WSWS: The Iraq war and the debate on phony intelligence

[RichM]

A top-notch incisive analysis. It develops the idea that making YellowCakeGate the object of so much attention is really an attempt to frame the discussion narrowly, to block the many other lies from being widely appreciated.

Excerpt:
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The debate touched off by the admission that Bush’s State of the Union address included a false report of an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium has something of a surreal character. There is an intense effort on the part of the media and the political establishment to frame the controversy within absurdly narrow and superficial parameters.

Bush’s lie about Iraq and African uranium is one of scores the Bush administration told to the American people about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in order to terrorize the population and concoct a casus belli. But the official debate seeks to ignore the web of lies and instead focus on this one speech, with the emphasis on a supposed intelligence “breakdown” or lapse in communications that led to the insertion of the by now infamous 16 words into last January’s address to Congress.

“Was the president misled? How could it happen, and who is responsible?” Such is the general tenor of the debate. The public is to believe that the politicians and media pundits are in a state of shock and bewilderment over the acknowledgement that the president made a misleading assertion in the course of his drumbeat for war.

There is a degree of hypocrisy at work here that is remarkable, even by the standards of American politics....

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/iraq-j19.shtml

[IndianaGreen]

1. Bush told several lies, including the one about the Al-Qaeda ties

Bush told several lies, including the one about the Al-Qaeda ties to Saddam.

Here is another one:

Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds

Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday June 15, 2003
The Observer

An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.

The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.

Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'

<snip>

The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,977853,00.html

[OneBlueSky]

2. to the articles questions about 9/11, one might add . . .

how did two tall buildings, hit by jetliners near their top floors, manage to essentially dissolve into their own footprints within an hour of one another in an identical manner?

how did a jetliner that supposedly hit the Pentagon manage to leave a hole no larger than a bay window in the building's wall? (see DOD photographs of the Pentagon before the wall collapsed)

how did an engine of a jetliner that supposedly crashed in Pennsylvania with no outside assistance end up in a lake five miles from the crash site?

and, most importantly, will the 9/11 commission address any of these issues or (as I suspect) simply ignore them?

just wonderin' . . .