Cheney attempts to slant intelligence information to start war

This is hilarious.

Washington Post.

"But in his quiet way, [Cheney] he was insistent, sometimes asking the same question again and again as if he hoped the answer would change, according to people familiar with his contacts with the CIA .... CIA officials repeatedly told Cheney and others in his circle that they did not think Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic, before the attacks." -- LA Times

'Cheney’s claims about an “established relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda were always a principal part of the administration’s case for war, cited by Powell at the United Nations and, most forcefully, by Cheney in numerous speeches and TV interviews before and after the invasion. But it is also a contention that has been seriously undermined by a series of recent U.S. government reports, including the September 11 Commission report, which concluded there was no “collaborative operational relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Another is a recent CIA analysis, disclosed for the first time this week, raising questions about whether Jordanian terrorist Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, had been harbored by Saddam’s regime before the war.

Cheney said last night that Zarqawi, who once ran a terror camp in Afghanistan with loose links to Al Qaeda, had “migrated to Baghdad” after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and “set up shop” there, overseeing a “poisons facility” at Kurmal, in northern Iraq.

In fact, U.S. intelligence officials tell NEWSWEEK, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Zarqawi went first to Iran—a country that many officials have long believed had far more consequential relationships with terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, than Saddam’s regime. And while the new CIA report confirms that Zarqawi unquestionably did later move to Baghdad—and received medical treatment there before the war— there is still no hard evidence on whether he was being supported or assisted by Saddam’s regime. “The information on that is not clear,” said one U.S. official familiar with the report. “It’s still being worked.” Cheney also left out the fact that the alleged poisons facility that Zarqawi allegedly supervised was in a part of northern Iraq not controlled by Saddam's government.

...As for administration claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program—claims that had been championed by Cheney more than any single high-level official—Duelfer found that Saddam had actually abandoned his nuclear efforts years earlier. “He was getting further away from nuclear weapons,” a U.S. government official familiar with Duelfer’s report told reporters yesterday. “He was further away from nuclear weapons in 2003 than he was in 1991.” The nuclear program wasn’t reconstituting, the official said. It was “decaying.”' -- Newsweek

My question: Why does Cheney want war so much? What does he have to gain by this?