[Vision2020] The Deceptions of War

[Nick Gier]

         Greetings:

I've sent this to my usual column venues and wanted to share it with 
interested Visionaries.  Nick Gier

THE DECEPTIONS OF WAR:
THE COOKING OF INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ

President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are busy defending themselves 
against the charge that they deceived the American people about the reasons 
for going to war in Iraq.  Sorting through my thick Iraq file, I've come up 
with following examples of outright deception.
$               Cheney continued to repeat the alleged 2001 meeting between 
9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague, even though 
American and European intelligence agencies said the report was false.

$               The bipartisan 9/11 Commission reported that there was no 
"collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, but Bush 
and Cheney blithely continued to make these charges.

$               Even though on June 17, 2004 Defense Secretary Rumsfeld 
stated that Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was "not Al Qaeda," Bush and 
Cheney continued to state that he was. Zarqawi now heads the main terrorist 
organization in Iraq because of the turmoil of the U.S. invasion, not 
because Saddam invited him there.

$               The day after the 9/11 report was released Cheney claimed 
that Zarqawi "ran [a] poisons factory in northern Iraq out of Baghdad," but 
he should have known full well that this camp was not under Saddam's 
control, and when it was taken by U. S. troops, captured documents revealed 
no connection to Baghdad.

$               With regard to Iraq's capacity to produce nuclear weapons, 
Bush, at a September 2, 2002 news conference, declared that a new report 
from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that Iraq was 
"six months away" from building a nuclear weapon.  It was later discovered 
that no such report existed.

$               On December 8, 2002, former U.S. weapons inspector David 
Albright appeared on "60 Minutes" and stated that the aluminum tubes Saddam 
ordered could not be used to enrich uranium. He concluded that Bush 
administration was "selectively picking information to bolster a case that 
the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and in essence, 
scare people."

Bush and Cheney sometimes defend themselves by saying that they are privy 
to information that others don't have.  At the same time they declare that 
Congress voted for the war on the basis of the same intelligence they 
had.  They obviously cannot have it both ways. We now find is that most of 
the information not shared was contrary to the view that Saddam was a 
threat to the U.S.

In the fall of 2002 Bush kept telling us that we wanted to avoid a war in 
Iraq, but a July 23, 2002 memo detailing a secret meeting of British 
officials demonstrates that Bush had no desire to go to the UN, or give UN 
inspectors another chance to disarm Hussein.  Here are the crucial passages 
from this memo: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, 
justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMDs.  But the intelligence 
and facts were being fixed around the policy."

There should be no question that the Bush administration did in fact cook 
the intelligence on Iraq.  The result has been an Iraq in far worse shape 
than before, the recruitment of new terrorists and insurgents where none 
existed before, and the unnecessary deaths of 2,100 Americans and tens of 
thousands of Iraqis.

Some Bush supporters have a mantra that goes something like this: "It's 
better to fight terrorists in Baghdad rather than to fight them in 
Detroit."  During the Cold War millions of innocent people in the Third 
World died because both sides chose to fight in some else's country.  Our 
country would be much more secure if the billions spent in Iraq had been 
used to repair our crumbling infrastructure, protect our ports, search air 
cargo, and secure our nuclear and chemical plants.
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