Misinformation – A Compendium

Some hawks like to think that we were lead into war with integrity.  Bullshit.

First, I challenge everyone, especially the war apologists clinging to the delusion that we were lead into war honestly, to watch Frontline: The Dark Side and Bill Moyers’s Selling the War.  Available online, the complimentary PBS docs chronicle the coordinated deceit, coercion, McCarthy-like intimidation of branding dissenters unpatriotic, Cheney’s intelligence power-grab freezing out the CIA to use his own massaged intelligence, and the press’s complicity. All this came out before George Tenet’s admission that “”[t]here was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat”.

Second, I did a brief search on YouTube and found six clips showing Bush officials directly contradicting themselves and edited them into this six-minute rough cut.  Did you know in 2001 Powell and Rice said Saddam had not developed any significant WMDs and was not a threat to his neighbors (let alone, the US)!?!

Exhibit C April 5, 2007 Cheney claims Iraq/Al Qaeda link the same day 2002 memo debunking claim is declassified.

The report said that the office of then-undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith — one of the foremost advocates for invading Iraq after the 2001 attacks — had deliberately ignored the CIA’s position and characterized the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda as “mature” and “symbiotic” in a September 2002 briefing to the chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Exhibits D and E are clips from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.  They’re not new, but they are concise in exposing administration deceit:

The first clip eviscerates any shred of credibility Bush has as war time leader in 2:27.

The second clip at 8:44 disects Bush’s false State of the Union claims regarding the 4 supposed terror plots foiled by the government.  Not about Iraq, but certainly speaks to Bush’s character and pathology.

Exhibits F and G: Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.

Exhibit H: Ex-CIA officer Larry Johnson, “a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000″, had this to say about former CIA boss Sandy Tenet and the Iraq “intelligence”:

“In fall of 2002, [Tenet] was told specifically that there was a high level source in Saddam’s government that was saying, ‘We don’t have WMD,’ ” Johnson said. “George Tenet’s hands are just as bloody as everybody else in this administration in helping gin up what was an unfounded case for war.”

Also, Johnson was among a group of former intelligene officers who sent an open letter to Tenet calling for him to return his Medal of Freedom and donate procedes from his book to families of killed or wounded soldiers that served in Iraq:

We agree with you that Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials took the United States to war for flimsy reasons….CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused.  On October 1 you signed and gave to President Bush and senior policy makers a fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)-which dovetailed with unsupported threats presented by Vice President Dick Cheney in an alarmist speech on August 26, 2002….

Although CIA officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda.

I stand on solid ground when I say the Bush administration are proven liars and the US was lead to war on lies, hoaxes, frauds. I’ve sourced my information.

I have first-rate journalists, elected officials, and more than 50% of America on my side.  America was lied to – What other possible conclusion can I come to? If anyone on the right who supports this war and has viewed the two documentaries, my Youtube clip, and the other sources laid out can show me why it is irrational and incorrect to believe that Bush administration perpetrated a fraud of the darkest, most egregious level by lying to us to justify this war, do so now.