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Rewriting the History of the Iraq War

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Donald L. Feinberg

In a Veterans Day speech today to military families at Tobyhanna Army Depot near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, George Bush said:

...it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began ... Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. ... more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate who had access to the same intelligence -- voted to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Bush is repeating precisely the things that nearly two-thirds of the American public do not believe.

We in the United States are not rewriting the history of the war. We are now writing the correct history.

All Americans relied on the intelligence given to us BUT VETTED by the Bush White House. The information given to Congress and to the American people has been proven to NOT be the same information the White House had. Worse, much information given to America by the Bush White House has been complete fabrication.

Any irresponsibility lies in the fabrications, and not on America's efforts to understand the fabrications. For example:

LIE: Bush still insists on clinging to the thoroughly discredited notion that there was any connection between the old Iraqi regime -- no matter how lawless and brutal -- and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

LIE: Bush assured us that military intervention in Iraq was a last resort and that the United States would make every effort to avoid war through diplomacy. However, the Downing Street War Memo proves that as early as July 2002, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD ... the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

LIE: V-P Cheney quoted testimony from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a "defector" delivered up by Ahmad Chalabi's exile organization, the Iraqi National Congress, which had already been rejected as a fabrication by both the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (Vice-President Cheney, March 24, 2003)

LIE: An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons. (No such report existed.)

LIE: Aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." -- Condoleezza Rice, Sept. 8, 2002 CNN. (However, administration officials had already told the New York Times that Ms. Rice already knew that Iraq's potential use for the tubes was in hot dispute within the U.S. government at the time of the CNN interview.)

LIE: This war is notable for its protection of civilians (for example, the saturation bombardment of Fallujah with White Phosphorous).

LIE: The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment of terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees.

LIE: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

LIE: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan. 28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

LIE: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney, Mar. 16, 2003

LIE: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." -- CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002; echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.

LIE: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002.

LIE: "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002. (Those drones can only fly 300 miles; Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S.)

LIE: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." -- President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in national radio address.

LIE: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.

LIE: "We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.

LIE: "Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." -- President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally Jun. 1, 2003.

LIE: "'Absolutely." -- Ari Fleischer, May 7, 2003 ( answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat")

LIE: "'This is about imminent threat." -- Scott McClellan, Feb. 10, 2003

LIE: Saddam "gassed" 300,000 of his own people -- Karen Hughes, 10/22/05

Mr Bush:

These were all lies, but were all given as truth by your administration, which was eager to go to war and enact your grandiose schemes for the Middle East. You repeatedly lied to us, and now over 2000 of our brave sons and daughters are dead, to say nothing of 50,000 or more Iraqis.

While your Administration is being investigated for crimes, and being charged for your crimes, you have the audacity to place the blame on others while hiding from blame yourself. As the cover-up grows, and as the deceit reaches higher and higher, the tough questions must be asked, and we must push for the truth your White House refuses to bring forth.

I personally will not rest until this nation gets the answers about this war that it deserves.

Donald L. Feinberg
Naperville, IL 

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