Did BushCo Create Fake Photos Of Iraqi Drones?

This is interesting:

Add faked photos to the list of lies told by the Bush–Cheney Administration before its invasion of Iraq.

In a town hall meeting in Bloomsburg, Pa., this week, Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a 12-term congressman, said that shortly before Congress was scheduled to vote on authorizing military force against Iraq, top officials of the CIA showed select members of Congress three photographs it alleged were Iraqi Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones. Kanjorski said he was told that the drones were capable of carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical agents, and could strike 1,000 miles inland of east coast or west coast cities.

Kanjorski said he and four or five other congressmen in the room were told there may be drones on freighters headed to the U.S. Both secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and President Bush wandered into and out of the briefing room, Kanjorski said.

Kanjorski said it was the second time he was called to the White House for a briefing. He had opposed giving the President the powers to go to war, and said that he hadn’t changed his mind after a first meeting. Until he saw the pictures, Kanjorski said, “I hadn’t thought that Iraq was a threat.” That second meeting changed everything. After he left that meeting, said Kanjorski, he was willing to give the President the authorization he wanted since the drones “represented an imminent danger.”

Kanjorski said he went to see Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a retired Marine colonel. Murtha, said Kanjorski, “turned white” when told about the drones; Murtha, a former intelligence officer, believed that such information was classified.

Several years later, Kanjorski said he learned that the pictures were “a god-damned lie,” apparently taken by CIA photographers in the desert in the southwest of the U.S. The drone story itself had already been disproved, although not many major media carried that story. * * *

Needless to say, if photos were indeed fabricated, then this is a big story. Everybody knows that the Bush Regime cherry-picked intelligence to support the 2003 Iraq invasion. Bush had made up his mind in early 2002 to invade Iraq , and the Downing Street Memos revealed that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." What this meant in real terms was that solid evidence showing that Iraq did not possess WMD was ignored while flimsy evidence that Iraq had WMD -- including "evidence" provided by a drunken, crazy person -- was hyped aggressively.

But this is the first report -- as far as I know -- of U.S. operatives actually fabricating evidence during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out.