Thursday, November 26, 2009
Everyone Knew that Iraq Didn't Have WMDs
Everyone knew the WMD claims were fake. For example, Tony Blair - the British Prime Minister - knew that Saddam possessed no WMDs. If America's closest ally Britain knew, then the White House knew as well.
And the number 2 Democrat in the Senate -who was on the Senate intelligence committee - admitted that the Senate intelligence committee knew before the war started that Bush's public statements about Iraqi WMDs were false. If the committee knew, then the White House knew as well.
But we don't even have to use logic to be able to conclude that the White House knew.
Specifically, the former highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe says that Bush, Cheney and Rice were personally informed that Iraq had no WMDs in Fall 2002 (and see this).
Former Treasury Secretary O’Neil - who was a member of the National Security Council - said:
In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction.The CIA warned the White House that claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions (using forged documents) were false, and yet the White House made those claims anyway.
Indeed, a former high-level CIA analyst (who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials) says that falsified documents which were meant to show that Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime had been trying to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger can be traced back to Dick Cheney, and that:
CIA Director George Tenet told his "coterie of malleable managers" at the CIA to create a National Intelligence Estimate "to the terms of reference of Dick Cheney's speech of August 26, 2002, where Dick Cheney said for the first time Saddam Hussein could have a nuclear weapon in a year, he's got all kinds of chemical, he's got all kinds of biological weapons."Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind says:
Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official "that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion."The Washington Post reports that a secret, fact-finding team of scientists and engineers sponsored by the Pentagon determined in May 2003 that two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops were not evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program. The nine-member team “transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003.” Despite having authoritative evidence that the biological laboratories claim was false, the administration continued to repeat the myth over the next four months.
A British official said that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.
In January 2004, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report on WMDS in Iraq concluded that the evidence prior to the war indicated that Iraq’s nuclear program had been dismantled and its chemical weapons had lost most of their lethality. In addition, the report concluded that the administration “systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile programs”.
Fool Me Once ...
In addition, it is a well-understood principle that if someone has been caught in a lie, we are less likely to believe him. For example, a witness who is caught in a lie during trial is unlikely to be believed by the jury when he makes another statement.
Well, Cheney and other high-level White House officials repeatedly implied that Saddam and Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11, when they knew that wasn't true.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 ... and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
The government also spied on American citizens (even before 9/11 ... confirmed here and here), while saying "we don't spy".
And the government tortured prisoners in Iraq, but said "we don't torture".
In other words, high-level officials in the administration were caught in repeated untruths, and so their statements about believing good faith that Iraq had WMDs is less believable.
What Really Happened?
But if the White House knew that Iraq didn't have any WMDs, why did we go to war in Iraq?
Well, several very high-profile figures have said it was for the oil. See this, this, this. and this.
Perhaps Tom Brokaw says it most simply:
All wars on based on propaganda.If you still believe that the government invaded Iraq due to WMDs or links to terrorists, this is why.
15 comments:
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The same nonsense is going on with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It is being continually said that they are allies, when it is not true. They really dislike each other. That the Taliban would not turn over bin Laden to the US was not because they were friends, but because they were not willing to accede to the Evil One's demand.
ReplyDeleteYou would think that a president educated at Harvard with a degree in constitutional law would indeed "look backward" regarding these matters. Revelations like these further damage Obama's credibility. 4365 dead american soldiers, over 20,000 wounded and $2T plus should warrant Mr. Obama's looking backwards.
ReplyDeleteI don't give a damn who knew what when. The important question is what happened to the constitution? It says our congress MUST vote for us to go to war. Who the hell gave the United Nations authority to send our troops into harms way? Remember Bush saying we needed to invade on a UN mandate to prove they had the power to back up their words? If our congressmen do not have the testicular fortitude to vote YES or NO on war then the answer is no. On Afghanistan we should have destroyed the training bases (we paid to build them, fund them and set them up a few years back anyway) then brought our troops home. We must fire every congressman and senator, I would prefer to see most charged with treason they swear to "uphold the CONSTITUTION!" failure to do so is treason. Patriot act, FISA healthcare, bailouts, appointing Tzar's, usurping authority not grated to the federal arm of government. We created this government to secure our rights, and they are the ones violating our rights. Get off the couch and get active call your congressmen and vote against the incumbents! FIRE THEM ALL!
ReplyDeleteEven after many "conservatives" have finally conceded that war with Iraq was "unjustified", the new cover is that they STILL BLINDLY justify Bush by saying that "he did not intentionally lie about WMD"....it was an "error in intelligence".
ReplyDeleteNothing will ever change while Party or Personality loyalty trumps Principle and the Truth.
Oil, debt and the American way! We are sitting pretty on the worlds most abundant source of its most valuable resource! Go Ahead ASIA, EUROPE, try and make us pay you back your loans! How about worthless money? Don't like it? Deal with it. We got the good stuff, so shove off!
ReplyDeleteEvery country has the leadership it deserves
ReplyDeletemany U.S. citizens had serious doubts about the WMD story.
ReplyDeleteit is hard to know the truth about anything today.
God help us.
The word "admitted" in the second line of the second paragraph and which is for the Wa. Times article regarding Senator Durbin saying that the Bush administration knew in 2002 that Saddam Hussein did not possess WMD is not validly linked. It links to washtimes.com and is supposed to be washingtontimes.com. I just tried loading the link as it is in the second paragraph and the page couldn't be found, but believing you meant the Wa. Times article and seeming to recall it's the domain name just stated, I inserted the lacking part of the domain name and this works.
ReplyDeletehttp://washingtontimes.com/news/2007/apr/27/20070427-124842-1706r
Mike Corbeil
What's sad is there's an Iraqi who runs a corner store near my business. He said that life was great under Saddam. He lived in Baghad - it was a modern, clean city and people had lots of freedoms. Women were equal, lots of bars, etc..
ReplyDeleteOne angle that often gets overlooked though - the far-right Christian fundie contingent. I monitor those sorts of sites occasionally - the ones obsessed with Revelations, End Times, etc. and they cannot be underestimated when it comes to their lobbying clout in Washington - particularly under republican admnistrations. These fundamentalists were obsessed with Iraq - which they'd refer to as Babylon and claimed that Hussein claimed to be the reincarnation of that old biblical enemy King Nebuchadnezzar. For them, taking down Iraq is some part of their whole Armageddon teleology. Sure, oil and control of the Middle East is a part of it, but I think this bit also played a role. Some of the higher ups in the Bush admin were just plain effing nuts.
The fundie connection raises a good point: what one knows is only as much as what one believes. Religious people don't let facts confuse them in their faith, why would a little thing like evidence of no WMDs change their beliefs?
ReplyDeleteNobody should trust the government in its imperial activities. It is utterly reprehensible that the average American supports the budget of the Pentagon, but does not support publicly funded healthcare. Americans are brainwashed by big media. Television and newspapers failed America in the crucial run up to the war. Where were the courageous journalists and editors who stood against the administration? They did not exist.
ReplyDeletegoto www.wanttoknow.info
ReplyDeleteBest site on the net.....
"Who the hell gave the United Nations authority to send our troops into harms way?"- Delia Lopez
ReplyDeleteUmm no one? Why ask stupid questions?
The UN security council can authorise war, the US has a veto on this anyway but even if they forgot that fact, due to being mentally challenged, the simple fact that the UN security council has authorised use of force cannot make any of the member nations participate in any way, never mind actually sending equipment or soldiers to participate.
The usual US whine was who is the UN to say they cannot commit acts of violence, did you forget?
Hey "Washington": Your proctologist called. He found your head.
ReplyDeletehttp://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/no-lies-about-iraq/
i do not agree with this article.
ReplyDeletethe question of whether Saddam had WMDs was almost impossible to prove, its proving a negative. there was legitimate debate in many areas, including CIA, the media, and the anti-war movement.
your citation of the Iraqi intelligence chief (Habbush) is just hard to understand. why would one country believe the top spy of another country? Ron Suskind's book Way of the World is not primarily about how 'habbush was right', it was about how Habbush (and others) could have been valuable assets to the US intelligence groups, but instead the relationship was screwed up by the adminsitrations incompetence and its decision to go to war no matter what.
in an anti-war view, the WMD question was not the primary one, because how could you ever know? the more important question was what do you do with a guy like Saddam, who you can never be sure about? do you contain him, continue inspections, do flyovers, etc? or do you invade with hundreds of thousands of troops, bomb the cities, and have no exit plan?
alot of people seem to think that somehow, if Saddam did have WMDs, then the war would have been a good idea and OK. thats hard to understand too. we couldn't even stop looting, let alone take care of any possible WMDs. imagine if he had a few nukes stashed in bases across the country. we blow up his whole communications system, and kill all his leaders... where do the bombs go? they disappear into the black market, probably iranian intelligence, and then israel has to bomb iran , hello World War III.
imho a lot of people wish they had been against the war when they werent, and now they are trying to blame Cheney's PR machine instead of their own lack of appropriate skepticism. part of this wish is to act like the WMD question was black and white, as if somehow everyone knew the truth and lied about it, when it was in reality a gray area. you should have been against the war all along, WMDs or no WMDs. but you weren't. don't try to change history to suit your own guilt.