Another important allegation made by author James Risen that is not getting much coverage.

Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA’s behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade.

New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. His book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration” describes secret operations of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

The book said Dr. Alhaddad flew home in mid-September 2002 and had a series of meetings with CIA analysts. She relayed her brother’s information that there was no nuclear program.

A CIA operative later told Dr. Alhaddad’s husband that the agency believed her brother was lying. In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned.

This is very important information in trying to determine if the Bush administration really tried to get the best information available before deciding to invade Iraq. The question to be asked is what made the administration decide that all 30 of these family members were lying? What tipped them off? Was it that they did not come back with the information that the White House had already decided must be true?

Now looking back on the facts, we know for a fact that these family members were not lying and were in fact providing good solid information which could have spared the lives of thousands. Doesn't that make the people who decided to ignore them culpable?

I keep hearing the Right saying that it is useless to keep revisiting how the information about Iraq could have been so far of base. I know, and on some level they know, that if this were a mistake made by a Democrat they would be all over it. And the difference between them and myself, is that I would be all over it with them. The only way to ensure that we do not allow ourselves to make a similar mistake in the future is to determine what went wrong and to make sure it never happens again!

And the idea that this was a mistake made by the CIA and that they deserve all of the blame is getting thinner and thinner. This evidence, "some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned", suggests to me that they did their job in trying to gather as much information as they could. It is not the fault of the CIA if the Bush administration refused to believe it.

And on another point that the Right keeps making that the WMD's were not the sole reason that we went into Iraq, therefore we are still correct in attacking even after it was demonstrated that they did not exist. Wrong! Without the WMD's we would never have gone into Iraq! The WMD's was the straw and congress was the camel.