DETROIT -- End the propaganda. The war in Iraq was contrived and is a horrible mistake. President George W. Bush's war minions, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, won't stop spinning even as the wretched truth overwhelms them.
Hearing the 911 tapes of the Sept. 11 attacks reminds us of how ill-prepared we were then and still are in many significant ways. The 9/11 Commission gave the Bush administration failing grades in a number of critical areas, including protecting the American people from nuclear weapons.
Instead of focusing on homeland security and protecting nuclear power plants, chemical production, ports and vulnerable infrastructure, we send an army of occupation into Iraq, killing tens of thousands, creating a new generation of terrorists and costing American taxpayers at least $6 billion a month.
The bleeding of our troops and resources in Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, plays right into bin Laden's hands. He can smile and plot his next attack. Bush wanted war regardless of what the facts indicated, and he knew one of his major arguments for the invasion of Iraq was flawed. That truth was covered up to protect him throughout the 2004 election.
The "National Journal's" Murray Waas reports Bush was given specific warnings that the intelligence community had serious doubts that high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq had secured were intended for nuclear weapons.
Bush was able to pin the Saddam-Hussein-shopping-for-enriched-uranium-in-Niger fantasy on faulty intelligence when then-CIA director George Tenet betrayed his own agency to please the boss. Waas reports the aluminum-tubes tale was much trickier to cover up.
He has seen government documents that concluded the tubes were intended for conventional weapons and that explicit information was given to Bush in an October 2002 memo. But that didn't prevent the president from using the tube argument, without any qualifications, in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address.
Waas writes Karl Rove was aware of the memo and mounted a political protection mission. Waas reports a "former senior government official" familiar with the plot told him, "Presidential knowledge was the ball game. The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do it with the tubes."
The cover-up worked. Smoking-gun evidence that Bush knew he was lying to the American people about his case for war was buried and he slipped through the election.
"You know, I didn't want war," was part of Bush's feeble response to Helen Thomas' pointed question about why he invaded Iraq. More and more people are concluding that Bush really did want war with Iraq and that nothing was going to stop him.
"Bush Wanted War" was the headline for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's column last week, in which he tried to explain how he was somehow misled into his enthusiastic support for the war. Cohen is one of the pseudo-moderates, like half the Democrats in the Senate, who joined in beating the war drums because they trusted Bush and his arguments for war.
I am grateful to Greg Mitchell of "Editor and Publisher" for alerting us to Cohen's continuing denial of his own complicity in propaganda in the march to war. Cohen, the former warmonger, now writes that "Bush wanted war. He just didn't want the war he got."
"It would be nice if Cohen would admit that, like Bush, he chose poorly, with disastrous consequences," Mitchell wrote.
Career intelligence officers, military commanders, troops on the ground and members of the struggling Iraqi government make errors. Nothing in the grand strategy Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld crafted for Iraq can possibly be faulted. "Things happen," Rumsfeld said when looting and lawlessness broke out in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam.
Rummy does admit fallibility on one front. He told an audience at the Army War College, "If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or a D-plus as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today."
Rumsfeld's own strategy in the battle of ideas is a costly disaster. The Pentagon hired a politically connected Washington public-relations firm to churn out propaganda and lies that further erode American credibility in the Middle East.
The Lincoln Group was hired to plant stories and bribe Iraqi journalists and editors to carry reports the flacks produced aimed at convincing readers that the occupation is just hunky-dory. A Pentagon internal investigation recently cleared Lincoln of any wrongdoing, claiming the work was not propaganda because it was "factually correct."
Lincoln teamed up with U.S. troops assigned to the Information Operations Task Force in Baghdad to grind out reports peddled to Iraqi media, according to a report in the British Independent. The paper claims that quotations contained within the reports "attributed to anonymous Iraqi officials or citizens were routinely made up by U.S. troops who never went beyond the perimeter of the Green Zone."
A former employee of Lincoln told the Independent the company eventually paid up to $2,000 an article. Some of the stories were hilarious, with the Iraqi Security Forces described as "brave warriors" and "eager troops," just as the Pentagon was downgrading the single Iraqi battalion once deemed capable of fighting without U.S. support.
John Pike, a director of Global Security, a defense think tank, reviewed several of the Lincoln stories and found them ineffective, even "comical." He told the Independent, "The first rule of propaganda is that it should not look like propaganda." You know, use phrases like "We Report, you decide." Pike told the Independent he found the reports "so cheesy" and "cartoonish" that the Pentagon propaganda campaign in Iraq was simply "embarrassing."
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week about the rights of detainees at Guantanamo and whether their cases should go before military tribunals. It was a waste of time for Justice Antonin Scalia. He's already made up his mind. Anything Bush wants he gets. No questions asked.
Scalia told the audience at a legal gathering in Freiberg, Switzerland, he was "astounded" by European reaction to Gitmo, where only a handful of prisoners have even been charged.
The Sunday before, Scalia got testy when asked about his religious views and position on the high court.
Scalia was leaving the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston after a special Mass for lawyers when a reporter and photographer approached him and asked the jurist about his critics. Looking right into the camera lens, Scalia said, "To my critics I say," and then he flicked the fingers of his right hand under his chin.
The Herald, a conservative paper, published the photo and described Scalia as offering an "obscene" gesture. Nino cried foul and wrote a letter to the editor defending his gesture and saying it "speaks for itself" and means "I couldn't care less." The paper came back and reported that as soon as Scalia made the gesture he said, "You're not going to print that, are you?"
The photographer added that Scalia's complete quote was, "To my critics, I say, Vaffanculo." That's loosely translated as "f--- you," but the literal meaning is considerably more vile.
I like Scalia. He says what he means. No propaganda.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 4 2006 |