Backup for Downing Street Minutes -Send these articles around

cyberpj

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Wed Jun-08-05 10:18 AM
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Backup for Downing Street Minutes -Send these articles around

This is documented info to send to ALL congresspeople and news outlets to backup the information in the Downing Street Minutes.
Since Bush and Blair are brushing it off - let's keep it front and center.

(1) The Nation
posted June 1, 2005 (web only)

The Other Bomb Drops
Jeremy Scahill

The implications of this information for US lawmakers are profound. It was already well known in Washington and international diplomatic circles that the real aim of the US attacks in the no-fly zones was not to protect Shiites and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that while Congress debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to war, while Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing Iraq and while international diplomats scurried to broker an eleventh-hour peace deal, the Bush Administration was already in full combat mode--not just building the dossier of manipulated intelligence, as the Downing Street memo demonstrated, but acting on it by beginning the war itself. And according to the Sunday Times article, the Administration even hoped the attacks would push Saddam into a response that could be used to justify a war the Administration was struggling to sell.

On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003, Bush said in his national radio address: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force." Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic, aggressive bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being disarmed by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight individual, offensive airstrikes against Iraq in 2002 alone.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050613&s=scahill

AND this.......

(2) The clues are falling into place, pointing to the incontrovertible judgment that George W. Bush willfully misled the United States into invading Iraq, in part, by eliminating the possibility of the peaceful solution that he pretended to want.

Many of the clues have been apparent for three years � and some were reported in outlets such as our own Consortiumnews.com in real time � but only recently have new revelations clarified this obvious reality for the slow-witted mainstream U.S. news media.

The latest piece of the puzzle was reported by Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press in an article on June 4 describing how Bush�s Undersecretary of State John Bolton orchestrated the ouster of global arms control official Jose Bustani in early 2002 because Bustani�s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was making progress toward getting arms inspectors back into Iraq.

If Bustani had succeeded in gaining Iraq�s compliance with international inspection demands, Bush would have been denied his chief rationale for war, even before U.S. military divisions were deployed to the Persian Gulf. Bustani had made himself an obstacle to war, so he had to go.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/060605.html