Bush* told many lies about WMD and Iraq...

[Q]

- The Niger connection is just the tip of the iceberg. Soon it will become clear that little or nothing Bush* said about Iraq (and 9-11) was true and that he used fear and memories of 9-11 to push this nation into an illegal invasion. Worse yet...Bush* knew that Iraq wasn't a threat and had been disarmed...but still unnecessarily used 'shock and awe' to slaughter an untold number of civilians.


Bush's deceptions on Iraq intelligence

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 6/6/2003

Excerpts:

WITH SUCH empty hands after the battle, President Bush is losing the war for his honor. The primary pretext for his unprecedented first-strike war was that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had the most horrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction on earth.

Last summer, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said ''there is no doubt'' and ''there's just no question'' that Hussein had the weapons. Bush turned up the rhetoric in September. ''For the sake of your children's future,'' Bush said, ''we must make sure this madman never has the capacity to hurt us with a nuclear weapon, or to use the stockpiles of anthrax that we know he has, or VX, the biological weapons which he possesses.''

Greg Thielmann, a recently retired State Department analyst who could not believe that Bush would use ''that stupid piece of garbage'' to make his case, told Newsweek, ''There is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused.''

A Central Command planner told Newsweek that the CIA's information on the sites where weapons of mass destruction were stored was ''crap.'' An intelligence official told US News and World Report that ''the policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day.''

Time quoted a senior military official who helped plan the war in Iraq but quit after seeing the White House exaggerate bad intelligence. Time also quoted an Army intelligence officer who said Rumsfeld ''was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence.''

David Albright, a former Atomic Energy Agency arms inspector, said the White House ''deliberately selected information that would increase the perception that Iraq was a serious threat'' and ''made a decision to turn a blind eye'' to the evidence that ''the large number of deployed chemical weapons the administration said that Iraq had are not there.''

Patrick Lang, a former CIA analyst on Iraq, has said intelligence was ''exploited and abused and bypassed'' by the White House. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-terrorism operations, said many intelligence officials ''believe it is a scandal.''

If Bush cannot shoulder the burden of truth, his disgrace should be one that makes Bill Clinton's lust a footnote in history and Richard Nixon's tapes a petty larceny of democracy. The denial and deception of President Bush ended in debauchery and death. - Continues: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/157/oped/Bush_s_deceptions_on_Iraq_intelligenceP.shtml

[gratuitous]

1. This article's over a month old . . .

But as timely as tomorrow's New York Times front page. The uranium deception is indeed just one little piece, and a pretty small one at that. Make no mistake, I'm happy the press has gotten wind of any of this corrupt administration's lies, but this one is pretty paltry.

The real big lies, the unequivocal "Saddam has this" or "Saddam has that" lies are still just waiting to be uncovered, like Easter eggs. This administration told a lot of tall tales in order to justify their imperial oil grab; and one leads to another, just as surely as one clue leads to the murderer in a mystery novel.

Come Watson, the game's afoot!