Bush administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism

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Thu, 18 Aug 2005 14:20:04 -0700 (PDT)

Bush administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism

 

 

 

http://www.citypages.com/databank/24/1182/article11417.asp

 

 

News

Volume 24 - Issue 1182 - Cover Story - July 30, 2003

The Bush administration's Top 40 Lies about war and terrorism

 

 

Bring 'em On!

 

By Steve Perry

 

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, http://www.bushwarsblog.com.

 

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

 

hroughout 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.

 

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