Iraq WMD Lies

Iraq All Over Again: Bush, Paulson and Bernanke are Just Crying Wolf

dlindorff — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:09:57 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Hold everything!

Talk about déjà vu. Remember when Bush and his cabinet officers were
running all over in late 2002 crying wolf about Iraq’s supposed nukes,
and threatening that inaction on a war resolution by the Congress would
leave them to blame when the “mushroom cloud” appeared over some
American city?

Well, now they’re doing it again, this time claiming that economic
Armageddon faces the US and even the global economy if Congress doesn’t
hand over all power over the economy to the Secretary of the Treasury
in absolute contravention of the most fundamental principle of the
Constitution, which establishes that the budget be in the control of
Congress. These guys are saying if Congress doesn’t vote to hand over
$700 billion or more of taxpayer money to the Treasury to dole out to
fat cat bankers, the resulting economic collapse will be on their heads.

But here’s the thing. Just as nobody else in the world was freaking
out about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear threat, nobody is
particularly panicked about the US or the global economy. If investors,
who are supposed to be all wise about things economic, were worried
that the roof was about to cave in, they’d be selling stocks as fast as
they could dial their brokers. And the institutional investors—those
with the real inside information—not to mention the managements of
companies, who really know the true state of affairs of their own
firms—would be unloading shares at fire sale prices. The stock market
would be falling like it fell in 1987, or, if what these administration
con artists are claiming were really the case, even farther. That is to
say, we’d be seeing a 3000-4000 point drop in the Dow.

But we’re not seeing that. The Dow Jones average this week fell a
modest 8 percent and then recovered by 4 percent, and yesterday, the
broader S&P index actually rose. Some panic!

We’re told that there is a credit crisis, but people are still
getting mortgages. I know a retired woman of modest means who just went
in and refinanced her mortgage at a lower rate. Businesses are still
receiving loans, too, and while they might want a lower rate, they’re
still meeting payroll. Banks haven’t jacked up interest rates to absurd
levels.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told
a select group of Congressional leaders earlier this week that if they
didn’t rush through their three-page proposal giving them draconian
power to shovel public money into banker’s coffers, the country would
be instantly plunged into a major recession.

But when Congress balked at this power-grabbing rip-off, it caused
barely a ripple in the stock markets, which are down less than 10
percent from their level when the crisis first struck with the bailout
of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Let’s be honest: this is an artificial panic, or worse, an effort
to create one. It’s not a real panic. When you have the president and
the treasury secretary and the Fed chairman going around warning of a
steep recession or a depression, you have to ask yourself why these
guys are yelling “Fire!” in the theater. In a real crisis, President
Franklin Roosevelt preached calm (“We have nothing to fear but fear
itself.”). This president says, “Be afraid. Real afraid!”

The truth is, this is a very normal economic downturn, with the
exception that a lot of banks are holding an unusual amount of really
rotten debt—the result of their own greed and fraud.

The answer is not to bail these rotten institutions out. It’s to let them fail.

I realized what was happening when the Bush Administration spent
$85 billion assuming all the bad debt of AIG in return for warrants
giving it the right to up to 80 percent ownership of the insurance
giant, when, at that day’s share value, the Treasury could have bought
the whole company outright for just $7 billion.

If we’re concerned about the homeowners who hold subprime
mortgages, the government can step in and order the banks to
renegotiate the terms of those loans to make them fixed 30-year
mortgages that people can actually afford to pay, and it can step in
and guarantee them. In return for covering the bankers’ asses on those
loans, the government can take over the worst banks, and take ownership
positions in others as it sees fit.

If the economy slows down because of all of this, the answer is for
the government to start spending on programs that will create new
jobs—R&D funding for new non-carbon energy sources, public funded
power generation projects using wind, waves and solar energy,
infrastructure repair, public transit expansion, more teachers for our
schools. Every dollar spent on these kinds of things will circulate
back into the economy immediately, helping to bring the economy back.
Funneling money to banks won’t help, because the odds are, much of it
will flow overseas where there’s a better return.

In short, Congress needs to call the president’s bluff.

The public knows it’s being had here. We’ve seen the deceitful
nature of this administration, and we know now that everything it says
is a lie.

Bush and his treasury secretary, however, are right about one
thing: Congress is going to be blamed if they do the wrong thing. But
the wrong thing isn’t failing to approve a $700-billion Wall Street
bailout. The wrong thing would be approving it.
________________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Condi Lies About Suskind Forgery Charge

Bob Fertik — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:28:54 -0400

Ron Suskind's explosive new book has the Busheviks so terrified that they deployed their designated liar, Condi Rice, to lie through her teeth to Karl Rove's personal stenographer, Politico's Mike Allen.

Here's the video link, at least until they scrub it because Condi's lies (in bold) are so obvious:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=9160921

Mike: Madame Secretary, as you know there's a new book by Ron Suskind which says the White House ordered the CIA to falsify intelligence about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda. Is it possible the United States government forged a letter from Iraq's intelligence chief to Saddam Hussein?
Condi: the United States government didn't forge a letter. The White House in which I was working and I think...
Mike: they didn't direct...
Condi: the people as I understand it - the people that he quotes as being sources for that have denied it.
Mike: So you think it's impossible...
Condi: The United States, the White House was not going to ask someone to ask someone to forge a letter on something of this importance.
Mike: You believe it did not occur...
Condi: It did not occur. The intelligence might have been wrong, that's now clear, not because people weren't working very hard. But when you have an opaque regime like Saddam Hussein's regime that had used WMD before that had them before, one can understand how the judgment may have been wrong. But the decision to go to war was based on the strategic threat of Saddam Hussein, the fact that we'd been to war against him before, the fact that he still threatened his neighbors, and the fact that we were told that he was reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction.

To prove that Condi is lying, we'll pay $1,000 to anyone who runs this video through lie detector software and gets a reliable result.

It's long past time for Congress to ask Condi these questions under oath and threat of perjury.

Videos from June 13 Iraq Forum, "Reframing the Iraq War Discussion," in Cherry Hill, NJ

dlindorff — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:16:21 -0400

Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War (Part 1)

Kokesh Reams Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ) for Backing the War (Part 2)

Dave Lindorff on the Bush/Cheney Push for War with Iran (Part 1)

Dave Lindorff on the Bush/Cheney Push for War with Iran (Part 2)

Time for Congress to Stand Up in Its Own Defense: Impeach Bush and Cheney N

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:24:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The last couple of weeks have brought confirmation—as if it were needed—even in the corporate media, that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the gang of thugs and sycophants around them in the White House, engaged in a massive conspiracy to lie the country into a war in Iraq.

The release of a confessional book by former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan and the subsequent release of a long blocked report by the Senate Intelligence Committee make it clear that Bush, Cheney & Company deliberately lied to Congress and the American public back in 2002 and early 2003 about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (there was none). McClellan also states that Bush and Cheney conspired to “out” CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of a compaign to prevent her husband from exposing a major part of that campaign of lies: the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.

It would be hard to overstate the extent of or the damage caused by these crimes that are now exposed to the light of day.

Beginning in 2001, making the most cynical use of the tragic killing of nearly 3000 Americans in the 9-11 attacks, Bush and Cheney moved to aggrandize as much power as possible in the executive, and then, to consolidate that power grab, engineered a full-scale war against Iraq, enabling them to claim that any opponent of their dictatorial usurpation of power was a traitor to the nation.

It was all a lie.

Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda, and he had no nuclear program. He had no weapons of mass destruction. His country was broken, thanks to years of international sanctions and war.

As a result of these lies, we have a country that no longer even remotely resembles what the Founders had intended. The Congress has been shorn of its once exclusive authority to legislate, and even its Constitutional power to investigate the executive branch has been successfully defied. It is now an atrophied relic. The federal judiciary, right up to the Supreme Court, has been packed with administration sycophants and Federalist Society advocates of unfettered executive power.

We also have been saddled with an unwinnable war in the Middle East that has claimed the lives of 4500 Americans, destroyed the lives of another 30,000—or perhaps several hundred thousand, if we add in all those suffering psychological damage, or genetic damage from exposure to depleted uranium weapons. That war has also killed over 1 million innocent Iraqis, including countless chiildren, destroyed their country, bankrupted this nation, and made the US a pariah and a rogue state in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Most Americans long since came to the conclusion that the Bush administration was a gang of idiots. Just watching their handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold was enough to make that clear. But the new reports from McClellan and from the Senate Intelligence Committee should make it clear that this was not just stupidity. The disasters that have befallen this nation, or that it has brought on the rest of the world, over the past eight years have been the result of deliberate lying and deceit and of the conspiratorial policies of a cabal of leaders whose goal from day one was undoing the Constitution and establishing the presidency as a kind of dictatorship.

Most of the corporate media have been unable to bring themselves to state this clearly. They edge around the issue by talking about the White House having been “misleading” or “untruthful.” And little is said about the lasting damage that has been done to the Republic and the Constitution, or about what is to be done about a still bloody war that never should have been fought in the first place.

The answer is clear. Impeachment proceedings should be initiated against both Bush and Cheney. These two arch criminals must not be permitted to leave office with their titles intact. They need to be tossed out in disgrace, and then indicted for war crimes and for crimes like perjury, conspiracy and perhaps treason.

We are already seeing the long-term damage that has been wrought. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, is saying that the president’s use of the National Security Agency to spy, without any court order, on tens or hundreds of thousants, or perhaps millions of Americans, is legal, and would continue under a McCain administration. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said that he would continue Bush’s use of “signing statements” to ignore Congressional legislation that he felt impaired his Constitutional powers as president.

The nation is at a dangerous crossroad. Either Congress reasserts its authority now, via impeachment, drawing a Constitutional line in the stand in defense of Article I of the Constitution—the article that defines the power of Congress as absolute in terms of passing legisation—or it forever surrenders that role, leaving us with what can only be called a dictatorship.

We clearly cannot count on the next president, whoever that may be, to surrender powers usurped by the current one. What leader in history has willingly and voluntarily surrendered authority, after all?

Such power must be wrested back by Congress, and the only way for that to happen is impeachment—a course laid out clearly by the authors of the Constitution for just such a crisis.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Senate Intelligence Committee findings on falsified Intelligence leading to Iraq War released

John Healy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:37:24 -0400

Press Release of Intelligence Committee Senate Intelligence Committee Unveils Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence -- Two Bipartisan Reports Detail Administration Misstatements on Prewar Iraq Intelligence, and Inappropriate Intelligence Activities by Pentagon Policy Office -- Contact: Wendy Morigi (202) 224-6101 Thursday, June 5, 2008 Washington, DC -- The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, and a bipartisan majority of the Committee (10-5), today unveiled the final two sections of its Phase II report on prewar intelligence. The first report details Administration prewar statements that, on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq. The second report details inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities conducted by the DoD’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department. "Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence," Rockefeller said. "In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed." "It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses. "There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate. "These reports represent the final chapter in our oversight of prewar intelligence. They complete the story of mistakes and failures – both by the Intelligence Community and the Administration – in the lead up to the war. Fundamentally, these reports are about transparency and holding our government accountable, and making sure these mistakes never happen again," Rockefeller added. The Committee’s report cites several conclusions in which the Administration’s public statements were NOT supported by the intelligence. They include: Ø Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence. Ø Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information. Ø Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products. Ø Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing. Ø The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information. Ø The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed. Additionally, the Committee issued a report on the Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The report found that the clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranians in Rome and Paris were inappropriate and mishandled from beginning to end. Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz failed to keep the Intelligence Community and the State Department appropriately informed about the meetings. The involvement of Manucher Ghobanifer and Michael Ledeen in the meetings was inappropriate. Potentially important information collected during the meetings was withheld from intelligence agencies by Pentagon officials. Finally, senior Defense Department officials cut short internal investigations of the meetings and failed to implement the recommendations of their own counterintelligence experts. Today’s reports are the culmination of efforts that began in March 2003, when, as Vice Chairman, Senator Rockefeller initially requested an investigation into the origin of the fraudulent Niger documents. In June 2003, he was joined by all Democrats on the Committee in pushing for a full investigation into prewar intelligence, which was eventually expanded by the Committee in February 2004 to include the five phase II tasks. The Committee released its first report on July 9, 2004, which focused primarily on the Intelligence Community’s prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and links to terrorism. Those findings helped lay the foundation for some of the intelligence reforms enacted into law in late 2004. In September 2006, the Committee completed and publicly released two sections of Phase II: The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress; and Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare with Prewar Assessments. In May 2007, the Committee released the third section of Phase II: Prewar Intelligence Assessments About Postwar Iraq. Separately, in early 2007, the Pentagon Inspector General released its own report on the intelligence activities conducted by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and also concluded that those activities were inappropriate. ###

What About the Iraqis?

dlindorff — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:59:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I found myself listing to a talk radio show on NPR’s Philadelphia affiliate WHYY today, which focused in part on the agonies suffered by families of American troops killed or seriously maimed in Iraq.

Left unsaid—and this I think is the case in nearly all the reporting that gets done on the costs of the Iraq War that are being borne here in the US by relatives of troops—is the terrible reality that we’re talking about the relatives of just 4500 American servicemen and women killed, and perhaps 30,000 seriously wounded (not counting the hundreds of thousands suffering mental damage). Not to diminish that suffering, it needs to be pointed out that by some accounts, well over 1 million Iraqis have died in this illegal, uncalled-for and criminal war.

And most of the dead, contrary to what we are told by the corporate media, are victims of the US military, not Iraqi bombers. The immense firepower of American forces, and the over-use of rockets, pilotless, rocket-firing drones, and aerial bombardment (designed to keep US casualties as low as possible), ensure high levels of civilian casualties (called collateral damage, or on rare occasions “unfortunate mistakes”), and we are unable to obtain accurate numbers because the US “doesn’t do bodycounts.”

Most are also civilians, not combatants. According to one study conducted by the Christian Science Monitor, one of the nation’s most respected daily newspapers, the ratio of civilians killed by US troops vs. enemy fighters killed was an appalling 30:1. As I’ve often noted, with a ratio like that it would be fairer to call any enemy fighters who are killed “collateral damage” in what should be seen as deliberate targeting of civilians.

And a disproportionate number of those civilians are children and young people. This has also been documented by researchers and has been observed anecdotally in hospitals. Children, because they are less aware of what’s going on around them, are less able to defend themselves, and are in general more vulnerable, are the main victims in this kind of brutal urban war fighting.

Now recall that for every Iraqi killed, whether that person is a fighter or a civilian, there is a grieving family, whose loss is every bit as terrible as is the loss suffered by an American family. What you get is perhaps 4-5 million Iraqis, in a nation of 24 million, who are suffering this inconsolable losses.

It is as though 50 million Americans had lost someone in the war.

But that’s just the dead and the relatives of the dead.

For every Iraqi who has been killed, there are surely two or three or more who have been gravely wounded, crippled, or driven mad. Even if we assume that shamefully poor medical care in Iraq assures that half of Iraq’s gravely wounded die instead of surviving with their wounds as our returned casualties do, that would add another two million to the casualties, and another 8 million to the number of impacted family members—for a total of 12 million—almost half of all Iraq!

It is wrong to say much of this tragedy is the fault of Iraqis. Prior to the US invasion, Iraqis were not massacring Iraqis. Across most of Iraq, Shia and Sunni lived side by side. They intermarried easily, with no bad repercussions. Certainly they suffered under the repression of dictator Saddam Hussein, but nothing like what they suffer today.

The reality is that the Bush/Cheney regime tricked the nation into becoming a terrorist aggressor, invading a nation by claiming falsely that it had, or was about to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In the process our military became what it was allegedly trying to find: a weapon of mass destruction that has wreaked devastation upon Iraq as far-reaching and incomprehensibly destructive as any atomic bomb.

I have great sympathy for those Americans who have lost loved ones in, or whose loved ones have returned broken to them from Iraq.

But I do not want us to forget the incomparably greater suffering that has been brought on Iraqis in our names and thanks to our tax dollars and our political naivety and gullibility.

Yes, Senator Jim Webb is right that we owe better treatment to our veterans, who for the most part are victims of the same criminal machinations of our political leaders as are the Iraqis. But we also owe much better to the Iraqis, who are continuing to be killed, maimed and left bereft by our military and by our government’s mad insistence on “staying the course.”

It is way past time that we started thinking about them.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Scott McClellan on Iraq: Was it Propaganda or Lies?

Bob Fertik — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:38:43 -0400

Whatever you think of Scott McClellan, one thing is clear: he's tough.

After days of attacks by Busheviks, McClellan went directly into the lion's den to battle Bill O'Reilly on his home court. And even O'Reilly admitted McClellan held his own.

So now that the dust is settling, what's the bottom line? Did McClellan provide any evidence that Bush committed statutory crimes and/or impeachable offenses?

The broadest charge against Bush is that he lied to Congress and the American people to win support for invading Iraq even though Iraq never attacked us or even threatened us.

McClellan comes close to endorsing that charge, but refuses to cross the line.

As I've detailed in this book, the campaign mentality at times led the president and his chief advisers to spin, hide, shade and exaggerate the truth, obscuring nuances and ignoring the caveats that should have accompanied their arguments. Rather than choosing to be forthright and candid, they chose to sell the war, and in so doing they did a disservice to the American people and to our democracy. However, this is not the same as saying they deliberately misled and lied.

Elsewhere McClellan makes the same point:

An even more fundamental problem was the way his advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people. It was all part of the way the White House operated and Washington functioned, and no one seemed to see any problem with using such an approach on an issue as grave as war. A pro-war campaign might have been more acceptable had it been accompanied by a high level of candor and honesty, but it was not.

McClellan is clear that the war was sold to the American people through a political propaganda campaign. But when does propaganda cross the line that separates truth from lies?

For me, that line is crossed when a someone knows the truth but tells a different story to avoid the adverse consequences of telling the truth. So three conditions must be present: (1) knowing the truth, (2) saying something different from the truth, and (3) having an ulterior motive for not telling the truth.

We know the truth: Saddam had no WMD's in 2002. (A few rightwing dead-enders reject that conclusion and insist Saddam shipped them to Syria just before we invaded, but no one in the Bush administration says that.) What we don't know is whether Bush knew the truth.

O'Reilly pressed McClellan hard on this precise point: did Bush believe Iraq had WMD's? For O'Reilly, if Bush believed what he said, he couldn't have been lying according to the first test. And when McClellan said yes, O'Reilly pronounced Bush innocent.

But McClellan refused to accept O'Reilly's exoneration of Bush. According to McClellan, Bush also knew there were facts that contradicted his belief, but he refused to share those facts with the American people. In McClellan's view, Bush failed to act with "candor and honesty." In McClellan's view, Bush crossed a line by withholding key facts while exaggerating unproved allegations, and should be judged accordingly.

But what judgment does McClellan propose? Should we simply consider him "uncandid" and "dishonest," and frown in his presence? Or should he be held accountability somehow?

Obviously McClellan does not consider "political propaganda" to be an impeachable offfense; by his own admission, it was the heart and soul of what he and the White House did every single day. (He wrote his book to try to reduce the role of raw politics in governing.)

But there has to be a point where "political propaganda" becomes so distant from the truth that it becomes a lie that requires accountability. If not, then Presidents and their aides can tell every manner of lie with full impunity.

In many ways, the contemporary Republican Party was formed out of an adamant rejection of "moral relativism." In foreign policy, they rejected any "moral equivalence" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, even though both were military empires that abused the rights of smaller countries that were deemed essential to their empires. And in domestic policy, they insisted on "personal responsibility" in opposition to loose morals, which they wrongly called "liberal."

And it was "loose morals" that drove them to their irrational hatred of Bill Clinton. Richard Mellon Scaife funded the "Arkansas Project" to find evidence of Clinton's "loose morals" and finally struck paydirt with Paula Jones, who filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexual harassment.

And it was a very short trip from objectionable "loose morals" to actionable lying. Orrin Hatch decided to impeach Bill Clinton after Clinton went on TV and declared, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." According to many observers of southern sexual mores - and to the judge who presided over Clinton's grand jury testimony - Clinton wasn't lying because Clinton didn't give Lewinsky any sexual pleasure, he only took it. But for Hatch, Newt Gingrich, and the entire Republican Party, Clinton's "spin" crossed the line between truth and lies.

On Iraq, George Bush never said Saddam Hussein actually had a nuclear bomb. But he insisted Saddam had the scientists and possibly the materials (uranium from Niger) needed to build a bomb. Thus he deliberately created the impression that Saddam probably had a bomb. And since Saddam hated the U.S., he would probably find a way to use it against the U.S., either directly or through an alliance with Al Qaeda.

Ultimately, Bush's argument for war rested on the probability that Saddam would attack the U.S. with WMD's. If the probability was low, there was little reason for the U.S. to attack him. If the probability was high, then there was good reason to do so.

According to McClellan, Bush knew the probability of Saddam attacking the U.S. with WMD's was acceptably low. (Colin Powell and Condi Rice actually said so months before 9/11.) But Bush told Congress and the American people something different - that the probability was unacceptably high. And according to McClellan, Bush knowingly failed to tell the whole truth and told instead a Big Non-truth for an ulterior reason: because he wanted to "democratize" the Middle East. According to McClellan, if the American people knew Bush's real reason for invading Iraq, they would not have accepted it. So Bush had to launch a propaganda campaign to accomplish his goal.

And therefore by the three-part test I outlined above, Bush lied.

McClellan insists he wants his book to help fix Washington. If he's serious, he should start by drawing a line between acceptable "spin" and unacceptable - and actionable - lies.

I've drawn my line - will McClellan draw his?

McCain Revives Bush's Iraq Zombie Lie

Bob Fertik — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:37:02 -0400

When all the pre-war lies were finally exposed, the Busheviks settled on one final lie to justify all their discredited lies. As Bush told Politico on May 14,

intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment.

As I wrote then,

Bullshit.

The intelligence agencies of Germany, France, Russia, and China didn't believe it. That's why their governments opposed a second U.N. resolution to authorize a U.S. invasion, and why Bush had to create a "coalition of the ~~billing~~ willing" outside the U.N.

We don't know for certain whether Britain's MI6 believed it or not. We know Blair's political hacks "sexed up" the intelligence, while the professional analysts did not agree. The same process was at work here in the U.S.

We have no idea whether the intelligence agencies in the region - Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, or even Israel - believed it.

Everything about Iraq has been a lie - before, during, and after. It's high time for Bush's last Zombie Lie to have a stake driven through its heart.

Now John McCain is picking up where Bush left off:

I know why I supported it [the war] because I believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as did every intelligence agency in the world and every assessment.

As Satyam writes,

The Bush administration did set up its own intelligence shops to disseminate faulty intelligence about Iraq’s alleged WMD. But “every” agency in the “world” did not buy the spin — several U.S. agencies were highly skeptical:

State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR): Concluded that the “activities we have detected do not add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what [the INR] would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.”

Department of Energy: Concluded aluminum tubes said to be used for nuclear centrifuges were “likely intended for small artillery rockets.”

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA): On March 7, 2003, IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei reported there was “no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons or was in the process of acquiring them.”

Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapon’s inspector: In June 2003, Blix told the U.N. Security Council that his inspection teams had not found any “smoking guns” after visiting some 125 Iraqi sites.

We must find a way to kill this Zombie Lie.

Update 1: Dana Perino embraces the Zombie Lie:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The White House Monday rejected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's charges of "abuse" of pre-war intelligence on Iraq, saying "the entire world" agreed on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

"We acted on the intelligence that we had, and that the entire world had," spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters after Rudd alleged "abuse of intelligence information" on the regime in Baghdad.

"No-one else in the world, no other government, had different information and so we acted based on what was the threat that was presented to us. When the intelligence community presents you with their concerns, you'd better take them seriously," said Perino.

Bush Repeats His Last Iraq Lie

Bob Fertik — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:43:00 -0400

While all progressives suspected Bush was lying about Iraq's WMD's before the war, the first major proof of his lies came on 7/6/03, nearly four months after the invasion, when Joseph Wilson published his now-famous op-ed, What I Didn't Find in Africa. (Wilson was punished for this by having his wife outed, which endangered her life and may have cost the lives of spies in her network.)

The second major proof of Bush's lies came two years later with the publication of the now-famous Downing Street Memo in the Times of London on 5/1/05. (The U.S. Corporate Media still refuses to acknowledge the existence of this devastating memo.)

Since then, we've accumulated endless evidence of Bush's pre-war lies.

But there is one Bush lie that refuses to die - a veritable "zombie lie." And that's Bush's lie that "all the world's intelligence agencies believed Iraq had WMD." Bush repeated the lie twice in his interview with Politico:

Q Mr. President, I'm going to surprise you -- there's a question from a user, Bruce Becker, and he asks: Do you feel that you were misled on Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: I feel like -- I felt like there were weapons of mass destruction. You know, "mislead" is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional -- I don't think so, I think there was a -- not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was.

Q And so you feel that you didn't have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?

THE PRESIDENT: No, no, I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction -- as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein. And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes. But intelligence communities all across the world felt the same thing. This was kind of a common assessment.

So "mislead" means, do I think somebody lied to me? No, I don't. I think it was just, you know, they analyzed the situation and came up with the wrong conclusion.

Bullshit.

The intelligence agencies of Germany, France, Russia, and China didn't believe it. That's why their governments opposed a second U.N. resolution to authorize a U.S. invasion, and why Bush had to create a "coalition of the ~~billing~~ willing" outside the U.N.

We don't know for certain whether Britain's MI6 believed it or not. We know Blair's political hacks "sexed up" the intelligence, while the professional analysts did not agree. The same process was at work here in the U.S.

We have no idea whether the intelligence agencies in the region - Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, or even Israel - believed it.

Everything about Iraq has been a lie - before, during, and after. It's high time for Bush's last Zombie Lie to have a stake driven through its heart.

Bush Tied to Child Prostitution - Resignation or Impeachment Expected!

Bob Fertik — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:11:39 -0400

George Bush has been tied to a prostitution ring involving as many as 50,000 women and girls and is expected to resign or be impeached, according to Congressional sources.

The prostitutes, some as young as 13, are among the 1.2 million desperate Iraqis who fled to Syria after Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the U.K. Independent.

Bush's invasion destroyed the Iraqi government and unleashed a wave of political and sectarian violence that has killed over 1 million Iraqis and forced 4 million to become refugees, according to the UN.

Facing starvation, as many as 50,000 women and girls have been forced into prostitution in Syria alone, according to Hana Ibrahim of the Women's Will Association.

"70 percent to 80 percent of the girls working this business in Damascus today are Iraqis," 23-year-old Abeer told the New York Times. "The rents here in Syria are too expensive for their families. If they go back to Iraq they'll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available."

According to the Times, "inexpensive Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists from wealthier countries in the Middle East. In the club's parking lot, nearly half of the cars had Saudi license plates."

Driving women and girls into prostitution violates numerous human rights agreements, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. George Bush himself denounced sex trafficking at the United Nations in 2003.

Bush's invasion of a country that posed no threat to the U.S. was illegal under both U.S. and international law, according to legal experts. Bush has been convicted of war crimes by citizen tribunals around the world, including New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Istanbul. Just las week, the towns of Brattleboro and Marlboro Vermont voted to indict and arrest Bush and Cheney.

In 2002 and 2003, Bush led a propaganda campaign to defraud Congress, the American people, and key allies into believing Iraq was a threat. Bush claimed Iraq had stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons to use against the U.S., and was sharing them with Al Qaeda.

Speaking near Rochester NY, Bush later admitted, "See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

According to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity, top Bush Administration officials told at least 935 lies about Iraq on 532 separate occasions. These included 259 lies by Bush, 254 lies by Secretary of State Colin Powell, 109 lies by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 109 lies by Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, 56 lies by National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and 48 lies by Vice President Cheney.

The lies about Iraqi WMD's were manufactured by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which included the most senior White House staff: White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Jim Wilkinson, Nick Calio, Michael Gerson, and Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby.

In July 2003, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed Bush's lie that Iraq sought uranium from Niger in a New York Times op ed. Libby secretly sought retribution against Wilson by revealing the name of his wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, to several reporters. The scandal led to the appointment of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who won conviction of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby was sentenced to to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000, but his jail sentence was commuted by President Bush at the urging of Vice President Cheney to prevent Libby from telling Fitzgerald the truth.

According to George Mason, the "father of the Bill of Rights," it was unquestionably an impeachable offense for a President (or Vice President) to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself."

WHIG was chaired by Bush's propaganda mastermind Karl Rove, who admitted under harsh questioning at the University of Iowa on Monday, "I fully expect to be indicted by the end of the year."

After the invasion, 1,400 experts in the Iraq Survey Group scoured Iraq for WMD's but found none. Charles Duelfer wrote the ISG's final report in September 2004 and concluded Iraq ended its WMD program in 1991.

This publicly confirmed what the CIA had privately known since 1995, when Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan and told the CIA he had personally overseen the complete destruction of Iraq's WMD after 1991 Gulf War.

In May 2005, the Times of London published the "Downing Street Memo" which revealed Bush's pre-war intelligence was a deliberate fraud, according to Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI6 spy agency, who met with George Tenet in July 2002. "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invading Iraq, Dearlove told a secret meeting of Tony Blair's war cabinet on July 23, 2002, eight months before Bush invaded Iraq.

This publication of the "Downing Street Memo" led to widespread calls for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. John Conyers and other Democrats held preliminary impeachment hearings in the basement of the Capitol on June 16, 2005. In 2006, Conyers published his explosive findings in "George W. Bush Versus the U.S. Constitution: The Downing Street Memos and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Coverups in the Iraq War and Illegal Domestic Spying."

After Democrats won Congress in 2006, Conyers became Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and has met repeatedly with impeachment advocates. Despite widespread reports that Speaker Pelosi is blocking Conyers from starting impeachment, Conyers recently declared, "I don't know who's ever stopped me before, I don't know why Pelosi's going to stop me now."

In 2007, Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced three Articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney for his role in the Iraq War lies. Kucinich's bill, H.Res. 333, has 26 co-sponsors.

The bill was debated on the House floor last November the House voted 251-162 to refer it to the Judiciary Committee for further action, rather than kill the bill. (The bill was renamed to H.Res. 799.)

Last December, Rep. Robert Wexler and two other members of the House Judiciary Committee urged Conyers to begin hearings on the impeachment of Vice President Cheney. Wexler posted an online petition and collected over 230,000 signatures.

Rep. Kucinich ran for President in 2007 and his calls for impeachment were enthusiastically received by voters. Last week, Kucinich fended off a primary challenge in his Congressional district and is expected to introduce the first Articles of Impeachment against George Bush.

But some in Congress believe Bush and Cheney will resign before they are impeached. "When the American people finally learn the truth about Bush's crimes, Bush and Cheney will have to resign, just like Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew," said a key Congressional Democrat. "The pressure on Eliot Spitzer is nothing compared to what we'll see for Bush and Cheney," he added.

The latest polls by Newsweek and AP-Ipsos put Bush's approval rating at 30%, a record low. His disapproval rating is over 60%, a record high, and suggests more Americans now favor Bush's impeachment than in earlier polls which showed strong support for impeachment.