Plenty available if one looks.....

Good links, thanks.

It never fails to amaze me how the American press is able to reduce everything to the level of petty party politics. We see them still apologizing for Bush's "honest mistakes", at the same time they are condemning Obama's attempts to legally go to war as "el Qaeda’s Air Force". I wonder what the press coverage would be like if they had a Republican president, or even a white Democrat president?

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a map that showed the Iraqis had rockets that could reach as far as Cyprus with WMD warheads, this was not true and they knew it, and when questioned, they sort of agreed, but did not put out a retraction.

Got any more info on that?

Plenty available if one looks.....

Whitehall & the Iraq War

"The government had committed several blunders here. The schoolboy-style plagiarism cast a veil of dishonesty over all the material issued in ‘dossier’ form."

The Iraq Inquiry

Iraq 10 years on

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a map that showed the Iraqis had rockets that could reach as far as Cyprus with WMD warheads, this was not true and they knew it, and when questioned, they sort of agreed, but did not put out a retraction.

Got any more info on that?

I think that the reports of Saddam having WMD came from a source, that at best could be described as, double check everything he says. But Dubya and a persuaded Blair were prepared to grasp anything that made a case for action.

Also in the pre-war government report by the British government there was a map that showed the Iraqis had rockets that could reach as far as Cyprus with WMD warheads, this was not true and they knew it, and when questioned, they sort of agreed, but did not put out a retraction. This was probably one of the "facts" that meant the great unwashed were prepared to back action, when you consider Cyprus is a popular holiday destination for the Brits and quite a few would have or had service personnel serving in the 3 Sovereign base areas.

I think there are two points to be made here.

1. After 9/11 Bush wanted revenge, and had an itchy trigger finger. Saddam was the first to pop his head up over the parapet so he got it first.

2. At the time the CIA and MI5 both agreed Iraq had WMD and would use them, and Bush was quite willing to go to war on what he was told by them.

Bush launched a second Gulf War, despite multiple dissenting opinions and questions of integrity about the underlying intelligence. Later U.S.-led inspections agreed that Iraq had earlier abandoned its WMD programs, but asserted Iraq had an intention to pursue those programs if UN sanctions were ever lifted.

Bush later said that the biggest regret of his presidency was "the intelligence failure" in Iraq, while the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2008 that his administration "misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq". A key CIA informant in Iraq admitted that he lied about his allegations, "then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war".

I don't think there were specific lies, made up facts, or misrepresentations, just handy reports that were readily believable, suited the purpose, and weren't as double checked as they should have been.

In the interests of civility, let's not call what Bush told us "lies".
Instead of "lies", let's call them "made up facts".

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I do not fight fascists because I think I can win.
I fight them because they are fascists.
Chris Hedges

A riot is the language of the unheard. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

I agree, the shrub did not lie about WMDs what he is guilty of is going to war with hastily vetted evidence some of which was a lie.

Don't you mean, "some of which was wrong."

There's a difference.

No, I mean lies by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war

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The Iraqi intelligence service did a masterful job. Everyone likes to forget that they were proclaiming they had WMD's. Back that up with a nice feint of having conferences out at some remote building with the "right" people forced to attend, and some heavy truck traffic and guess what, you have a WMD program.

It's called sabre rattling and it worked. The trouble is when you are the one listening, do you take a chance that is what it actually is or not?

The Iraqi intelligence service did a masterful job. Everyone likes to forget that they were proclaiming they had WMD's. Back that up with a nice feint of having conferences out at some remote building with the "right" people forced to attend, and some heavy truck traffic and guess what, you have a WMD program.

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I agree, the shrub did not lie about WMDs what he is guilty of is going to war with hastily vetted evidence some of which was a lie.

Don't you mean, "some of which was wrong."

There's a difference.

I agree, the shrub did not lie about WMDs what he is guilty of is going to war with hastily vetted evidence some of which was a lie.

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I tire of seeing people repeat that W lied to attack Iraq.

I get so tired of "opinion" and "popular bs" masquerading as knowledge.

If you want to stop sounding like just one more moron repeating what someone else told you to hear, there are ways to inform yourself.

I suggest you watch the whole thing (because it is interesting and not technical), but if you only have a minute or two watch a few minutes of this video, taken from that vast right-wing conspiratorial stronghold, a lecture hall at The University of California at Berkeley.

This is delivered by a guy who is hyper-concerned about man-made global warming. If you are going to accuse him of a bias, please tell me what his bias is.

The quick information you need is at 41:50.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BHdsjo-NR4


This is not actually the best one of these compilations I have seen, it omits a lot, but it is quick and useful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwqh4wQPoQk

Another:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCVZlLBchVE




It seems to me that I remember before the second gulf war seeing video of truck after truck after truck full of "something" unidentified streaming into Syria from Iraq. I may be making this up, but when the war started I think the forces were very quickly concerned about sealing the border with Syria.

"W" is hardly my favorite President. He did so much that I cannot excuse that I am ashamed of him. He was wrong about whether WMD were IN IRAQ at that moment in time. He didn't "lie" about it unless you want to say everyone was lying about it.


I'm not saying I know what is going-on in Syria now. I'm absolutely certain I don't. But I'm not going to let someone else tell me what I should think about the facts and draw my conclusions for me. Too many years of too much smoke being blown up my _____.

I **remember** a press conference with Madeline Albright and John Kerry trying to push President Clinton into a war with Iraq.

I don't want to hear about Bush's lies anymore. At least not among a group of enlightened people here. If you aren't enlightened, you didn't click the links.