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<font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1><x-tab> </x-tab></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times">Greetings:<br><br>
I've sent this to my usual column venues and wanted to share it with
interested Visionaries. Nick Gier<br><br>
<div align="center"><b>THE DECEPTIONS OF WAR:<br>
THE COOKING OF INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ<br><br>
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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.<br>
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<dd>$<x-tab> </x-tab></font><x-tab> </x-tab>Cheney
continued to repeat the alleged 2001 meeting between 9/11 hijacker
Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague, even though American and
European intelligence agencies said the report was false.<br><br>
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The bipartisan 9/11 Commission reported that there was no “collaborative
relationship” between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, but Bush and Cheney
blithely continued to make these charges.<br><br>
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<dd>$<x-tab> </x-tab></font><x-tab> </x-tab>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.<br><br>
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<dd>$<x-tab> </x-tab></font><x-tab> </x-tab>The
day after the 9/11 report was released Cheney claimed that Zarqawi “ran
[a] poisons factory in northern Iraq out of Baghdad,” but he should have
known full well that this camp was not under Saddam’s control, and when
it was taken by U. S. troops, captured documents revealed no connection
to Baghdad. <br><br>
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<dd>$<x-tab> </x-tab></font><x-tab> </x-tab>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.<br><br>
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<dd>$<x-tab> </x-tab></font><x-tab> </x-tab>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.”
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</dl>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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br>
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