What We Know Now Part 2 PBU25

Having made the decision to go after Saddam, the Bush Administration now had an opportunity to actually do it. Back in those early days after the 9/11 attacks, our media was bombarding us with frightening stories of biological terror attacks with scenarios of small pox epidemics, nerve gas in the subway, dirty bombs, a menu of terror that we viewed nightly on CNN and Fox News. Fear had so permeated the minds of Americans that we were ready to believe anything, and many of us did. Was the mainstream press complicit in this crime, or were they merely being used?

In March of 2002, according to the DSM, Tony Blair's foreign policy advisor Sir David Manning met with Condi Rice in Washington to discuss the options in dealing with Iraq. The British were intent on putting any invasion in a political framework that it could use to convince parliament and the British public that military force was necessary. Manning's advice to Blair was to take the upcoming opportunity during his visit in Crawford with the President to convince the President to make an attempt to gather International support. The British had a much more difficult job of convincing the Parliament and the public of the need to resort to military force.

Fast forwarding to the Cabinet Office Paper of July 21, 2002, here is an interesting little excerpt that describes the need for an information campaign to shape public opinion.

"When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted. "

Weapons Inspections! What a great idea. Koffi Annan had already begun a series of talks with Iraq in an effort to persuade them to readmit the UN inspectors. But there is quite a lot of evidence that the US didn't want any inspections, for fear of not being able to find any weapons. In fact, our own John Bolton convinced Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to fire Jose Bustani, the head of that organization. There is some speculation that Bolton didn't want any inspections, which is probably the information that the democrats are seeking as they continue to hold up his nomination. In addition to Bolton's outrage, there were other strange attempts to keep third party inspectors out of Iraq.

"The UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been attempting to negotiate the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. During his third round of negotiations with Iraqi diplomats, the US leaked a detailed Pentagon war planning document to the press, spelling out some of the military options under consideration. " The leak to the New York Times - this sort of document never surfaces by accident - seems to be a clear attempt to raise the stakes after a new round of talks in [Vienna] between Iraq and the United Nations failed to produce agreement on the return of UN weapons inspectors". (Independent on Sunday, 7 July 2002, p. 14)"

Here is a link to some other instances of the US/UK attempts to railroad the inspections.

The really damaging evidence against the Blair/Bush coalition comes from the DSM on July 23 when Sir Richard Dearlove (head of M16) reports on his recent meeting in Washington. These are the key excerpts from the memo.

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

But this is not really news, since the mainstream media has said that we knew all of this back in 2002, why report on it now? Back in 2002, what we didn't have were these documents detailing officials at the highest level of governments discussing illegal war, the shaping of public opinion, and the need to create a legal justification for war. In addition to these astounding discussions, the DSM reveals that the actual war had already begun, under the guise of enforcing the no-fly zones.

"The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections."

Spikes of activity is a nice way to say that we were already bombing the crap out of Iraq before going to the UN, before Congress authorized it, and during the time that Bush was telling Americans that war would be a last option. The bombing was intended to get Saddam to fire back at the aircraft, and creating an incident which would allow the Coalition to declare war without the nuisance of those UN inspectors. The British joined us in the secret bombing campaigns in August when the bombing intensified to new levels designed to soften up Iraqi air defenses before the war.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the effort to shape the opinion of the public was in full swing. There were stories of uranium from Niger (lies), unmanned drones with chemical weapons (lies), there was talk of stockpiles of biological weapons (lies). The distinction between all Arab people began to blur, and suddenly, it was Saddam who attacked us, not Osama. The words were chosen not for their accuracy, but for their impact on an already frightened American public. Phrases like "imminent threat", "absolute certainty", "nuclear program", "mushroom cloud" permeated the airwaves and obscured the occasional voice of reason. The US convinced the UN Security Council to approve resolution 1441 and Iraq unconditionally let the UN inspectors back in under the threat of serious consequences.

Across the pond, there were documents that appeared suddenly out of nowhere that supported the British case for war. Colin Powell even praised them in his speech to the UN as "fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."
"Powell embellishes an intercepted conversation about weapons inspections between Iraqi officials to make it sound more incriminating, changing an order to "inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas" to a command to "clean out" those areas. He also added the phrase "make sure there is nothing there," a phrase that appears nowhere in the State Department's official translation. (FAIR; CommonDreams) .

Because the UN inspectors were unable to find the stockpiles of weapons, the Bush Administration accused the Iraqis of limiting access to the inspectors. Dick Cheney claimed that he knew exactly where the weapons were, but the inspectors claimed that the Americans were sending them on a "wild goose chase" .The preparation of a second UN resolution, this one authorizing the use of force, was underway in Britain. There was little support for the second resolution in spite of the effort of the US to convince the UN Security Council members to get on board.

The unforgivable sin in our rush to war, was the disregarding of the results of the UN inspectors on the ground. As one by one, the claims of the Coalition were proven to be false, US officials shouted them down, and what we, the American public heard was not the truth, but the lies of an Administration determined to have it's war in spite of evidence to the contrary. For example: the satellite photographs purported to show new research buildings at Iraqi nuclear sites, but when the U.N. went into the new buildings they found nothing. Saddam's presidential palaces, where the inspectors went with specific coordinates supplied by the U.S. on where to look for incriminating evidence. Again, they found nothing. The Niger uranium story that made it into the President's State of The Union address was discredited ten days before the beginning of the war. The "fine documents distributed by the UK" the ones that Colin Powell had praised at the UN, were shown to have been plagarized by academic papers that were several years old, and not as claimed by the British, written by their own intelligence agents.

These things that we knew before the war could have stopped all of horror that is and has been Iraq for the last two years. All of these things that could have been prevented, had the press done it's job, if more than one Democrat would have stood up and made some noise, not even John Kerry opposed the war, and we now have 1700 dead soldiers, and the blood on our hands from the civilian deaths of 100,000 Iraqis. All of this could have been avoided if we had stopped for just a moment, and listened to the truth.

Nothing has changed much in the past two years of a bloody war and a grim insurgency. The mainstream press still ignores the Downing Street Memos, dismissing them as not news worthy, just as they ignored the evidence of the UN inspectors back in 2003. I urge you to keep this story alive, in your blogs, in discussions with friends and family, so that someday we can correct the mistakes of this Administration, and ultimately bring an end to this illegal war.

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