AfterDowningStreet.org's David Swanson has posted in a recommended diary more news about Iraq war lies, which in the midst of the torture debate seem to have taken a back seat in the long list of Bush era atrocities to be redressed. Good people care about torture, but let's not forget it's just one little old war they started, based on utter fabrications, which has cost us $1 trillion to date, the lives of thousands of Americans who were told they were avenging 9/11, and which has destabilized the Middle East for the foreseeable future.
The depth of our indoctrination, however, has never been addressed, and until it is, generating outrage and charges for war crimes in this country will be difficult. Deprogramming is a long and painful process, but it must be done. Otherwise America will remain in a quasi-psychotic state of denial. The front-line defenses for deniers:
-- "They found the WMD" - referring to...
the discovery of degraded sarin gas shells from before the first Gulf War (1991) found mixed in with old conventional weapons. But sarin has a shelf-life of 5 years. Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Senator Rick Santorum said in 2006: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent." A Senior Defense Department official pointed out to Fox News that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions. "This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war." If anything, scattered rounds of rotting sarin which Reagan gave to Saddam in his tilt against Iran should serve to remind people that Saddam was once a close ally of the United States, not a "mad" dictator who "had to be dealt with" as many Americans are fond of echoing talk radio, many of whom never had to put on a uniform to go and "deal" with him.
-- "Congress was looking at the same intelligence before voting for war." No, it wasn't. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate presented to congress before the war, the administration's key document, was scrubbed of the conclusion by 16 US intelligence agencies that Saddam was NOT an imminent threat, and would attack or pass on WMD to a terrorists organization only if attacked first. Big, big time deception well-documented in Vincent Bugliosi's book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder."
-- "Zarqawi was in Iraq, proving an Iraq - Al Qaeda connection." He was in an area controlled by the Kurds, not by Saddam. Zarqawi did not swear loyalty to Al Qaeda until well after the invasion. Bin Laden and Saddam hated each other, as Saddam was secular and allowed women to become doctors, and bin Laden considered him an infidel for being an ally of the US for so long.
-- "Atta met with Iraqi Intelligence in Prague, proving the Iraq - Al Qaeda connection." Atta was in a bank ATM in Florida. The FBI has the security camera photos to prove it.
-- "They found a terrorist training camp with a Boeing 707 fueselage at Salman Pak." More right wing hysteria. Saddam built this for Iraqi commandos after terrorists hijacked an Iraqi airliner and ditched it in the ocean.
-- "They moved the WMD to Syria." Then why didn't Bush attack the convoys to Syria?
-- "Saddam was not allowing weapons inspectors into Iraq." The weirdest one of all, for anyone who was watching TV the day Bush ordered the weapons inspectors to return home. Despite Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix reporting that "at this juncture we are able to perform professional, no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance."
-- And when all else fails, "Why do you hate America?" This is a psychotic reaction of psychotic people getting too close to the fact that they have been duped. Whether it is permanent or can be cured remains to be seen.
It's not as if everyone lost under George Bush, many people, the shareholders of Halliburton, General Dynamics, and Lockheed-Martin profited handsomely, and they contribute to both parties. I want the revelations which David Swanson is blogging about, a friend and comrade, to go somewhere. We must prepare for the inevitable onslaught of a re-hashing of tried and tested lies. Since Iraq was invaded, a trillion dollars has changed hands. Whose hands was it in? To whose did it go?
It's all tied in: if it weren't for the Bush administration dying to have the Iraq adventure, we'd have rebuilt Afghanistan, decimated Al Qaeda at Tora Bora, and be on our way home right now, our treasury a trillion dollars richer (but not Halliburton's et al.) There would have been no climate for the torture we are finding out about as we keep opening previously locked doors in the Bush House of Horrors. There will be no "moving forward" as long as Americans are struggling with what their country has become if we accept the lies, and they say "no."