When the nation was busy rushing to war in 2003, when a patriotic surge of pride swept the country to support an unprovoked attack on another nation, the voices of dissent were heartily criticized.

The Observer was perhaps the only newspaper in this area that came out against the impending war. We were tossed into the heap of “appeasers” and “America haters” who felt it was their patriotic duty not to embrace the fervor.

Since then, dozens of administration officials, military commanders and intelligence analysts have admitted most of the points the critics were once reviled over.

This fact is mentioned due to the recent release of “Iraq: the War Card,” a compilation of the false pretenses that pushed the country’s rush to battle. The Center for Public Integrity scoured the statements made by President George Bush and seven of his top officials.

What the study found was a “carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

The tally? There were at least 935 false statements made in the two years following September 11, 2001. The Center refers to its study as the first-ever analysis of the prewar body of rhetoric.

The study (at www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard) offers a searchable database of information, with every statement annotated to the date and circumstance in which it was made.

It’s astonishing to read through the transcripts where nuclear weapons, biological laboratories, chemical attacks within 45 minutes and al Qaeda are  all mentioned as fact—despite knowledge that other intelligence disputed these statements and that much of the information was outdated or obtained from dubious sources.

Finally, in December 2005, the President went before the nation and admitted the intelligence was wrong, however, he didn’t mention that his actions were also at fault.

Being wrong is certainly forgivable, but it’s not that simple in this case. Instead, it was a matter of ignoring information that didn’t fit your agenda, of burying reports that ran contrary to your plans.

Billions of dollars and tens of thousands of deaths later, it’s no wonder that calls for a Congressional investigation grow louder. It’s not the intelligence that needs looking into. That’s already been done. Now the American people deserve to know how the intelligence was handled. They need to know about the judgment used to carry us into an unnecessary war.