[BRC-NEWS] The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism

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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0730-06.htm

The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
Bring 'em On!
by Steve Perry

Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by the Minneapolis City
Pages


1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11
onward.

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly
maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously,
that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the
opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and
concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own
mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush
popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in
March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against
Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily
waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him
out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for
international development, recently lent further credence to
the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair
made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of
2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld
aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes
indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge
whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not
only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up.
Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading
intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq.
He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the
record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin
Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on
September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the
forefront a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War
world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the
first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners,
led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense
Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took advantage
of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control
of the world both militarily and economically, to the point
where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge
the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call
"preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times,
subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the
basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true
believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New
American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they
all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W
never really embraced their plan until the events of September
11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat
to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence
evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass
destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq:
"The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the
main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for
bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were many other important
factors as well." Right. But they did not come under the
heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence:
They set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and
ignored everything that contradicted it. In the end, this
required that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the
findings of analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence
Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau) and stake their claim
largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal testimony from
handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But the
administration did not just listen to the defectors; it
promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting
public opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there
was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place
was that the Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these
sorts of claims to every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired
head of the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe
the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to
the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This
administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we
know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those
answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted as saying, "The
principal reasons that Americans did not understand the nature
of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure of senior
administration officials to speak honestly about what the
intelligence showed."

3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions,
and here is W's most notorious case in point: Once the
administration decided to issue a damage-controlling (they
hoped) mea culpa in the matter of African uranium, they were
obliged to couch it in another, more perilous lie: that the
administration, and quite likely Bush himself, thought the
uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting
ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York
Times on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled
to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the
behest of the CIA and Dick Cheney's office and found them to be
groundless, describes what followed this way: "Although I did
not file a written report, there should be at least four
documents in U.S. government archives confirming my mission.
The documents should include the ambassador's report of my
debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy
staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer
from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may
have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these
reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that
this is standard operating procedure."

4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was
just as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit
cagier in its formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us
that [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum
tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." This is
altogether false in its implication (that this is the likeliest
use for these materials) and may be untrue in its literal sense
as well. As the London Independent summed it up recently, "The
U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy
high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas
centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency
said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head
of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council
in January that the tubes were not even suitable for
centrifuges." [emphasis added]

5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for
the administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no
WMDs, but not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar
intelligence errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has
taken the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the
Uranium address. As the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote
shortly before the war, "Even as it prepares for war against
Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its
war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is
bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce
intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ...
Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to
be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured
to justify the push for war."

In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State
of the Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it
again.

7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that
Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear
weapons.

Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out
that no such report existed.

8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the
plotting of 9/11.

One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's
fibs, this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary
threads imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated,
handpicked Iraqi defectors that there was an al Qaeda training
camp in Iraq, a claim CIA analysts did not corroborate and that
postwar U.S. military inspectors conceded did not exist; and
second, old intelligence accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad
between a bin Laden emissary and officers from Saddam's
intelligence service, which did not lead to any subsequent
contact that U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up.
According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory
Thielman, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies well in
advance of the war was that "there was no significant pattern
of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist
operation."

9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as
anyone who has paid attention to the state of Arab popular
sentiment already realizes. Representative government in Iraq
would mean the rapid expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the
U.S. wants westernized, secular leadership regimes that will
stay in pocket and work to neutralize the politically ambitious
anti-Western religious sects popping up everywhere. If a little
brutality and graft are required to do the job, it has never
troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically, these standards
describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein. Judging from
the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush administration
will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and when
they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a
homegrown Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than
most people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed
choice to lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his
INC that funneled compliant defectors to the Bush
administration, where they attested to everything the Bushmen
wanted to believe about Saddam and Iraq (meaning, mainly, al
Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The administration
proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the combined
intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam
was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and
posed no imminent threat to anyone.

Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of
Langley, but it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi
National Congress and installed Chalabi at the helm back in the
days following Gulf War I, when the thought was to topple
Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an internal opposition. It
didn't work; from the start Iraqis have disliked and distrusted
Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous ways have
alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy
establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of
Defense, and therefore the White House.

11) The United States is waging a war on terror.

Practically any school child could recite the terms of the Bush
Doctrine, and may have to before the Ashcroft Justice
Department is finished: The global war on terror is about
confronting terrorist groups and the nations that harbor them.
The United States does not make deals with terrorists or
nations where they find safe lodging.

Leave aside the blind eye that the U.S. has always cast toward
Israel's actions in the territories. How are the Bushmen doing
elsewhere vis-à-vis their announced principles? We can start
with their fabrications and manipulations of Iraqi WMD
evidence--which, in the eyes of weapons inspectors, the UN
Security Council, American intelligence analysts, and the world
at large, did not pose any imminent threat.

The events of recent months have underscored a couple more
gaping violations of W's cardinal anti-terror rules. In April
the Pentagon made a cooperation pact with the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an anti-Iranian terrorist group based
in Iraq. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, American
intelligence blamed it for the death of several U.S. nationals
in Iran.

Most glaring of all is the Bush administration's remarkable
treatment of Saudi Arabia. Consider: Eleven of the nineteen
September 11 hijackers were Saudis. The ruling House of Saud
has longstanding and well-known ties to al Qaeda and other
terrorist outfits, which it funds (read protection money) to
keep them from making mischief at home. The May issue of
Atlantic Monthly had a nice piece on the House of Saud that
recounts these connections.

Yet the Bush government has never said boo regarding the Saudis
and international terrorism. In fact, when terror bombers
struck Riyadh in May, hitting compounds that housed American
workers as well, Colin Powell went out of his way to avoid
tarring the House of Saud: "Terrorism strikes everywhere and
everyone. It is a threat to the civilized world. We will commit
ourselves again to redouble our efforts to work closely with
our Saudi friends and friends all around the world to go after
al Qaeda." Later it was alleged that the Riyadh bombers
purchased some of their ordnance from the Saudi National Guard,
but neither Powell nor anyone else saw fit to revise their
statements about "our Saudi friends."

Why do the Bushmen give a pass to the Saudi terror hotbed?
Because the House of Saud controls a lot of oil, and they are
still (however tenuously) on our side. And that, not terrorism,
is what matters most in Bush's foreign policy calculus.

While the bomb craters in Riyadh were still smoking, W held a
meeting with Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Speaking publicly afterward, he outlined a deal for U.S.
military aid to the Philippines in exchange for greater
"cooperation" in getting American hands round the throats of
Filipino terrorists. He mentioned in particular the U.S.'s
longtime nemesis Abu Sayyaf--and he also singled out the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front, a small faction based on Mindanao,
the southernmost big island in the Philippine chain.

Of course it's by purest coincidence that Mindanao is the
location of Asia's richest oil reserves.

12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist
elements, in particular by crippling al Qaeda.

A resurgent al Qaeda has been making international news since
around the time of the Saudi Arabia bombings in May. The best
coverage by far is that of Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem
Shahzad. According to Shahzad's detailed accounts, al Qaeda has
reorganized itself along leaner, more diffuse lines,
effectively dissolving itself into a coalition of localized
units that mean to strike frequently, on a small scale, and in
multiple locales around the world. Since claiming
responsibility for the May Riyadh bombings, alleged al Qaeda
communiqués have also claimed credit for some of the strikes at
U.S. troops in Iraq.

13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from
terror on U.S. soil.

Like the Pentagon "plan" for occupying postwar Iraq, the
Department of Homeland Security is mainly a Bush administration
PR dirigible untethered to anything of substance. It's a
scandal waiting to happen, and the only good news for W is that
it's near the back of a fairly long line of scandals waiting to
happen.

On May 26 the trade magazine Federal Computer Week published a
report on DHS's first 100 days. At that point the nerve center
of Bush's domestic war on terror had only recently gotten
e-mail service. As for the larger matter of creating a
functioning organizational grid and, more important, a software
architecture plan for integrating the enormous mass of data
that DHS is supposed to process--nada. In the nearly two years
since the administration announced its intention to create a
cabinet-level homeland security office, nothing meaningful has
been accomplished. And there are no funds to implement a
network plan if they had one. According to the magazine,
"Robert David Steele, an author and former intelligence
officer, points out that there are at least 30 separate
intelligence systems [theoretically feeding into DHS] and no
money to connect them to one another or make them
interoperable. 'There is nothing in the president's homeland
security program that makes America safer,' he said."

14) The Bush administration has nothing to hide concerning the
events of September 11, 2001, or the intelligence evidence
collected prior to that day.

First Dick Cheney personally intervened to scuttle a broad
congressional investigation of the day's events and their
origins. And for the past several months the administration has
fought a quiet rear-guard action culminating in last week's
delayed release of Congress's more modest 9/11 report. The
White House even went so far as to classify after the fact
materials that had already been presented in public hearing.

What were they trying to keep under wraps? The Saudi
connection, mostly, and though 27 pages of the details have
been excised from the public report, there is still plenty of
evidence lurking in its extensively massaged text. (When you
see the phrase "foreign nation" substituted in brackets, it's
nearly always Saudi Arabia.) The report documents repeated
signs that there was a major attack in the works with extensive
help from Saudi nationals and apparently also at least one
member of the government. It also suggests that is one reason
intel operatives didn't chase the story harder: Saudi Arabia
was by policy fiat a "friendly" nation and therefore no threat.
The report does not explore the administration's response to
the intelligence briefings it got; its purview is strictly the
performance of intelligence agencies. All other questions now
fall to the independent 9/11 commission, whose work is
presently being slowed by the White House's foot-dragging in
turning over evidence.

15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on
September 11, 2001.

Old questions abound here. The central mystery, of how U.S. air
defenses could have responded so poorly on that day, is fairly
easy to grasp. A cursory look at that morning's timeline of
events is enough. In very short strokes:

8:13 Flight 11 disobeys air traffic instructions and turns off
its transponder.

8:40 NORAD command center claims first notification of likely
Flight 11 hijacking.

8:42 Flight 175 veers off course and shuts down its
transponder.

8:43 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 175
hijacking.

8:46 Flight 11 hits the World Trade Center north tower.

8:46 Flight 77 goes off course.

9:03 Flight 175 hits the WTC south tower.

9:16 Flight 93 goes off course.

9:16 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 93
hijacking.

9:24 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 77
hijacking.

9:37 Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.

10:06 Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field.

The open secret here is that stateside U.S. air defenses had
been reduced to paltry levels since the end of the Cold War.
According to a report by Paul Thompson published at the
endlessly informative Center for Cooperative Research website
(www.cooperativeresearch.org), "[O]nly two air force bases in
the Northeast region... were formally part of NORAD's defensive
system. One was Otis Air National Guard Base, on
Massachusetts's Cape Cod peninsula and about 188 miles east of
New York City. The other was Langley Air Force Base near
Norfolk, Virginia, and about 129 miles south of Washington.
During the Cold War, the U.S. had literally thousands of
fighters on alert. But as the Cold War wound down, this number
was reduced until it reached only 14 fighters in the
continental U.S. by 9/11."

But even an underpowered air defense system on slow-response
status (15 minutes, officially, on 9/11) does not explain the
magnitude of NORAD's apparent failures that day. Start with the
discrepancy in the times at which NORAD commanders claim to
have learned of the various hijackings. By 8:43 a.m., NORAD had
been notified of two probable hijackings in the previous five
minutes. If there was such a thing as a system-wide air defense
crisis plan, it should have kicked in at that moment. Three
minutes later, at 8:46, Flight 11 crashed into the first WTC
tower. By then alerts should have been going out to all
regional air traffic centers of apparent coordinated hijackings
in progress. Yet when Flight 77, which eventually crashed into
the Pentagon, was hijacked three minutes later, at 8:46, NORAD
claims not to have learned of it until 9:24, 38 minutes after
the fact and just 13 minutes before it crashed into the
Pentagon.

The professed lag in reacting to the hijacking of Flight 93 is
just as striking. NORAD acknowledged learning of the hijacking
at 9:16, yet the Pentagon's position is that it had not yet
intercepted the plane when it crashed in a Pennsylvania field
just minutes away from Washington, D.C. at 10:06, a full 50
minutes later.

In fact, there are a couple of other circumstantial details of
the crash, discussed mostly in Pennsylvania newspapers and
barely noted in national wire stories, that suggest Flight 93
may have been shot down after all. First, officials never
disputed reports that there was a secondary debris field six
miles from the main crash site, and a few press accounts said
that it included one of the plane's engines. A secondary debris
field points to an explosion on board, from one of two probable
causes--a terrorist bomb carried on board or an Air Force
missile. And no investigation has ever intimated that any of
the four terror crews were toting explosives. They kept to
simple tools like the box cutters, for ease in passing
security. Second, a handful of eyewitnesses in the rural area
around the crash site did report seeing low-flying U.S.
military jets around the time of the crash.

Which only raises another question. Shooting down Flight 93
would have been incontestably the right thing to do under the
circumstances. More than that, it would have constituted the
only evidence of anything NORAD and the Pentagon had done right
that whole morning. So why deny it? Conversely, if fighter jets
really were not on the scene when 93 crashed, why weren't they?
How could that possibly be?

16) The Bush administration had a plan for restoring essential
services and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the
shooting war ended.

The question of what the U.S. would do to rebuild Iraq was
raised before the shooting started. I remember reading a press
briefing in which a Pentagon official boasted that at the time,
the American reconstruction team had already spent three weeks
planning the postwar world! The Pentagon's first word was that
the essentials of rebuilding the country would take about $10
billion and three months; this stood in fairly stark contrast
to UN estimates that an aggressive rebuilding program could
cost up to $100 billion a year for a minimum of three years.

After the shooting stopped it was evident the U.S. had no plan
for keeping order in the streets, much less commencing to
rebuild. (They are upgrading certain oil facilities, but that's
another matter.) There are two ways to read this. The popular
version is that it proves what bumblers Bush and his crew
really are. And it's certainly true that where the details of
their grand designs are concerned, the administration tends to
have postures rather than plans. But this ignores the strategic
advantages the U.S. stands to reap by leaving Iraqi domestic
affairs in a chronic state of (managed, they hope) chaos. Most
important, it provides an excuse for the continued presence of
a large U.S. force, which ensures that America will call the
shots in putting Iraqi oil back on the world market and seeing
to it that the Iraqis don't fall in with the wrong sort of oil
company partners. A long military occupation is also a
practical means of accomplishing something the U.S. cannot do
officially, which is to maintain air bases in Iraq
indefinitely. (This became necessary after the U.S. agreed to
vacate its bases in Saudi Arabia earlier this year to try to
defuse anti-U.S. political tensions there.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to pay for whatever rebuilding it
gets around to doing with the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales, an
enormous cash box the U.S. will oversee for the good of the
Iraqi people.

In other words, "no plan" may have been the plan the Bushmen
were intent on pursuing all along.

17) The U.S. has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in
Iraq during the postwar period.

"Some [looters] shot big grins at American soldiers and Marines
or put down their prizes to offer a thumbs-up or a quick finger
across the throat and a whispered word--Saddam--before grabbing
their loot and vanishing."

--Robert Fisk, London Independent, 4/11/03

Despite the many clashes between U.S. troops and Iraqis in the
three months since the heavy artillery fell silent, the postwar
performance of U.S. forces has been more remarkable for the
things they have not done--their failure to intervene in civil
chaos or to begin reestablishing basic civil procedures. It
isn't the soldiers' fault. Traditionally an occupation force is
headed up by military police units schooled to interact with
the natives and oversee the restoration of goods and services.
But Rumsfeld has repeatedly declined advice to rotate out the
combat troops sooner rather than later and replace some of them
with an MP force. Lately this has been a source of escalating
criticism within military ranks.

18) Despite vocal international opposition, the U.S. was backed
by most of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member
Coalition of the Willing.

When the whole world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the
outcry was so loud that it briefly pierced the slumber of the
American public, which poured out its angst in poll numbers
that bespoke little taste for a war without the UN's blessing.
So it became necessary to assure the folks at home that the
whole world was in fact for the invasion. Thus was born the
Coalition of the Willing, consisting of the U.S. and UK, with
Australia caddying--and 40-some additional co-champions of
U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, whose ranks included
such titans of diplomacy and pillars of representative
government as Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, and
Micronesia. If the American public noticed the ruse, all was
nonetheless forgotten when Baghdad fell. Everybody loves a
winner.

19) This war was notable for its protection of civilians.

This from the Herald of Scotland, May 23: "American guns,
bombs, and missiles killed more civilians in the recent war in
Iraq than in any conflict since Vietnam, according to
preliminary assessments carried out by the UN, international
aid agencies, and independent study groups. Despite U.S. boasts
this was the fastest, most clinical campaign in military
history, a first snapshot of 'collateral damage' indicates that
between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi non-combatants died in the
course of the hi-tech blitzkrieg."

20) The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad
was unanticipated.

General Jay Garner himself, then the head man for postwar Iraq,
told the Washington Times that he had put the Iraqi National
Museum second on a list of sites requiring protection after the
fall of the Saddam government, and he had no idea why the
recommendation was ignored. It's also a matter of record that
the administration had met in January with a group of U.S.
scholars concerned with the preservation of Iraq's fabulous
Sumerian antiquities. So the war planners were aware of the
riches at stake. According to Scotland's Sunday Herald, the
Pentagon took at least one other meeting as well: "[A]
coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling
itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met
with U.S. Defense and State department officials prior to the
start of military action to offer its assistance.... The group
is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who
favor a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the
ownership and export of antiquities.... [Archaeological
Institute of America] president Patty Gerstenblith said: 'The
ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities
through weakening the laws of archaeologically rich nations and
eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier
export.'"

21) Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups.

This is very concisely debunked in Walter Pincus's July 21
Washington Post story, so I'll quote him: "'Iraq could decide
on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to
a terrorist group or individual terrorists,' President Bush
said in Cincinnati on October 7.... But declassified portions
of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released
Friday by the White House show that at the time of the
president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that
possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began
circulating October 2, shows the intelligence services were
much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda
terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his
government was collapsing after a military attack by the United
States."

22) Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological
attack in 45 minutes.

Again the WashPost wraps it up nicely: "The 45-minute claim is
at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent
suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had
questioned the government's use of the allegation. The
scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British
parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the
45-minute claim was added to Britain's public 'dossier' on Iraq
in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister
Tony Blair--and against the wishes of British intelligence,
which said the charge was from a single source and was
considered unreliable."

23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable
Palestinian state.

The interests of the U.S. toward the Palestinians have not
changed--not yet, at least. Israel's "security needs" are still
the U.S.'s sturdiest pretext for its military role in policing
the Middle East and arming its Israeli proxies. But the U.S.'s
immediate needs have tilted since the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. Now the Bushmen need a fig leaf--to confuse, if not
exactly cover, their designs, and to give shaky pro-U.S.
governments in the region some scrap to hold out to their own
restive peoples. Bush's roadmap has scared the hell out of the
Israeli right, but they have little reason to worry. Press
reports in the U.S. and Israel have repeatedly telegraphed the
assurance that Bush won't try to push Ariel Sharon any further
than he's comfortable going.

24) People detained by the U.S. after 9/11 were legitimate
terror suspects.

Quite the contrary, as disclosed officially in last month's
critical report on U.S. detainees from the Justice Department's
own Office of Inspector General. A summary analysis of
post-9/11 detentions posted at the UC-Davis website states,
"None of the 1,200 foreigners arrested and detained in secret
after September 11 was charged with an act of terrorism.
Instead, after periods of detention that ranged from weeks to
months, most were deported for violating immigration laws. The
government said that 752 of 1,200 foreigners arrested after
September 11 were in custody in May 2002, but only 81 were
still in custody in September 2002."

25) The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment
of terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees.

The entire mumbo-jumbo about "unlawful combatants" was
conceived to skirt the Geneva conventions on treatment of
prisoners by making them out to be something other than POWs.
Here is the actual wording of Donald Rumsfeld's pledge,
freighted with enough qualifiers to make it absolutely
meaningless: "We have indicated that we do plan to, for the
most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent
with the Geneva conventions to the extent they are
appropriate." Meanwhile the administration has treated its
prisoners--many of whom, as we are now seeing confirmed in
legal hearings, have no plausible connection to terrorist
enterprises--in a manner that blatantly violates several key
Geneva provisions regarding humane treatment and housing.

26) Shots rang out from the Palestine hotel, directed at U.S.
soldiers, just before a U.S. tank fired on the hotel, killing
two journalists.

Eyewitnesses to the April 8 attack uniformly denied any gunfire
from the hotel. And just two hours prior to firing on the
hotel, U.S. forces had bombed the Baghdad offices of
Al-Jazeera, killing a Jordanian reporter. Taken together, and
considering the timing, they were deemed a warning to
unembedded journalists covering the fall of Baghdad around
them. The day's events seem to have been an extreme instance of
a more surreptitious pattern of hostility demonstrated by U.S.
and UK forces toward foreign journalists and those non-attached
Western reporters who moved around the country at will. (One of
them, Terry Lloyd of Britain's ITN, was shot to death by UK
troops at a checkpoint in late March under circumstances the
British government has refused to disclose.)

Some days after firing on the Palestine Hotel, the U.S. sent in
a commando unit to raid select floors of the hotel that were
known to be occupied by journalists, and the news gatherers
were held on the floor at gunpoint while their rooms were
searched. A Centcom spokesman later explained cryptically that
intelligence reports suggested there were people "not friendly
to the U.S." staying at the hotel. Allied forces also bombed
the headquarters of Abu Dhabi TV, injuring several.

27) U.S. troops "rescued" Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi
hospital.

If I had wanted to run up the tally of administration lies, the
Lynch episode alone could be parsed into several more.
Officials claimed that Lynch and her comrades were taken after
a firefight in which Lynch battled back bravely. Later they
announced with great fanfare that U.S. Special Forces had
rescued Lynch from her captors. They reported that she had been
shot and stabbed. Later yet, they reported that the
recuperating Lynch had no memory of the events.

Bit by bit it all proved false. Lynch's injuries occurred when
the vehicle she was riding in crashed. She did not fire on
anybody and she was not shot or stabbed. The Iraqi soldiers who
had been holding her had abandoned the hospital where she was
staying the night before U.S. troops came to get her--a
development her "rescuers" were aware of. In fact her doctor
had tried to return her to the Americans the previous evening
after the Iraqi soldiers left. But he was forced to turn back
when U.S. troops fired on the approaching ambulance. As for
Lynch's amnesia, her family has told reporters her memory is
perfectly fine.

28) The populace of Baghdad and of Iraq generally turned out en
masse to greet U.S. troops as liberators.

There were indeed scattered expressions of thanks when U.S.
divisions rolled in, but they were neither as extensive nor as
enthusiastic as Bush image-makers pretended. Within a day or
two of the Saddam government's fall, the scene in the Baghdad
streets turned to wholesale ransacking and vandalism. Within
the week, large-scale protests of the U.S. occupation had
already begun occurring in every major Iraqi city.

29) A spontaneous crowd of cheering Iraqis showed up in a
Baghdad square to celebrate the toppling of Saddam's statue.

A long-distance shot of the same scene that was widely posted
on the internet shows that the teeming mob consisted of only
one or two hundred souls, contrary to the impression given by
all the close-up TV news shots of what appeared to be a massive
gathering. It was later reported that members of Ahmed
Chalabi's local entourage made up most of the throng.

30) No major figure in the Bush administration said that the
Iraqi populace would turn out en masse to welcome the U.S.
military as liberators.

When confronted with--oh, call them reality deficits--one habit
of the Bushmen is to deny that they made erroneous or
misleading statements to begin with, secure in the knowledge
that the media will rarely muster the energy to look it up and
call them on it. They did it when their bold prewar WMD
predictions failed to pan out (We never said it would be easy!
No, they only implied it), and they did it when the "jubilant
Iraqis" who took to the streets after the fall of Saddam turned
out to be anything but (We never promised they would welcome us
with open arms!).

But they did. March 16, Dick Cheney, Meet the Press: The Iraqis
are desperate "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will
welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do
that.... [T]he vast majority of them would turn on [Saddam] in
a minute if, in fact, they thought they could do so safely").

31) The U.S. achieved its stated objectives in Afghanistan, and
vanquished the Taliban.

According to accounts in the Asia Times of Hong Kong, the U.S.
held a secret meeting earlier this year with Taliban leaders
and Pakistani intelligence officials to offer a deal to the
Taliban for inclusion in the Afghan government. (Main
condition: Dump Mullah Omar.) As Michael Tomasky commented in
The American Prospect, "The first thing you may be wondering:
Why is there a possible role for the Taliban in a future
government? Isn't that fellow Hamid Karzai running things, and
isn't it all going basically okay? As it turns out, not really
and not at all.... The reality... is an escalating guerilla war
in which 'small hit-and-run attacks are a daily feature in most
parts of the country, while face-to-face skirmishes are common
in the former Taliban stronghold around Kandahar in the
south.'"

32) Careful science demonstrates that depleted uranium is no
big risk to the population.

Pure nonsense. While the government has trotted out expert
after expert to debunk the dangers of depleted uranium, DU has
been implicated in health troubles experienced both by Iraqis
and by U.S. and allied soldiers in the first Gulf War.
Unexploded DU shells are not a grave danger, but detonated ones
release particles that eventually find their way into air,
soil, water, and food.

While we're on the subject, the BBC reported a couple of months
ago that recent tests of Afghani civilians have turned up with
unusually high concentrations of non-depleted uranium isotopes
in their urine. International monitors have called it almost
conclusive evidence that the U.S. used a new kind of
uranium-laced bomb in the Afghan war.

33) The looting of Iraqi nuclear facilities presented no big
risk to the population.

Commanders on the scene, and Rumsfeld back in Washington,
immediately assured everyone that the looting of a facility
where raw uranium powder (so-called "yellowcake") and several
other radioactive isotopes were stored was no serious danger to
the populace--yet the looting of the facility came to light in
part because, as the Washington Times noted, "U.S. and British
newspaper reports have suggested that residents of the area
were suffering from severe ill health after tipping out
yellowcake powder from barrels and using them to store food."

34) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon a crowd
of civilian protesters in Mosul.

April 15: U.S. troops fire into a crowd of protesters when it
grows angry at the pro-Western speech being given by the town's
new mayor, Mashaan al-Juburi. Seven are killed and dozens
injured. Eyewitness accounts say the soldiers spirit Juburi
away as he is pelted with objects by the crowd, then take
sniper positions and begin firing on the crowd.

35) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon two
separate crowds of civilian protesters in Fallujah.

April 28: American troops fire into a crowd of demonstrators
gathered on Saddam's birthday, killing 13 and injuring 75. U.S.
commanders claim the troops had come under fire, but
eyewitnesses contradict the account, saying the troops started
shooting after they were spooked by warning shots fired over
the crowd by one of the Americans' own Humvees. Two days later
U.S. soldiers fired on another crowd in Fallujah, killing three
more.

36) The Iraqis fighting occupation forces consist almost
entirely of "Saddam supporters" or "Ba'ath remnants."

This has been the subject of considerable spin on the Bushmen's
part in the past month, since they launched Operation
Sidewinder to capture or kill remaining opponents of the U.S.
occupation. It's true that the most fierce (but by no means
all) of the recent guerrilla opposition has been concentrated
in the Sunni-dominated areas that were Saddam's stronghold, and
there is no question that Saddam partisans are numerous there.
But, perhaps for that reason, many other guerrilla fighters
have flocked there to wage jihad, both from within and without
Iraq. Around the time of the U.S. invasion, some 10,000 or so
foreign fighters had crossed into Iraq, and I've seen no
informed estimate of how many more may have joined them since.

(No room here, but if you check the online version of this
story, there's a footnote regarding one less-than-obvious
reason former Republican Guard personnel may be fighting mad at
this point.)

37) The bidding process for Iraq rebuilding contracts displayed
no favoritism toward Bush and Cheney's oil/gas cronies.

Most notoriously, Dick Cheney's former energy-sector employer,
Halliburton, was all over the press dispatches about the first
round of rebuilding contracts. So much so that they were
eventually obliged to bow out of the running for a $1 billion
reconstruction contract for the sake of their own PR profile.
But Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root still received
the first major plum in the form of a $7 billion contract to
tend to oil field fires and (the real purpose) to do any
retooling necessary to get the oil pumping at a decent rate, a
deal that allows them a cool $500 million in profit. The fact
that Dick Cheney's office is still fighting tooth and nail to
block any disclosure of the individuals and companies with whom
his energy task force consulted tells everything you need to
know.

38) "We found the WMDs!"

There have been at least half a dozen junctures at which the
Bushmen have breathlessly informed the press that allied troops
had found the WMD smoking gun, including the president himself,
who on June 1 told reporters, "For those who say we haven't
found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons,
they're wrong, we found them."

Shouldn't these quickly falsified statements be counted as
errors rather than lies? Under the circumstances, no. First,
there is just too voluminous a record of the administration
going on the media offensive to tout lines they know to be
flimsy. This appears to be more of same. Second, if the great
genius Karl Rove and the rest of the Bushmen have demonstrated
that they understand anything about the propaganda potential of
the historical moment they've inherited, they surely understand
that repetition is everything. Get your message out regularly,
and even if it's false a good many people will believe it.

Finally, we don't have to speculate about whether the
administration would really plant bogus WMD evidence in the
American media, because they have already done it, most visibly
in the case of Judith Miller of the New York Times and the
Iraqi defector "scientist" she wrote about at the military's
behest on April 21. Miller did not even get to speak with the
purported scientist, but she graciously passed on several
things American commanders claimed he said: that Iraq only
destroyed its chemical weapons days before the war, that WMD
materiel had been shipped to Syria, and that Iraq had ties to
al Qaeda. As Slate media critic Jack Shafer told WNYC Radio's
On the Media program, "When you... look at [her story], you
find that it's gas, it's air. There's no way to judge the value
of her information, because it comes from an unnamed source
that won't let her verify any aspect of it. And if you dig into
the story... you'll find out that the only thing that Miller
has independently observed is a man that the military says is
the scientist, wearing a baseball cap, pointing at mounds in
the dirt."

39) "The Iraqi people are now free."

So says the current U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer,
in a recent New York Times op-ed. He failed to add that
disagreeing can get you shot or arrested under the terms of the
Pentagon's latest plan for pacifying Iraq, Operation Sidewinder
(see #36), a military op launched last month to wipe out all
remaining Ba'athists and Saddam partisans--meaning, in
practice, anyone who resists the U.S. occupation too zealously.

40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.

Not long after the September 11 attacks, neoconservative high
priest Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One hears that Bush, who
entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted
to do there, now feels there was a purpose behind his election
all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes
he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from
the world."

No, he really believes it, or so he would like us to think. The
Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz that Bush made the following pronouncement
during a recent meeting between the two: "God told me to strike
at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to
strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve
the problem in the Middle East."

Oddly, it never got much play back home.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This was truly a collaborative effort from start to finish. It
began with the notion of running a week-long marathon of Bush
administration lies at my online Bush Wars column
(bushwarsblog.com). Along the way my e-mail box delivered more
research assistance than I've ever received on any single
story. I need to thank Jeff St. Clair and the Counterpunch
website (counterpunch.org), which featured the Lies marathon in
addition to posting valuable reportage and essays every day; I
also received lots of lies entries and documentary links from
BW readers Rob Johnson, Ted Dibble, and Donna Johnson, as well
as my colleagues Mark Gisleson, Elaine Cassel, Sally Ryan, Mike
Mosedale, and Paul Demko. Dave Marsh provided valuable editing
suggestions.

I also found loads of valuable information through Cursor and
Buzzflash, the two best news links pages on the internet, and
through research projects on the Bushmen posted at Cooperative
Research (cooperativeresearch.org), Whiskey Bar (billmon.org),
and tvnewslies.org.

But the heart of the effort was all the readers of Bush Wars
who sent along ideas and links that advanced the project. Many
thanks to Estella Bloomberg, Vince Bradley, Angela Bradshaw,
Gary Burns, Elaine Cole, George Dobosh, Deborah Eddy, David
Erickson, Casey Finne, Douglas Gault, Jean T. Gordon, Doug
Henwood, George Hunsinger, Peter Lee, Eric Martin, Michael
McFadden, George McLaughlin, Eric T. Olson, Doug Payne, Alan W.
Peck, Dennis Perrin, Charles Prendergast, Publius, Michele
Quinn, Ernesto Resnik, Ed Rickert, Maritza Silverio, Marshall
Smith, Robert David Steele, Ed Thornhill, Christopher Veal, and
Jennifer Vogel. And my apologies to anyone else whose e-mails I
didn't manage to save.

Editor's note: In the interest of relative brevity I've stinted
on citing and quoting sources in some of the items below. You
can find links to news stories that elaborate on each of these
items at my online Bush Wars column. 

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