Tuesday, December 13, 2005
The Big Lie
This is not a joke.
This is the front of the Daily Mirror, one of the top four newspapers in the U.K. It has the same circulation as the Wall Street Journal, a little over 2 million.
Take a good look, America. Take a good, long fucking look. This is your guy. This is the leadership you wanted. This is the smirking, stuttering, twitchy, arrogant, aggressive, duplicitous man you’ve had a close-up view of for four years and you just couldn’t get enough. This is your leader. He believes Independent Design should be taught in schools. He doubts the existence of global warming. He mocked a woman on death row. He relaxed air standards on polluters and called it “Clear Skies.” He let loggers log on Federal Lands and called it “Healthy Forests.” He cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy. He destroyed the surplus and exploded the national debt. He invaded Iraq and went “whoops, guess there weren’t any WMDs here. Well, we’re here so we have to finish the job, right? Let’s not look backwards. Let’s go forwards.”
No. Let’s look backwards. I insist. Let’s find out why the rest of the world thinks we’re fucking nuts. Let’s see why the rest of the world is pretty sure Dubya lied about Iraq and knew it. Let’s find out how eager Scotty McClellan is to go forward when Congress wants to go forward with an impeachment.
The aluminum tubes. Colin Powell was briefed about these tubes. The CIA told him they were for nukes. The IAEA and the Department of Energy disagreed. The Administration went with the CIA.
Yellowcake uranium for Niger. These allegations were found, by February 2002, to be baseless by both the CIA and the State Department. The deputy commander of U.S. Armed Forces Europe, Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford, the U.S. ambassador to Europe, and Joe Wilson all investigated the Niger uranium story and found it to be unlikely. Stephen Hadley, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice who replaced her as national security advisor and worked the closest with the Office of Special Plans, received a memo and a phone call from the George Tenet, DCI, in October 2002 before Bush’s State of the Union address warning him to remove reference to the Niger uranium information because it was bad. Hadley “forgot” and Bush used the reference in the speech. Then Hadley must have “forgot” again because he himself referenced the bad information in a Chicago Tribune opinion article a few weeks later. The Bush Administration continues to maintain that there were British sources who indicated that Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger, none of which were ever cited specifically by the Bush Administration or the Butler Report, which nevertheless maintains that Iraq was five years away from obtaining a nuclear device if all UN sanctions were to be lifted immediately.
Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose testimony was “the principal basis,” in the words of a Newsweek report, of the administration’s claims that Al Qaeda was working in and with Iraq, was full of shit and everyone knew it. The Defense Intelligence Agency report in February 2002 concluded that he was “intentionally misleading the debriefers.” A January 2003 CIA report came to the same conclusion. The Bush Administration used the bad information anyway, including specifically referencing al-Libi in Colin Powell’s address to the UN Security Council in February of 2003.
Curveball. “Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year,” reported the L.A. Times. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts told NBC's Tim Russert that "Curveball really provided 98 percent of the assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological weapon." The U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s WMD programs was largely based on this informant’s testimony while in German custody. The L.A. Times reports the German intelligence (BND) people who worked with him considered his testimony suspect. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst. The story continues, “More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds. The most important, a former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a liar by the CIA and DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S. intelligence databases.” The controversial October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was based "largely on information from a single source — Curveball," the presidential commission (Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction) concluded. On February 8th, 2003, U.N. Team Bravo raided one of Curveball’s sites and found out his description of the site was unambiguously false.
The creation of the OSP. The Office of Special Plans (“Special” as in “Special Olympics”) was headed by Douglas Feith, a neoconservative militant with close ties to Israel. The office’s job was to sort through information and find the stuff that implicated Iraq and use it, or at least look at it really, really hard after the CIA had discarded it and make really, really sure there might not be a tiny little kernel of truth to it.
His law office does most of its business with Israel. Feith has advocated a hard line in Israeli positions as consistent with her “moral superiority” over the Arabs. For instance, he criticized the Camp David Accords because they required Israel to weaken itself by surrendering “Judea and Samaria” to the Arabs.
This guy is an old-school Biblical zealot convinced of the racial superiority of Israelites as related to him personally by the Living God in a little tête-à-tête he just had with the big guy in a tent in the Sinai Desert.
According to Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack Gen. Tommy Franks called Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” referring to bad intelligence he fed the military.
The BBC reported in March of 2005 that “The Bush Administration made plans for war and for Iraq’s oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC’s Newsnight has revealed.” The Guardian Unlimited reported in July of 2003 that “[the OSP] surveyed data and picked out what they liked,” quoting Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department’s intelligence bureau. “Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to talk about it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended.”
The American Prospect reported in its November 2005 issue that, “based on two-dozen interviews with former intelligence officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department…From 2001 on, [the CIA’s] covert operatives were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line.”
In the first few days of October of 2005 President Bush said on his Saturday radio address that Iraq had 100 battalions of battle-ready soldiers. By the following Thursday, in his television address, it was 80 battalions. The very next day, General George Casey, who oversees US forces in Iraq, said that there was only one battalion ready to fight independently of US forces.
George “Slam Dank” Tenet oversaw a CIA program that supposedly told the president there were WMDs in Iraq. All of the evidence was wrong. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom a year later.
Paul Bremer, the master of the Coalition Provisional Authority that “lost” 9 billion in Iraqi reconstruction money and an unknown amount of oil that was pumped out of Iraq’s wells while the meters were broken, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom a year later.
ABC polling shows that a solid majority of people believe Bush intentionally misled the country about Iraq, and Ipsos and Zogby polling in November of 2005 showed that, by a margin of 53% to 42%, George W. Bush should be impeached if he lied about the war in Iraq.
Oh, but the Republicans have no problem with the status quo. Let’s get a little selection of what they said about a far smaller conflict and one in which we had the support of NATO (Kosovo):
President Clinton is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces aout how long they will be away from home.
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)
If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.
Karen Hughes speaking for George W. Bush
You can support the troops but not the president.
Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)
I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.
Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)
Do you think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo.
Tony Snow, FOX News, 3/24/99
And other great quotes here.
This president is a bungler and a war criminal and a bad liar. His stooges in congress are blood-soaked hypocrites. This dry-drunk was convinced Iraq had a nuclear weapons program because of unnamed sources, and he was dead-sure Iraq had chemical or biological weapons, because British and American intelligence told him Saddam was being evasive and if he had a program he could have biological or chemical weapons within weeks.
That’s because chemical weapon technology is WWI stuff that Botswana could manufacture. Nerve agents are WWII technology that is similarly easy to manufacture. Any intelligence estimate of any nation on earth could end with “nerve agents might be created within weeks of the start of a chemical weapons program.”
The bottom line is that the U.S. and British governments had nothing. Bush deliberately used bad intelligence to justify a war he had long ago decided was necessary. For this he should be impeached.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 9:51 PM 
