Something is happening in the Midwest when the CHICAGO TRIBUNE prints a perspective on Bush as a slick liar and his administration is filled with the same. Here is an excellent breakdown on the immoral lying and corrupt manipulation of the Bush administration in regards to the events leading up to the Iraq war.


Administration's argument long on drama, short on facts

By Michael McConnell. Michael McConnell is regional director of the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago

August 3, 2003 CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Defending the invasion of Iraq, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recently declared that the United States, in light of Sept. 11, has the right to attack other nations, even on the basis of "murky intelligence." Unable to defend the quality of evidence used for the Iraq war, the Bush administration now wants to defend its ambiguity. Sept. 11, like a good religious savior, absolves us of all sins.

Murky data is itself a dubious, even immoral rationale for war, but the evidence presented by the Bush administration for war in Iraq was not even "murky." It was exaggerated, distorted, selective and fabricated evidence masquerading as absolute certainty.

In the months leading up to the war, the Bush administration portrayed the Iraq threat as certain, imminent and frightening. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice imagined a mushroom cloud. President Bush dramatized links to Al Qaeda, conjuring up smallpox epidemics. Last October he even hyped Iraq's aerial drones as capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction to the U.S., while conveniently omitting that they had a range of only 300 miles.

Kicking off the campaign for war on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "Imagine a Sept. 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000--it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."

Linking this massive destruction to Sept. 11 was so effective that a Knight Ridder poll showed that 50 percent of respondents believed that some Iraqis were among the hijackers on board the planes that hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when none was.

Knowledge and certainty

The message from the Bush administration was constantly one of knowledge and certainty based on secret intelligence. In September, Bush told the UN, "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

In a February radio address, the president declared with equal certainty, "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons." Even 10 days into the war, Rumsfeld, speaking of the weapons, told ABC News, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

No doubts, no questions, rather absolute certainty and frightening threats have been the currency of the Bush administration--long on drama and assertion, short on facts. The evidence mounts that this was an unnecessary and manufactured war based on deceptive arguments and outright lies claiming an Iraq nuclear threat, links to Al Qaeda and huge stores of biological and chemical weapons.

The nuclear threat argument started last September when Rice said on television that the only use for aluminum tubes that Iraq recently had obtained was for uranium centrifuges needed for nuclear weapons. Bush reiterated the tube argument in his September address to the UN. Many intelligence analysts were appalled because a debate was raging inside the intelligence community about their use. Many analysts concluded they were for conventional rockets, a viewpoint confirmed by British intelligence.

The Niger uranium purchase, based on forged documents, has been equally discredited. A former ambassador who investigated the purchase claim told The New Republic, "They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive."

Bulletproof?

The links to Al Qaeda, central to the fear mongering of the Bush administration, were even more tenuous. In September, Rumsfeld said there was "bulletproof evidence" of a Hussein-Al Qaeda link.

The big evidence was a meeting between an Iraqi agent and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Czech Republic, based on one unreliable source. Hard evidence of receipts and travel documents put Atta in the U.S. at the time.

Another strand to the claim was that Al Qaeda members were being sheltered in Iraq and had set up a camp to provide training in the use of poison weapons. Not mentioned was that the camp was in northern Iraq, an area controlled by the Kurds, not by Hussein. When U.S. troops reached the camp, they found no chemical or biological traces.

But in June, the UN Committee on Terrorism concluded that nothing had been found indicating such a link. On the chemical and biological weapons front, the Bush administration campaigned to discredit the UN inspectors when they found nothing. Now with free reign in the country and Iraqi scientists free to talk--the two conditions the U.S. insisted were necessary to find weapons--no weapons have been uncovered.

In addition to stonewalling the Sept. 11 investigation and the contrived Pfc. Jessica Lynch "rescue," a litany of assertions gone sour characterizes the Bush administration over the past few months. In May, Bush declared that they had found weapons of mass destruction in the form of two trailers. Independent international scientists quickly disproved that assertion.

Rumsfeld refused to answer about the cost of the war and then gave figures that grossly underestimated the tab to taxpayers. They purported to have a solid plan for postwar Iraq but now admit it was based on faulty assumptions. Rumsfeld insisted that no guerrilla war existed in Iraq, only to have Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, proclaim that indeed such a war was raging.

Since Bush's jet landing on the aircraft carrier declaring, "mission accomplished," more than 50 U.S. soldiers have been killed, with more dying daily. This adds up to a pattern of half-truths, deceptions and outrageous hyperbole that go far beyond a mere 16 words in the State of the Union address.

Trying to mesmerize

The Bush administration knows neither shame nor remorse over any of these errors. In the face of the unfolding reality in Iraq, the president simply reiterates the false claims of Iraq's danger without even trying to justify them. Constantly repeating the past stock answers, he wants to mesmerize us into forgetting that he is avoiding the real questions.

The Iraq war has cost the lives of more than 160 U.S. soldiers and several thousand innocent Iraqi civilians. Will those deaths now justify Iraq's future use of "murky intelligence" to attack others?

The majority of the people in the United States backed the Iraq war because of the certainty of the administration's rationale and a deep trust in the president. It is time to determine whether he and his administration merited that trust. The credibility and integrity of the United States of America are at stake.

We deserve a congressionally appointed independent commission to investigate the justifications for war. How high up does the deception go? What did the president know and when did he know it? A democracy, in matters of war and death, must have standards higher than "murky." We cannot settle for anything less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help us God.






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