The Truth Eventually Surfaces Devvy Kidd
May 31, 2003"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." So said Henry David Thoreau. Earlier this month someone noted that Mr. Bush had pulled the old bait and switch trick regarding the War with Iraq. With the Ussamah Bin Laden catastrophe hovering over Mr. Bush, he took to the airwaves and beat "weapons of mass destruction" for weeks on end. Saddam Husssein was gonna come-n-get us. Katy bar the door! When that failed to get the support of the American people, he switched to "Free the Iraqi people!" That, too, became the ad nauseum war chant.
I have yet to meet one single person outside the beltway (and I was in the Washington, DC area this month) who wanted to free the people of Iraq. Not a soul. Not that Americans don't feel for the people of the world living under tyrants, but we recognize that we cannot free the people of the world without jeopardizing our own Republic.
The people of the world will have to do as our Founding Fathers. They will have to die in the cause of freedom. That's just the way it is. It's simply amazing to see the continuing anti-American build up in the country America just "freed." Go home damn Yankee! How many times have we heard it before?
As just a side note, I believe Donald Runsfeld suffers from schizophrenia and I'm dead serious. I also think it's pathetic that the guy has never met a mirror he didn't love. The blood of every dead American military personnel over in Afghanistan and Iraq is dripping from the hands of Bush, Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, et al.
Now comes the truth about "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) over in Iraq. I hope everyone will make a copy of this article and give it to each of their congress critters and thank them for being the fools they are; e-mail it to a friend and hard copy to friends and relatives not on the net. The Masters of the Game orchestrating this one world nightmare cannot stand the light of day. Let's give them the sun.
WMD Just a Convenient Excuse for War, Admits Wolfowitz
By David Usborne
Independent Digital30 May 2003
The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged.
The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.
Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. "Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door" towards making progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine.
The comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. They come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be found.
The failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and Washington said were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more acute. Voices are increasingly being raised in the US and Britain demanding an explanation for why nothing has been found.
Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz, recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington most responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq. The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan.
There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way into the practice of American foreign policy. He is best known as the author of the policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs that was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida attacks.
In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He was the last senior member of the administration to agree to the push earlier this year to persuade the rest of the world that removing Saddam by force was the only remaining viable option.
The conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council in February when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that allegedly proved that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.
Critics of the administration and of the war will now want to know how convinced the Americans really were that the weapons existed in Iraq to the extent that was publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying as to the quality of the intelligence provided to the White House. Was it simply faulty given that nothing has been found in Iraq or was it influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons issue? Or were the intelligence agencies telling the White House what it wanted to hear?
This week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate whether the argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence. He raised the possibility that Mr Bush's policy against Saddam had influenced the intelligence that indicated Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.
This week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have promised to conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material they supplied the administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat on the White House was only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission that nothing may now be found in Iraq to back up those earlier claims, if only because the Iraqis may have got rid of any evidence before the conflict.
"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," the Defence Secretary said.
* The US military said last night that it had released a suspected Iraqi war criminal by mistake. US Central Command said it was offering a $25,000 (315,000) reward for the capture of Mohammed Jawad An-Neifus, suspected of being involved in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims whose remains were found at a mass grave in Mahawil, southern Iraq, last month.
The alleged mobile weapons laboratories
As scepticism grows over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, London and Washington are attempting to turn the focus of attention to Iraq's alleged possession of mobile weapons labs.
A joint CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency report released this week claimed that two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile labs used to develop biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with hi-tech laboratory equipment and the report said the discovery represented the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biowarfare programme".
The design of the vehicles made them "an ingeniously simple self-contained bioprocessing system". The report said no other purpose, for example water purification, medical laboratory or vaccine production, would justify such effort and expense.
But critics arenot convinced. No biological agents were found on the trucks and experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN Security Council, they were open sided and would therefore have left a trace easy for weapons inspectors to detect. One former UN inspector said that the trucks would have been a very inefficient way to produce anthrax.
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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.).
In case you missed this gem by one of my favorite writers, here's Charlie Reese at his best:
The Mists of Falsehoods
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030523/index.php
Charley Reese
Friday, May 23, 2003
I love this administration's ability to remain cloaked in a mist of falsehoods. If you listen to them, everything is going swimmingly.
Retired Gen. Jay Garner and several of his staff are relieved of their posts in Iraq but, of course, have done a splendid job. There is still chaos, looting and a lack of clean water and power, but reconstruction is proceeding with great progress. America is doing a worse job than Saddam Hussein in feeding the Iraqi people, but everyone is so happy to see the tyrant gone â€" though where he has gone, we don't know. Perhaps he's with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Not to worry, paradise is on the way.
As for al-Qaida, it has been decimated, crippled, rendered ineffective, except, of course, for those members who simultaneously blew up three foreign compounds and a business in Saudi Arabia.
Everything in Afghanistan is peachy-creamy except, of course, that it looks remarkably as unstable and undeveloped as it did a year ago. The president has also committed himself to his "road map to peace," but never mind that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refuses to accept it and again embarrasses Secretary of State Colin Powell by clamping down on Palestinians before the secretary has even shaken off the dust of Palestine from his shoes.
And, of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the American economy, except the absence of another round of tax cuts. The ability of this administration to live in a dream world, divorced from reality, is quite remarkable. Why, the falling value of the dollar is good for American exports. And the answer to the biggest string of record trade deficits in history is to have more free-trade agreements, never mind that they are the cause of the trade deficits in the first place.
Sometimes I think our whole country is on dope. How nice that Poland will administer a third of Iraq provided, naturally, that we foot the bill for the entire operation. But one has to appreciate faithful allies even if they are dead-broke and we have to pay through the nose for their support. I'm sure the Poles, with their vast experience in the Middle East, will be crackerjack administrators.
A purely advisory role for the United Nations devoid of one ounce of authority is naturally "a vital role." And while we were impatient with U.N. weapons inspectors, now that we are hunting these so-far-mythical tons of weapons of mass destruction, people must be patient and understand it might even take years. But even if we don't find them, never mind that everything we said to sell the war was a lie. After all, we got rid of a tyrant, even though we have temporarily misplaced him.
We shall, of course, leave no child behind, never mind the federal cuts in education because of a ballooning federal deficit and the further cuts in state education because of the state deficits. We have only to say something and it is so. We say we are going to improve public education, and bingo, it is improved. After all, a nation of functional illiterates won't know the difference.
And just look how we have expanded the great North Atlantic Treaty Organization, right up to the borders of Russia. Of course, the new members are too broke to buy arms, so we will have to foot the bill, and then there is the problem of no enemy to fight. Never mind. We will find something for NATO to do. NATO, like every other government bureaucracy, shall have eternal life, even though its reason for existence vanished a long time ago.
Sometimes, following the news, I think I'm having hallucinations, but I know I'm not, for I am as sober as a Southern Baptist preacher on Sunday morning. Perhaps there is, "Matrix"- style, a
dual universe. The Bush administration lives in one, and I in another. I wouldn't mind, except
that the Bush Universe is likely to have dire consequences for the universe I live in, as millions of unemployed Americans are discovering. Ah, if only words were magic. Then we could solve all our problems by just saying they are solved.