Unfortunately forgotten, however, has been a rarely mentioned Novak column penned in September 2002 — six months before the Iraq invasion — in which he points out the inconvenient truth (considered by some to be highly unpatriotic at the time) that Saddam Hussein’s supposedly threatening arsenal of weapons had been sold to him by the United States.

An eight-year-old Senate report confirms that disease-producing and poisonous materials were exported, under U.S. government license, to Iraq from 1985 to 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Furthermore, the report adds, the American-exported materials were identical to microorganisms destroyed by United Nations inspectors after the Gulf War. The shipments were approved despite allegations that Saddam used biological weapons against Kurdish rebels and (according to the current official U.S. position) initiated war with Iran.

This record is no argument for or against waging war against the Iraqi regime, but current U.S. officials are not eager to reconstruct the mostly secret relationship between the two countries. While biological warfare exports were approved by the U.S. government, the first President George Bush signed a policy directive proposing “normal” relations with Saddam in the interest of Middle East stability. Looking at a little U.S.-Iraqi history might be useful on the eve of a fateful military undertaking.

Novak went on to blast the selective amnesia of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was questioned about those weapons sales by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.).

At a Senate Armed Services hearing last Thursday, Byrd tried to disinter that history. “Did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war?” he asked Rumsfeld. “Certainly not to my knowledge,” Rumsfeld replied. When Byrd persisted by reading a current Newsweek article reporting these exports, Rumsfeld said, “I have never heard anything like what you’ve read, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it.”

That suggests Rumsfeld also has not read the sole surviving copy of a May 25, 1994, Senate Banking Committee report. In 1985 (five years after the Iraq-Iran war started) and succeeding years, said the report, “pathogenic (meaning “disease producing”), toxigenic (meaning “poisonous”) and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce.” It added: “These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction.”

The report then details 70 shipments (including anthrax bacillus) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding, “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”

With Baghdad having survived combat against Iran’s revolutionary regime with U.S. help, President George H.W. Bush signed National Security Directive 26 on Oct. 2, 1989. Classified “secret” but recently declassified, it said: “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East. The United States government should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence with Iraq.”

Bush the elder, who said recently that he “hates” Saddam, saw no reason then to oust the Iraqi dictator. On the contrary, the government’s approval of exporting microorganisms to Iraq coincided with the Bush administration’s decision to save Saddam from defeat by the Iranian mullahs.

“Such recollections of the recent past,” Novak added, “make for uncomfortable officials in Washington and Jerusalem today.”

Any historians writing the Iraq War chapter pertaining to journalism’s complicity in the invasion shouldn’t fail to include mention of these words.

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Needless to say, these are some hot-button legal issues that go to the heart of what the president has been doing over the last eight years in executing his “war on terror.”

Yet, you’d never know it from reading these memos. As I wrote in my recent piece about the Bush Justice Department, the lawyers chosen to lead the Office of Legal Counsel appear to have used their position not to explain to the president what the law is, but to provide him legal justification for doing precisely what he wanted to do all along.

Thus the newly-released OLC memos concluded that suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees are “enemy combatants” who are entitled to no protection whatsoever under the Geneva Conventions or the U.S. Constitution — a position the Supreme Court has since repudiated; that the president has the authority to create military commissions that did not comply with the Geneva Conventions without the approval of Congress — also rejected by the Supreme Court; and that the president has the right of “anticipatory self-defense” against Iraq, even if the threat posed by Iraq isn’t all that imminent. (The possibility that Iraq might possess WMDs apparently makes the usual “imminence” requirement very squishy.)

Perhaps it was just sloppy lawyering, as former OLC director Jack Goldsmith said when he took over the office and criticized some of its opinions in his book, “The Terror Presidency”.  But more likely it’s what critics like Dawn Johnsen, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick to head the OLC under his administration, have described as the tragic refusal of  OLC lawyers to just say no to the president and vice-president — even when they were intent on disregarding the law.

As Johnsen told the American Constitution Society, “OLC and the Attorney General have to be prepared to tell the President ‘no’; that’s what the law requires.”

Well, he’s no Mike Hayden. More soon.

We would like to let you personally know that we have decided that this past election will signify my last term in the House of Representatives. In 2010 it will be time for us to move on to new challenges.

Hoekstra says he’s eying a run to become Michigan’s governor.

First elected in 1992, the former Fortune-500 executive ran on a reform platform, but hasn’t always kept to the script. He went back on his vow to stay in Washington only 12 years, for example, and veered from another promise not to accept money from political action committees, or PACs.

In 2004, Hoekstra was named head of the House intelligence committee, where he rankled Democrats with a disputed 2006 report that the U.S. military had discovered hundreds of WMDs in Iraq. Another 2006 report coming out of the Hoekstra-led intelligence committee found that Iran was well on its way to procucing a nuclear weapon — an assertion blasted by the United Nations as “erroneous” and “misleading.”

Even Hoekstra seems to acknowledge the prickly nature of his tenure. “While I know that on any given day there would be differences on policy, I tried to insure that disagreements would not become disagreeable,” his statement reads. “Civility and respect are cornerstones of our democracy. That has always been my goal and my vision. I recognize that on some days I came up short. I apologize for that.”

Depending on how the Senate’s chairmanship shuffle unfolds, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), might give up the intelligence gavel to take the helm at the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. If that happens, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), is likely to chair the intelligence panel, Senate aides say.

Rockefeller never truly wanted the gavel in the first place. I did a profile of him in 2003, and I learned that he felt in over his head on all the intelligence-related controversies about Iraq, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. As the years went on, he found more of his footing. But he’s remained something of a squish, acquiescing to a baseless GOP charge that Joe Wilson only took his fateful trip to Africa because his wife at the CIA wanted a fanciful junket for her husband; believing that Dick Cheney never pressured the agency to cook its WMD and terrorism analysis to support the Iraq invasion; or supporting the gutting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this year.

It’s no wonder that progressives call him Jello Jay. And if he ends up moving aside for Feinstein, an imperfect but more reliable voice for oversight and civil liberties, it would seem like Rockefeller and progressives would consider that win-win.