Many Americans are vaguely aware that George W. Bush lied us into a war. Everyone knows about the infamous 16 words in his State of the Union speech and Valerie Plame. But few appreciate the full extent to which the administration brazenly manipulated intelligence, the United Nations, Congress, the media and ultimately the American people. The common perception is that Bush was just misled by his intelligence analysts. That he may have been wrong about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction but was only acting according to what the CIA told him. This is false.
In perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of the Iraq war deception,Hoodwinked, The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (published in 2004), John Prados, an analyst for the National Security Archive who has spent decades observing the CIA, exposes in great detail with smoking gun evidence how the administration knowingly deceived the public and forced CIA director George Tenet to take the fall during the lead-up to war. With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the recent propaganda blitzes by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, now is an important time to reflect on where our government has taken us since that fateful September morning, as the assault on truth and the rule of law launched by Bush has opened the floodgates for executive overreach, which has arguably increased under Obama... Continue Reading