[Vision2020] Re: Courageous Barbara Lee!

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

Joan:

Well, OK, perhaps I am being uncharitable towards people, citizens and 
politicians alike, who allow war to proceed without exacting scrutiny of all the 
issues.  But if any action calls for exacting skepticism and examination of 
everything involved, war is up there at the top of the list.  We are talking about 
killing and maiming 10s of thousands of people to achieve a "good" end.  

Joan wrote:

"Where you and I disagree is in what constitutes "bad logic."  Was it bad 
logic to assume that the threat of force would compel Saddam Hussein to allow UN 
weapons inspectors back into the country?  I don't think so.  I also don't 
think it was bad logic, per se, for the Congress to accept the intelligence 
information the Bush Administration supplied.  It wasn't bad logic but a foolish 
and misplaced trust in the Administration's integrity"

As I stated, anyone studying the W. Bush administration and the PNAC doctrine 
knew that Bush was going to invade Iraq at the time the vote in the US 
Congress occurred to grant Bush war authority.  There was nothing Saddam could do at 
that time that would make any difference.  The rest was window dressing for 
manufacturing consent (thank you Noam Chomsky) and to give the "appearance" of 
legality.  The vote in the US Congress we are discussing, that ONLY Barbara 
Lee voted against, was clearly a green light for Bush to invade, not just use 
force.  This was as plain as a clear sky in Montana.  

Joan wrote:

"The Iraq War was marketed, if you'll excuse the expression, as part and 
parcel of the War on Terror, and many reasonable, smart, logical people were 
willing to give the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt.   Should we write 
them all off as dim-witted morons?"

I've been over this so many times here's my standard reply: humble Ted 
Moffett with a computer and an hour or two discovered over the Internet before we 
invaded Iraq that the following facts or intelligence sourcing by the Bush 
administration (used to justify the most frightening image Bush spoke directly to 
the American people in a speech, the "mushroom cloud" over America) were false 
or misleading:

1: The yellow cake from Niger was a false story.    

2: The aluminum tubes in Iraq claimed to be used in nuclear fuel processing 
were not for this purpose.  This was a false claim.

3: Iraq had no nuclear arms program of substance except on paper.

4: Ahmed Chalabi, once a darling of the Bush administration, was a corrupt 
scoundrel who should not have been trusted as a source of critical intelligence, 
yet the Bush administration was sourcing critical intelligence about Iraq via 
Chalabi's associates, and feeding this BS to newspapers.

5: Both Hans Blix and Scott Ridder, critically involved in Iraq arms 
inspections, were waving their arms up and down trying to moderate the Bush 
administration Iraq WMD propaganda, yet were dismissed to a great extent.

Why would I know all this with high certainly, yet the New York Times, 
Washington Post, and every cable and network news outlet did not make these facts 
headlines over and over before we invaded?  Michael Moore is right.  The media 
failed us miserably, and we will not and do not have a healthy democracy here 
in the USA till the media gets its head out of its...

The New York Times is hammered from the left and the right for its bias.  
Read "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky if you have not.  How news stories 
are filtered and given emphasis by repetition or the lack thereof is 
brilliantly documented in this book and The New York Times is featured prominently.

Recently I heard Chomsky say he thought, of all major news sources, he 
thought the Wall Street Journal was offering some good journalism, quite a statement 
coming from Chomsky.

Ted Moffett

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