- "We were all wrong," White House chief weapons
hunter and longtime war booster David Kay admitted last week. There were
no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as the U.S. and Britain had long
alleged.
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- Iraq's nuclear weapons, death rays, vans of death, drones
of death, mobile germ labs, poison gas factories, hidden weapons depots,
long-range missiles, links to al-Qaida - all were bogus.
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- The only thing real is Iraq's oil.
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- If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as
it long insisted, we must draw one of two conclusions.
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- Either President George Bush, and secretaries Colin Powell
and Donald Rumsfeld, lied about the global threat they claimed Iraq posed,
and deceived Congress and the American people. Or, they were grossly misinformed
by their intelligence experts and must be judged fools of the first order.
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- If Bush and his team of chest-thumping, self-proclaimed
national security experts were really misinformed about Iraq's weapons
and capabilities, then they started a war by mistake - and presided over
the two biggest national security fiascos since Pearl Harbor: the 9/11
attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
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- It turns out President Saddam Hussein, whom Bush repeatedly
branded a "liar," was in fact telling the truth all along when
he said all of Iraq's old weapons systems had been destroyed. It was Bush
and British PM Tony Blair who weren't telling the truth.
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- Saddam should hire attorney Johnny Cochrane and sue the
U.S. and Britain for all they're worth.
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- So, take your pick.
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- The Iraq war either was the Mother of All Lies, or the
Mother of All Fiascos.
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- Confronted by these ugly facts, Bush tried to rebrand
the unprovoked war against Iraq by claiming it was justified because Saddam
was such a horrid man.
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- What arrant hypocrisy.
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- When Saddam committed his worst deeds - in the 1980s
- he was a close U.S. ally, secretly supported by Washington and London
with arms, intelligence, technicians and cash.
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- Now, the White House is trying to blame the Central Intelligence
Agency for the Iraq fiasco.
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- CIA director George Tenet may have wronged his agency
and the nation by not going public to debunk White House war propaganda
over Iraq.
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- But active and retired CIA officers kept warning the
public and media (including this writer) that intelligence on Iraq had
been deeply manipulated and politicized by a cabal of pro-war neo-conservative
ideologues in the Pentagon and the vice president's office.
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- They were ignored.
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- A shadowy Pentagon intelligence unit was created by the
neo-cons to whip up war fever against Iraq.
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- It fed either fake or wildly exaggerated reports about
Iraq to the White House and Pentagon, which were then trumpeted by the
neo-con media.
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- This column has maintained for the past 10 years that
a campaign of lies and disinformation was being waged against Iraq.
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- Though I detested Saddam, whose brutal secret police
once threatened to hang me, I was incensed to see western democracies fabricating
war propaganda.
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- I watched with disgust as so-called "Iraq experts"
and neo-con propagandists, few of whom had ever been to Iraq, warned night
after night on U.S. TV about the "deadly threat" from Iraq.
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- Genuine Mideast specialists were systematically excluded
from U.S. media commentary.
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- By challenging war propaganda, I became the object of
attacks by colleagues at this newspaper chain, and by other media pundits
in the U.S. and Canada.
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- Each week, I was flooded with hate e-mail.
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- "Don't be on the losing side," a close friend
warned last year. "Why risk your career and reputation by insisting
Iraq has no WMD?"
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- Why? Because I was absolutely convinced of my position,
and I passionately hate propaganda of all kinds - especially when it comes
from western democracies.
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- "Do you feel vindicated?" a radio show host
asked me last week. "You predicted a year ago that no WMD would be
found in Iraq."
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- Not vindicated. Just dismayed.
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- Dismayed by the continuing widespread indifference -
or even approval - by many Americans of the aggression against Iraq that
violated international law and basic norms of civilized behaviour.
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- Dismayed by the craven attitude of the U.S. Congress
and mainstream media.
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- And deeply concerned by growing hatred for the U.S. around
the globe.
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- Too few Americans seem troubled their president either
lied or blundered into a horrible mess in Iraq, so far costing 520 American
dead, nearly 10,000 casualties and $200 billion US for 2003-04.
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- This is an historic malfeasance far exceeding in gravity
Nixon's Watergate scandal or Bill Clinton's prevarications about sex.
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- The war fever and xenophobia fostered by the Bush administration
continues to grip America.
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- I am not comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany.
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- But one does begin to understand in all this how the
Germans, another educated and highly civilized people, were driven in the
1930s by a campaign of fear and lies, into supporting a policy of aggression,
religious hatred and racism.
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