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Did You See President Bush On Meet the Press?

The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions. . .

President Bush on Meet the Press – 2/8/04

Complete Transcript

“We had politicians making military decisions.” Funny, that. Could I get a show of hands, how many people think that the current military intervention in Iraq was driven by the political whims of the Bush administration? How many believe it was because Saddam Hussein was able to deploy WMD “within 45 minutes”?

I encourage everyone to read this article at Mother Jones entitled, The Lie Factory. It is an excellent article. I’m going to continue repeating this until everyone gets tired of hearing it. And then I’ll repeat it some more. This war was manufactured. Planning started from Day 1 of the Bush administration.

The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meetingÇ — and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11.

Bush and Cheney created a secret intelligence group, the Office of Special Plans, to manufacture intelligence that would justify going to war. It was all false.

The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon “cell,” was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser’s unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA’s reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted.

Read this article, support the democrats who have called for an investigation into the workings of the OSP.

{ 1 } Comments

  1. evan | 2/9/2004 at 11:56 pm | Permalink

    Hey! Thanks for the posting on my site…thought I would return the favor. I really like the article from Mother Jones, “The Lie Factory”, so I posted a link for that on my site too.