"Mr Scheuer claims that a July 2002 plan to destroy the camp lapsed because 'it was more important not to give the Europeans the impression we were gunslingers'.

"'Mr Bush had Zarqawi in his sights almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn't shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq,' he told Four Corners.

""Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had overhead imagery of the house he was staying in. It was a terrorist training camp . . . experimenting with ricin and anthrax . . . any collateral damage there would have been terrorists.'"

"During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi's presence in the north of the country was used by US officials to link Saddam Hussein to terrorism."

These really should be revelations, as the fact Zarqawi was in the Kurdish area of Iraq and not that controlled by Saddam Hussein was well known before the war.

(Crossposted to American Footprints.)