The simple fact is that the documentary Hubris skimmed over the real story of the lies and misinformation that was given. Not only did white house officials cherry pick their statements to the public to sell the war in Iraq. They also had a group of hand-selected people who were working to play up questionable intelligence and downplay good intelligence.
They were called, "The Office of Special Plans" but jokingly referred to themselves as "The Cabal".
According to this New Yorker article by Seymore Hersch, dated May 12, 2003, this group was hand-picked and chosen for one specific purpose:
According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true
(I Don't Believe that for a Moment!)
—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States
They filtered the intelligence, they worked together to produce a product that was easy to package and sell to the complicit media. They worked to ensure that "the intelligence was bad".
for instance:
If Special Plans was going to search for new intelligence on Iraq, the most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The I.N.C., an umbrella organization for diverse groups opposed to Saddam, is constantly seeking out Iraqi defectors. The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’s pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House.
There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years. Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. For years, Chalabi has had the support of prominent members of the American Enterprise Institute and other conservatives. Chalabi had some Democratic supporters, too, including James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A.
The reason that I don't believe that for a moment is because this is something that was done before, intentionally, to provide hand-picked faulty intelligence when Dick Cheney had Donald Rumsfeld's job during the cold war. As shown in the important documentary, "
The Power of Nightmares"
Professor RICHARD PIPES: And the idea was then to appoint a group of outside experts who have access to the same evidence as the CIA used to arrive at these conclusions, and to see if they could come up with different conclusions.
INTERVIEWER: Did you think it was a fantasy?
PIPES: No! I thought it was absolute reality.
CAHN: I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, "This is a laser beam weapon," when in fact it was nothing of the sort. They even took a Russian military manual, which the correct translation of it is "The Art of Winning." And when they translated it and put it into Team B, they called it "The Art of Conquest." Well, there's a difference between "conquest" and "winning." And if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.
INTERVIEWER: All of them?
CAHN: All of them.
INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?
CAHN: I don't believe anything in Team B was really true.
VO: The neoconservatives set up a lobby group to publicize the findings of Team B. It was called the Committee on the Present Danger, and a growing number of politicians joined, including a Presidential hopeful, Ronald Reagan.
And who set up the Team B back in the day?
Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld
And who provided most of the faulty information for the "new team b" (Office of Special Plans)?
Chalabi
and who became Iraq's first appointed president?
Chalabi
and what was the excuse for not finding WMD in Iraq?
bad intelligence.
and what did wolfowitz say?
The war will pay for itself in oil
and how much did it actually cost the United States of America?
4 trillion dollars
“The minimum that it could cost now is $4 trillion,” Bilmes told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Thursday. “We have trillions of dollars that have sort of sneaked up on us.”
For example, a few years ago Bilmes and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz predicted in their landmark book, “Three Trillion Dollar War,” that about 45 percent of the troops sent to fight in the conflict might require disability compensation. Now it looks like 56 percent will.
and what did Rumsfeld say would happen?
"They would welcome us as liberators."
And what actually happened?
3,400 u.s. military deaths after mission accomplished
(unknown number of civilian contractor deaths)
And how many people did bodycount.org (a mouthpiece for the same complicit media) say died in direct conflict?
122,000+
and how many died from lack of medical care? from being expatriated refugees? from poor nutrition? from unsafe drinking water? from loss of electrical power in major cities for over a year? from poor prenatal care and depleted uranium/chemical contamination?
Unknown but likely over 1 million early civilian deaths.