"McGovern unleashed a scathing indictment of the Bush’s administration’s handling of an array of intelligence, military and human rights matters in the context of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq," the report continues. "He said the people that are currently running U.S. foreign and military policy were affectionately known as 'The Crazies' during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, and were “kept at arm’s length,” never permitted to rise above middle management levels of influence because of their radical proclivities.

However, with the election of the current Bush, they took over all the top positions."

"McGovern and his colleagues in the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity held a press conference in D.C. last Friday to brief the media on the implications for the lives and safety of U.S. anti-terror intelligence assets worldwide of Bush advisor Karl Rove’s blowing the cover of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame.

"Rove’s action was done in order to “get even” with Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing the administration’s lie about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities prior to the invasion.

We wanted to tell the media how many people might get killed,” said McGovern.

“It was an inside job,” McGovern said since "Vice President Cheney claimed that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons along with its other phantom so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” a lie which has been repeated over and over by the Bush controlled media.

The so-called "intelligence" was false, "matched only by the CIA assessment in 1962 that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba. But that was an honest mistake,” McGovern said. “This one was dishonest from the get-go.”

McGovern added that the “biggest sea change in the last 42 years” has been the decline in the independent role of the press. “We no longer have a free press,” he exclaimed, citing as an example a panel assembled in 2001 for the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which is attributed with turning the vast majority of Americans against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

“At this panel, with representatives of the New York Times and Washington Post congratulating themselves, they were asked if a similar set of classified documents were leaked to their news organizations today, they would be published,” he recounted. “After a dead silence, they one after another began to answer, ‘It’s not likely today.’ And they said this without any trace of embarrassment or regret.”

"He said that bloggers and the Internet are providing ways around the 'captive press' and were, among other things, responsible for the eventual public exposure of the Downing Street memos that exposed the U.S. administration’s treachery in misleading the public on its motives for invading Iraq."

The US invasion of Iraq was based on a lie. Period.