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Posted by Bill Fright on 09/27/66 11:41
kathy_and_or_ken@yahoo.com wrote:
> Actress Geena Davis shows the usual LIEberal tact at the Emmys.
>
> Oh yes. She entralled us with her tale of the young 8 year old girl
> who came up and supposedly told her that Geena was her inspiration to
> want to be president one day. But then Geena had to come clean (I
> guess she FINALLY got over that yeast infection) and had to tell the
> truth that it never had happened. And tried to laugh it off. She was
> not alone in the laughing at her attempt at folly, but you have to
> consider the audience there. Most of them lying LIEberals like Geena!
>
>
> That's a LIEberal for you. Conveniently lying when it suits their
> goals and asperations.
>
> And not to take Geena to too much task, but I notice that she starred
> with fellow-uber-LIEberal Susan Sarandon in "Thelma and Louise". I bet
> there were not many "cold nights" in their trailers at after their
> "hard days" on the set.
>
> I suspect they are both flatcockers, as are many LIBeral femme bitches.
> "Flatcockers" is a word in 'www.urbandictionary.com'. I suggest you
> visit 'www.urbandictionary.com' to be educated and enlightened as to
> what a flatcocker is.
>
> Mmmmmm.....Ken says he wishes he could have been a fly on the wall
> during the nights at "Thelma and Louise".
>
> Kathy
>
> (with Ken in the living room watching "Thelma and Louise" just now)
>
Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by the Minneapolis City Pages
The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
Bring 'em On!
by Steve Perry
1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.
Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly
maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that
diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to
prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the
contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's March
31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security adviser Condi
Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions
against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily
waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out." Clare
Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international development,
recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told the London
Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few months afterward,
in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of
this year.
Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at
2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that
Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.
[Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go
massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual
light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told
Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes Saddam
was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing.
The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on September
11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront a radical
plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had been taking
shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency. Back then a
small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document
known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took
advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control
of the world both militarily and economically, to the point where no
other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge the U.S. Toward
that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive" wars waged to reset
the geopolitical table.
After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent drafts
were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never changed. In
1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol,
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for
the New American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they
all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W never
really embraced their plan until the events of September 11 left him
casting around for a foreign policy plan.
2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S., a
belief supported by available intelligence evidence.
Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass destruction
were not really the main reason for invading Iraq: "The decision to
highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for
going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were
many other important factors as well." Right. But they did not come
under the heading of self-defense.
We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence: They set
out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and ignored
everything that contradicted it. In the end, this required that
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the findings of analysts from the
CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau)
and stake their claim largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal
testimony from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But
the administration did not just listen to the defectors; it promoted
their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public opinion. The
only reason so many Americans thought there was a connection between
Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place was that the Bushmen trotted out
Iraqi defectors making these sorts of claims to every major media outlet
that would listen.
Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of
the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe the Bush
administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American
people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has had
a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us the
intelligence to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted as
saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not understand the
nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure of senior
administration officials to speak honestly about what the intelligence
showed."
3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.
Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions, and here
is W's most notorious case in point: Once the administration decided to
issue a damage-controlling (they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of
African uranium, they were obliged to couch it in another, more perilous
lie: that the administration, and quite likely Bush himself, thought the
uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting ambassador to
Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6 that
exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger in 2002 to investigate
the uranium claims at the behest of the CIA and Dick Cheney's office and
found them to be groundless, describes what followed this way: "Although
I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents
in U.S. government archives confirming my mission. The documents should
include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate
report written by the embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip,
and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice
president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen
any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know
that this is standard operating procedure."
4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.
The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was just as
egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit cagier in its
formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has
attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear
weapons production." This is altogether false in its implication (that
this is the likeliest use for these materials) and may be untrue in its
literal sense as well. As the London Independent summed it up recently,
"The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy high-strength
aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas centrifuges, needed to
enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally persistently, the
International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were being used for
artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN
Security Council in January that the tubes were not even suitable for
centrifuges." [emphasis added]
5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.
Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for the
administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but
not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.
6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence errors
or distortions regarding Iraq.
Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has taken the
fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the Uranium address. As the
journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as it
prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a
second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The
Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to
produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ...
Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low,
with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the
push for war."
In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State of the
Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it again.
7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq
could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons.
Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no
such report existed.
8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of 9/11.
One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's fibs, this
one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary threads imaginable:
first, anecdotal testimony by isolated, handpicked Iraqi defectors that
there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, a claim CIA analysts did
not corroborate and that postwar U.S. military inspectors conceded did
not exist; and second, old intelligence accounts of a 1991 meeting in
Baghdad between a bin Laden emissary and officers from Saddam's
intelligence service, which did not lead to any subsequent contact that
U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up. According to former State
Department intelligence chief Gregory Thielman, the consensus of U.S.
intelligence agencies well in advance of the war was that "there was no
significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda
terrorist operation."
9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.
Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as anyone who
has paid attention to the state of Arab popular sentiment already
realizes. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid
expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the U.S. wants westernized, secular
leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to neutralize the
politically ambitious anti-Western religious sects popping up
everywhere. If a little brutality and graft are required to do the job,
it has never troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically, these standards
describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein. Judging from the
state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush administration will no
doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and when they are finally
compelled to install anyone at all.
10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown Iraqi
political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.
Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than most people
realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed choice to lead a
post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his INC that funneled
compliant defectors to the Bush administration, where they attested to
everything the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and Iraq (meaning,
mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The administration
proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the combined
intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam was not in
the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and posed no imminent
threat to anyone.
Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of Langley, but
it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi National Congress and
installed Chalabi at the helm back in the days following Gulf War I,
when the thought was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an
internal opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have disliked
and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous ways have
alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy establishment
as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, and therefore the
White House.
11) The United States is waging a war on terror.
Practically any school child could recite the terms of the Bush
Doctrine, and may have to before the Ashcroft Justice Department is
finished: The global war on terror is about confronting terrorist groups
and the nations that harbor them. The United States does not make deals
with terrorists or nations where they find safe lodging.
Leave aside the blind eye that the U.S. has always cast toward Israel's
actions in the territories. How are the Bushmen doing elsewhere
vis-à-vis their announced principles? We can start with their
fabrications and manipulations of Iraqi WMD evidence--which, in the eyes
of weapons inspectors, the UN Security Council, American intelligence
analysts, and the world at large, did not pose any imminent threat.
The events of recent months have underscored a couple more gaping
violations of W's cardinal anti-terror rules. In April the Pentagon made
a cooperation pact with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an anti-Iranian
terrorist group based in Iraq. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution,
American intelligence blamed it for the death of several U.S. nationals
in Iran.
Most glaring of all is the Bush administration's remarkable treatment of
Saudi Arabia. Consider: Eleven of the nineteen September 11 hijackers
were Saudis. The ruling House of Saud has longstanding and well-known
ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits, which it funds (read
protection money) to keep them from making mischief at home. The May
issue of Atlantic Monthly had a nice piece on the House of Saud that
recounts these connections.
Yet the Bush government has never said boo regarding the Saudis and
international terrorism. In fact, when terror bombers struck Riyadh in
May, hitting compounds that housed American workers as well, Colin
Powell went out of his way to avoid tarring the House of Saud:
"Terrorism strikes everywhere and everyone. It is a threat to the
civilized world. We will commit ourselves again to redouble our efforts
to work closely with our Saudi friends and friends all around the world
to go after al Qaeda." Later it was alleged that the Riyadh bombers
purchased some of their ordnance from the Saudi National Guard, but
neither Powell nor anyone else saw fit to revise their statements about
"our Saudi friends."
Why do the Bushmen give a pass to the Saudi terror hotbed? Because the
House of Saud controls a lot of oil, and they are still (however
tenuously) on our side. And that, not terrorism, is what matters most in
Bush's foreign policy calculus.
While the bomb craters in Riyadh were still smoking, W held a meeting
with Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Speaking publicly
afterward, he outlined a deal for U.S. military aid to the Philippines
in exchange for greater "cooperation" in getting American hands round
the throats of Filipino terrorists. He mentioned in particular the
U.S.'s longtime nemesis Abu Sayyaf--and he also singled out the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front, a small faction based on Mindanao, the
southernmost big island in the Philippine chain.
Of course it's by purest coincidence that Mindanao is the location of
Asia's richest oil reserves.
12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist elements, in
particular by crippling al Qaeda.
A resurgent al Qaeda has been making international news since around the
time of the Saudi Arabia bombings in May. The best coverage by far is
that of Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad. According to
Shahzad's detailed accounts, al Qaeda has reorganized itself along
leaner, more diffuse lines, effectively dissolving itself into a
coalition of localized units that mean to strike frequently, on a small
scale, and in multiple locales around the world. Since claiming
responsibility for the May Riyadh bombings, alleged al Qaeda communiqués
have also claimed credit for some of the strikes at U.S. troops in Iraq.
13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from terror on U.S.
soil.
Like the Pentagon "plan" for occupying postwar Iraq, the Department of
Homeland Security is mainly a Bush administration PR dirigible
untethered to anything of substance. It's a scandal waiting to happen,
and the only good news for W is that it's near the back of a fairly long
line of scandals waiting to happen.
On May 26 the trade magazine Federal Computer Week published a report on
DHS's first 100 days. At that point the nerve center of Bush's domestic
war on terror had only recently gotten e-mail service. As for the larger
matter of creating a functioning organizational grid and, more
important, a software architecture plan for integrating the enormous
mass of data that DHS is supposed to process--nada. In the nearly two
years since the administration announced its intention to create a
cabinet-level homeland security office, nothing meaningful has been
accomplished. And there are no funds to implement a network plan if they
had one. According to the magazine, "Robert David Steele, an author and
former intelligence officer, points out that there are at least 30
separate intelligence systems [theoretically feeding into DHS] and no
money to connect them to one another or make them interoperable. 'There
is nothing in the president's homeland security program that makes
America safer,' he said."
14) The Bush administration has nothing to hide concerning the events of
September 11, 2001, or the intelligence evidence collected prior to that
day.
First Dick Cheney personally intervened to scuttle a broad congressional
investigation of the day's events and their origins. And for the past
several months the administration has fought a quiet rear-guard action
culminating in last week's delayed release of Congress's more modest
9/11 report. The White House even went so far as to classify after the
fact materials that had already been presented in public hearing.
What were they trying to keep under wraps? The Saudi connection, mostly,
and though 27 pages of the details have been excised from the public
report, there is still plenty of evidence lurking in its extensively
massaged text. (When you see the phrase "foreign nation" substituted in
brackets, it's nearly always Saudi Arabia.) The report documents
repeated signs that there was a major attack in the works with extensive
help from Saudi nationals and apparently also at least one member of the
government. It also suggests that is one reason intel operatives didn't
chase the story harder: Saudi Arabia was by policy fiat a "friendly"
nation and therefore no threat. The report does not explore the
administration's response to the intelligence briefings it got; its
purview is strictly the performance of intelligence agencies. All other
questions now fall to the independent 9/11 commission, whose work is
presently being slowed by the White House's foot-dragging in turning
over evidence.
15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on September 11,
2001.
Old questions abound here. The central mystery, of how U.S. air defenses
could have responded so poorly on that day, is fairly easy to grasp. A
cursory look at that morning's timeline of events is enough. In very
short strokes:
8:13 Flight 11 disobeys air traffic instructions and turns off its
transponder.
8:40 NORAD command center claims first notification of likely Flight 11
hijacking.
8:42 Flight 175 veers off course and shuts down its transponder.
8:43 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 175 hijacking.
8:46 Flight 11 hits the World Trade Center north tower.
8:46 Flight 77 goes off course.
9:03 Flight 175 hits the WTC south tower.
9:16 Flight 93 goes off course.
9:16 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 93 hijacking.
9:24 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 77 hijacking.
9:37 Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.
10:06 Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field.
The open secret here is that stateside U.S. air defenses had been
reduced to paltry levels since the end of the Cold War. According to a
report by Paul Thompson published at the endlessly informative Center
for Cooperative Research website (www.cooperativeresearch.org), "[O]nly
two air force bases in the Northeast region... were formally part of
NORAD's defensive system. One was Otis Air National Guard Base, on
Massachusetts's Cape Cod peninsula and about 188 miles east of New York
City. The other was Langley Air Force Base near Norfolk, Virginia, and
about 129 miles south of Washington. During the Cold War, the U.S. had
literally thousands of fighters on alert. But as the Cold War wound
down, this number was reduced until it reached only 14 fighters in the
continental U.S. by 9/11."
But even an underpowered air defense system on slow-response status (15
minutes, officially, on 9/11) does not explain the magnitude of NORAD's
apparent failures that day. Start with the discrepancy in the times at
which NORAD commanders claim to have learned of the various hijackings.
By 8:43 a.m., NORAD had been notified of two probable hijackings in the
previous five minutes. If there was such a thing as a system-wide air
defense crisis plan, it should have kicked in at that moment. Three
minutes later, at 8:46, Flight 11 crashed into the first WTC tower. By
then alerts should have been going out to all regional air traffic
centers of apparent coordinated hijackings in progress. Yet when Flight
77, which eventually crashed into the Pentagon, was hijacked three
minutes later, at 8:46, NORAD claims not to have learned of it until
9:24, 38 minutes after the fact and just 13 minutes before it crashed
into the Pentagon.
The professed lag in reacting to the hijacking of Flight 93 is just as
striking. NORAD acknowledged learning of the hijacking at 9:16, yet the
Pentagon's position is that it had not yet intercepted the plane when it
crashed in a Pennsylvania field just minutes away from Washington, D.C.
at 10:06, a full 50 minutes later.
In fact, there are a couple of other circumstantial details of the
crash, discussed mostly in Pennsylvania newspapers and barely noted in
national wire stories, that suggest Flight 93 may have been shot down
after all. First, officials never disputed reports that there was a
secondary debris field six miles from the main crash site, and a few
press accounts said that it included one of the plane's engines. A
secondary debris field points to an explosion on board, from one of two
probable causes--a terrorist bomb carried on board or an Air Force
missile. And no investigation has ever intimated that any of the four
terror crews were toting explosives. They kept to simple tools like the
box cutters, for ease in passing security. Second, a handful of
eyewitnesses in the rural area around the crash site did report seeing
low-flying U.S. military jets around the time of the crash.
Which only raises another question. Shooting down Flight 93 would have
been incontestably the right thing to do under the circumstances. More
than that, it would have constituted the only evidence of anything NORAD
and the Pentagon had done right that whole morning. So why deny it?
Conversely, if fighter jets really were not on the scene when 93
crashed, why weren't they? How could that possibly be?
16) The Bush administration had a plan for restoring essential services
and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the shooting war ended.
The question of what the U.S. would do to rebuild Iraq was raised before
the shooting started. I remember reading a press briefing in which a
Pentagon official boasted that at the time, the American reconstruction
team had already spent three weeks planning the postwar world! The
Pentagon's first word was that the essentials of rebuilding the country
would take about $10 billion and three months; this stood in fairly
stark contrast to UN estimates that an aggressive rebuilding program
could cost up to $100 billion a year for a minimum of three years.
After the shooting stopped it was evident the U.S. had no plan for
keeping order in the streets, much less commencing to rebuild. (They are
upgrading certain oil facilities, but that's another matter.) There are
two ways to read this. The popular version is that it proves what
bumblers Bush and his crew really are. And it's certainly true that
where the details of their grand designs are concerned, the
administration tends to have postures rather than plans. But this
ignores the strategic advantages the U.S. stands to reap by leaving
Iraqi domestic affairs in a chronic state of (managed, they hope) chaos.
Most important, it provides an excuse for the continued presence of a
large U.S. force, which ensures that America will call the shots in
putting Iraqi oil back on the world market and seeing to it that the
Iraqis don't fall in with the wrong sort of oil company partners. A long
military occupation is also a practical means of accomplishing something
the U.S. cannot do officially, which is to maintain air bases in Iraq
indefinitely. (This became necessary after the U.S. agreed to vacate its
bases in Saudi Arabia earlier this year to try to defuse anti-U.S.
political tensions there.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to pay for whatever rebuilding it gets around
to doing with the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales, an enormous cash box the
U.S. will oversee for the good of the Iraqi people.
In other words, "no plan" may have been the plan the Bushmen were intent
on pursuing all along.
17) The U.S. has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in Iraq during
the postwar period.
"Some [looters] shot big grins at American soldiers and Marines or put
down their prizes to offer a thumbs-up or a quick finger across the
throat and a whispered word--Saddam--before grabbing their loot and
vanishing."
--Robert Fisk, London Independent, 4/11/03
Despite the many clashes between U.S. troops and Iraqis in the three
months since the heavy artillery fell silent, the postwar performance of
U.S. forces has been more remarkable for the things they have not
done--their failure to intervene in civil chaos or to begin
reestablishing basic civil procedures. It isn't the soldiers' fault.
Traditionally an occupation force is headed up by military police units
schooled to interact with the natives and oversee the restoration of
goods and services. But Rumsfeld has repeatedly declined advice to
rotate out the combat troops sooner rather than later and replace some
of them with an MP force. Lately this has been a source of escalating
criticism within military ranks.
18) Despite vocal international opposition, the U.S. was backed by most
of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member Coalition of the Willing.
When the whole world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the outcry was
so loud that it briefly pierced the slumber of the American public,
which poured out its angst in poll numbers that bespoke little taste for
a war without the UN's blessing. So it became necessary to assure the
folks at home that the whole world was in fact for the invasion. Thus
was born the Coalition of the Willing, consisting of the U.S. and UK,
with Australia caddying--and 40-some additional co-champions of
U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, whose ranks included such
titans of diplomacy and pillars of representative government as Angola,
Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, and Micronesia. If the American public
noticed the ruse, all was nonetheless forgotten when Baghdad fell.
Everybody loves a winner.
19) This war was notable for its protection of civilians.
This from the Herald of Scotland, May 23: "American guns, bombs, and
missiles killed more civilians in the recent war in Iraq than in any
conflict since Vietnam, according to preliminary assessments carried out
by the UN, international aid agencies, and independent study groups.
Despite U.S. boasts this was the fastest, most clinical campaign in
military history, a first snapshot of 'collateral damage' indicates that
between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi non-combatants died in the course of the
hi-tech blitzkrieg."
20) The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad was
unanticipated.
General Jay Garner himself, then the head man for postwar Iraq, told the
Washington Times that he had put the Iraqi National Museum second on a
list of sites requiring protection after the fall of the Saddam
government, and he had no idea why the recommendation was ignored. It's
also a matter of record that the administration had met in January with
a group of U.S. scholars concerned with the preservation of Iraq's
fabulous Sumerian antiquities. So the war planners were aware of the
riches at stake. According to Scotland's Sunday Herald, the Pentagon
took at least one other meeting as well: "[A] coalition of antiquities
collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for
Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with U.S. Defense and State department
officials prior to the start of military action to offer its
assistance.... The group is known to consist of a number of influential
dealers who favor a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the
ownership and export of antiquities.... [Archaeological Institute of
America] president Patty Gerstenblith said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to
encourage the collecting of antiquities through weakening the laws of
archaeologically rich nations and eliminate national ownership of
antiquities to allow for easier export.'"
21) Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups.
This is very concisely debunked in Walter Pincus's July 21 Washington
Post story, so I'll quote him: "'Iraq could decide on any given day to
provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or
individual terrorists,' President Bush said in Cincinnati on October
7.... But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time
of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that
possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating
October 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that
Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing
death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military
attack by the United States."
22) Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological attack in
45 minutes.
Again the WashPost wraps it up nicely: "The 45-minute claim is at the
center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on
Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the
government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was
being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of
a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public
'dossier' on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime
Minister Tony Blair--and against the wishes of British intelligence,
which said the charge was from a single source and was considered
unreliable."
23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable Palestinian state.
The interests of the U.S. toward the Palestinians have not changed--not
yet, at least. Israel's "security needs" are still the U.S.'s sturdiest
pretext for its military role in policing the Middle East and arming its
Israeli proxies. But the U.S.'s immediate needs have tilted since the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the Bushmen need a fig leaf--to
confuse, if not exactly cover, their designs, and to give shaky pro-U.S.
governments in the region some scrap to hold out to their own restive
peoples. Bush's roadmap has scared the hell out of the Israeli right,
but they have little reason to worry. Press reports in the U.S. and
Israel have repeatedly telegraphed the assurance that Bush won't try to
push Ariel Sharon any further than he's comfortable going.
24) People detained by the U.S. after 9/11 were legitimate terror suspects.
Quite the contrary, as disclosed officially in last month's critical
report on U.S. detainees from the Justice Department's own Office of
Inspector General. A summary analysis of post-9/11 detentions posted at
the UC-Davis website states, "None of the 1,200 foreigners arrested and
detained in secret after September 11 was charged with an act of
terrorism. Instead, after periods of detention that ranged from weeks to
months, most were deported for violating immigration laws. The
government said that 752 of 1,200 foreigners arrested after September 11
were in custody in May 2002, but only 81 were still in custody in
September 2002."
25) The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment of
terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees.
The entire mumbo-jumbo about "unlawful combatants" was conceived to
skirt the Geneva conventions on treatment of prisoners by making them
out to be something other than POWs. Here is the actual wording of
Donald Rumsfeld's pledge, freighted with enough qualifiers to make it
absolutely meaningless: "We have indicated that we do plan to, for the
most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with the
Geneva conventions to the extent they are appropriate." Meanwhile the
administration has treated its prisoners--many of whom, as we are now
seeing confirmed in legal hearings, have no plausible connection to
terrorist enterprises--in a manner that blatantly violates several key
Geneva provisions regarding humane treatment and housing.
26) Shots rang out from the Palestine hotel, directed at U.S. soldiers,
just before a U.S. tank fired on the hotel, killing two journalists.
Eyewitnesses to the April 8 attack uniformly denied any gunfire from the
hotel. And just two hours prior to firing on the hotel, U.S. forces had
bombed the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera, killing a Jordanian reporter.
Taken together, and considering the timing, they were deemed a warning
to unembedded journalists covering the fall of Baghdad around them. The
day's events seem to have been an extreme instance of a more
surreptitious pattern of hostility demonstrated by U.S. and UK forces
toward foreign journalists and those non-attached Western reporters who
moved around the country at will. (One of them, Terry Lloyd of Britain's
ITN, was shot to death by UK troops at a checkpoint in late March under
circumstances the British government has refused to disclose.)
Some days after firing on the Palestine Hotel, the U.S. sent in a
commando unit to raid select floors of the hotel that were known to be
occupied by journalists, and the news gatherers were held on the floor
at gunpoint while their rooms were searched. A Centcom spokesman later
explained cryptically that intelligence reports suggested there were
people "not friendly to the U.S." staying at the hotel. Allied forces
also bombed the headquarters of Abu Dhabi TV, injuring several.
27) U.S. troops "rescued" Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital.
If I had wanted to run up the tally of administration lies, the Lynch
episode alone could be parsed into several more. Officials claimed that
Lynch and her comrades were taken after a firefight in which Lynch
battled back bravely. Later they announced with great fanfare that U.S.
Special Forces had rescued Lynch from her captors. They reported that
she had been shot and stabbed. Later yet, they reported that the
recuperating Lynch had no memory of the events.
Bit by bit it all proved false. Lynch's injuries occurred when the
vehicle she was riding in crashed. She did not fire on anybody and she
was not shot or stabbed. The Iraqi soldiers who had been holding her had
abandoned the hospital where she was staying the night before U.S.
troops came to get her--a development her "rescuers" were aware of. In
fact her doctor had tried to return her to the Americans the previous
evening after the Iraqi soldiers left. But he was forced to turn back
when U.S. troops fired on the approaching ambulance. As for Lynch's
amnesia, her family has told reporters her memory is perfectly fine.
28) The populace of Baghdad and of Iraq generally turned out en masse to
greet U.S. troops as liberators.
There were indeed scattered expressions of thanks when U.S. divisions
rolled in, but they were neither as extensive nor as enthusiastic as
Bush image-makers pretended. Within a day or two of the Saddam
government's fall, the scene in the Baghdad streets turned to wholesale
ransacking and vandalism. Within the week, large-scale protests of the
U.S. occupation had already begun occurring in every major Iraqi city.
29) A spontaneous crowd of cheering Iraqis showed up in a Baghdad square
to celebrate the toppling of Saddam's statue.
A long-distance shot of the same scene that was widely posted on the
internet shows that the teeming mob consisted of only one or two hundred
souls, contrary to the impression given by all the close-up TV news
shots of what appeared to be a massive gathering. It was later reported
that members of Ahmed Chalabi's local entourage made up most of the throng.
30) No major figure in the Bush administration said that the Iraqi
populace would turn out en masse to welcome the U.S. military as liberators.
When confronted with--oh, call them reality deficits--one habit of the
Bushmen is to deny that they made erroneous or misleading statements to
begin with, secure in the knowledge that the media will rarely muster
the energy to look it up and call them on it. They did it when their
bold prewar WMD predictions failed to pan out (We never said it would be
easy! No, they only implied it), and they did it when the "jubilant
Iraqis" who took to the streets after the fall of Saddam turned out to
be anything but (We never promised they would welcome us with open arms!).
But they did. March 16, Dick Cheney, Meet the Press: The Iraqis are
desperate "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as
liberators the United States when we come to do that.... [T]he vast
majority of them would turn on [Saddam] in a minute if, in fact, they
thought they could do so safely").
31) The U.S. achieved its stated objectives in Afghanistan, and
vanquished the Taliban.
According to accounts in the Asia Times of Hong Kong, the U.S. held a
secret meeting earlier this year with Taliban leaders and Pakistani
intelligence officials to offer a deal to the Taliban for inclusion in
the Afghan government. (Main condition: Dump Mullah Omar.) As Michael
Tomasky commented in The American Prospect, "The first thing you may be
wondering: Why is there a possible role for the Taliban in a future
government? Isn't that fellow Hamid Karzai running things, and isn't it
all going basically okay? As it turns out, not really and not at all....
The reality... is an escalating guerilla war in which 'small hit-and-run
attacks are a daily feature in most parts of the country, while
face-to-face skirmishes are common in the former Taliban stronghold
around Kandahar in the south.'"
32) Careful science demonstrates that depleted uranium is no big risk to
the population.
Pure nonsense. While the government has trotted out expert after expert
to debunk the dangers of depleted uranium, DU has been implicated in
health troubles experienced both by Iraqis and by U.S. and allied
soldiers in the first Gulf War. Unexploded DU shells are not a grave
danger, but detonated ones release particles that eventually find their
way into air, soil, water, and food.
While we're on the subject, the BBC reported a couple of months ago that
recent tests of Afghani civilians have turned up with unusually high
concentrations of non-depleted uranium isotopes in their urine.
International monitors have called it almost conclusive evidence that
the U.S. used a new kind of uranium-laced bomb in the Afghan war.
33) The looting of Iraqi nuclear facilities presented no big risk to the
population.
Commanders on the scene, and Rumsfeld back in Washington, immediately
assured everyone that the looting of a facility where raw uranium powder
(so-called "yellowcake") and several other radioactive isotopes were
stored was no serious danger to the populace--yet the looting of the
facility came to light in part because, as the Washington Times noted,
"U.S. and British newspaper reports have suggested that residents of the
area were suffering from severe ill health after tipping out yellowcake
powder from barrels and using them to store food."
34) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon a crowd of
civilian protesters in Mosul.
April 15: U.S. troops fire into a crowd of protesters when it grows
angry at the pro-Western speech being given by the town's new mayor,
Mashaan al-Juburi. Seven are killed and dozens injured. Eyewitness
accounts say the soldiers spirit Juburi away as he is pelted with
objects by the crowd, then take sniper positions and begin firing on the
crowd.
35) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon two separate
crowds of civilian protesters in Fallujah.
April 28: American troops fire into a crowd of demonstrators gathered on
Saddam's birthday, killing 13 and injuring 75. U.S. commanders claim the
troops had come under fire, but eyewitnesses contradict the account,
saying the troops started shooting after they were spooked by warning
shots fired over the crowd by one of the Americans' own Humvees. Two
days later U.S. soldiers fired on another crowd in Fallujah, killing
three more.
36) The Iraqis fighting occupation forces consist almost entirely of
"Saddam supporters" or "Ba'ath remnants."
This has been the subject of considerable spin on the Bushmen's part in
the past month, since they launched Operation Sidewinder to capture or
kill remaining opponents of the U.S. occupation. It's true that the most
fierce (but by no means all) of the recent guerrilla opposition has been
concentrated in the Sunni-dominated areas that were Saddam's stronghold,
and there is no question that Saddam partisans are numerous there. But,
perhaps for that reason, many other guerrilla fighters have flocked
there to wage jihad, both from within and without Iraq. Around the time
of the U.S. invasion, some 10,000 or so foreign fighters had crossed
into Iraq, and I've seen no informed estimate of how many more may have
joined them since.
(No room here, but if you check the online version of this story,
there's a footnote regarding one less-than-obvious reason former
Republican Guard personnel may be fighting mad at this point.)
37) The bidding process for Iraq rebuilding contracts displayed no
favoritism toward Bush and Cheney's oil/gas cronies.
Most notoriously, Dick Cheney's former energy-sector employer,
Halliburton, was all over the press dispatches about the first round of
rebuilding contracts. So much so that they were eventually obliged to
bow out of the running for a $1 billion reconstruction contract for the
sake of their own PR profile. But Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown
Root still received the first major plum in the form of a $7 billion
contract to tend to oil field fires and (the real purpose) to do any
retooling necessary to get the oil pumping at a decent rate, a deal that
allows them a cool $500 million in profit. The fact that Dick Cheney's
office is still fighting tooth and nail to block any disclosure of the
individuals and companies with whom his energy task force consulted
tells everything you need to know.
38) "We found the WMDs!"
There have been at least half a dozen junctures at which the Bushmen
have breathlessly informed the press that allied troops had found the
WMD smoking gun, including the president himself, who on June 1 told
reporters, "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing
devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
Shouldn't these quickly falsified statements be counted as errors rather
than lies? Under the circumstances, no. First, there is just too
voluminous a record of the administration going on the media offensive
to tout lines they know to be flimsy. This appears to be more of same.
Second, if the great genius Karl Rove and the rest of the Bushmen have
demonstrated that they understand anything about the propaganda
potential of the historical moment they've inherited, they surely
understand that repetition is everything. Get your message out
regularly, and even if it's false a good many people will believe it.
Finally, we don't have to speculate about whether the administration
would really plant bogus WMD evidence in the American media, because
they have already done it, most visibly in the case of Judith Miller of
the New York Times and the Iraqi defector "scientist" she wrote about at
the military's behest on April 21. Miller did not even get to speak with
the purported scientist, but she graciously passed on several things
American commanders claimed he said: that Iraq only destroyed its
chemical weapons days before the war, that WMD materiel had been shipped
to Syria, and that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda. As Slate media critic Jack
Shafer told WNYC Radio's On the Media program, "When you... look at [her
story], you find that it's gas, it's air. There's no way to judge the
value of her information, because it comes from an unnamed source that
won't let her verify any aspect of it. And if you dig into the story...
you'll find out that the only thing that Miller has independently
observed is a man that the military says is the scientist, wearing a
baseball cap, pointing at mounds in the dirt."
39) "The Iraqi people are now free."
So says the current U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, in a
recent New York Times op-ed. He failed to add that disagreeing can get
you shot or arrested under the terms of the Pentagon's latest plan for
pacifying Iraq, Operation Sidewinder (see #36), a military op launched
last month to wipe out all remaining Ba'athists and Saddam
partisans--meaning, in practice, anyone who resists the U.S. occupation
too zealously.
40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.
Not long after the September 11 attacks, neoconservative high priest
Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One hears that Bush, who entered the White
House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels
there was a purpose behind his election all along; as a born-again
Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the
evil of terrorism from the world."
No, he really believes it, or so he would like us to think. The
Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz that Bush made the following pronouncement during a recent
meeting between the two: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck
them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and
now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
Oddly, it never got much play back home.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This was truly a collaborative effort from start to finish. It began
with the notion of running a week-long marathon of Bush administration
lies at my online Bush Wars column (bushwarsblog.com). Along the way my
e-mail box delivered more research assistance than I've ever received on
any single story. I need to thank Jeff St. Clair and the Counterpunch
website (counterpunch.org), which featured the Lies marathon in addition
to posting valuable reportage and essays every day; I also received lots
of lies entries and documentary links from BW readers Rob Johnson, Ted
Dibble, and Donna Johnson, as well as my colleagues Mark Gisleson,
Elaine Cassel, Sally Ryan, Mike Mosedale, and Paul Demko. Dave Marsh
provided valuable editing suggestions.
I also found loads of valuable information through Cursor and Buzzflash,
the two best news links pages on the internet, and through research
projects on the Bushmen posted at Cooperative Research
(cooperativeresearch.org), Whiskey Bar (billmon.org), and tvnewslies.org.
But the heart of the effort was all the readers of Bush Wars who sent
along ideas and links that advanced the project. Many thanks to Estella
Bloomberg, Vince Bradley, Angela Bradshaw, Gary Burns, Elaine Cole,
George Dobosh, Deborah Eddy, David Erickson, Casey Finne, Douglas Gault,
Jean T. Gordon, Doug Henwood, George Hunsinger, Peter Lee, Eric Martin,
Michael McFadden, George McLaughlin, Eric T. Olson, Doug Payne, Alan W.
Peck, Dennis Perrin, Charles Prendergast, Publius, Michele Quinn,
Ernesto Resnik, Ed Rickert, Maritza Silverio, Marshall Smith, Robert
David Steele, Ed Thornhill, Christopher Veal, and Jennifer Vogel. And my
apologies to anyone else whose e-mails I didn't manage to save.
Editor's note: In the interest of relative brevity I've stinted on
citing and quoting sources in some of the items below. You can find
links to news stories that elaborate on each of these items at my online
Bush Wars column.
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