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JANUARY 29, 2004
– Widely reported in the news, recently resigned chief US weapons
inspector for Iraq, David Kay, has gone before Congress in the past
two days to tell Congress two seemingly divergent things.
First he said that none of the WMD’s we
had been told about existed.
"It turns out we were all wrong, and
that is most disturbing," Kay said, as reported by CNN (article:
Ex-Iraq Inspector: Prewar Intelligence Failure 'Disturbing').
Kay, however, rather than making this
statement an indictment of the President’s pitch to rush the nation
into war, used the occasion to try and completely absolve the
President, claiming the failures are entirely the fault of the
intelligence community, and that no one at all exaggerated, misled,
or pushed the CIA to come up with evidence to meet their wishes.
Sounds good for the President, huh?
This is an example of the playing out of
one of the central games in the Bush/Limbaugh tell a lie, tell it
big, tell it often arsenal.
There has been much evidence and
testimony about how senior members of the Bush administration pushed
the intelligence community to come up with the evidence they wanted
to have, and that the Bush administration directly misled the
American people.
Much of this was documented recently in
a report by the non-partisan Carnegie Endowment. According to
this report:
"Administration officials
systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and
ballistic missile programs, beyond the intelligence failures…by:
In other words, taking speculation and
conjecture and pretending it was known, proven fact.
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"Misrepresenting inspectors’
findings in ways that turned threats from minor to dire
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"Treating nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons as a single "WMD threat…" distort(ing) the
cost/benefit analysis of the war."
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"Insisting without evidence… that
Saddam Hussein would give whatever WMD he possessed to
terrorists.
This last idea has been deemed absurd by
experts.
Uncovered, The Whole Truth About Iraq details the testimony of
one such expert, who explains clearly that for Saddam to give his
WMDs to Osama or any other terrorist group would be like giving up
his hold on power, since once they have the weapons, his control
over them would be lost.
David Kay made the point in his
testimony before Congress yesterday that it couldn’t possibly have
been this administration exaggerating the WMD evidence, since prior
administrations had the same belief, that Saddam possessed WMDs.
This idea is debunked in the Carnegie
report as well.
The report points out that there was a,
"dramatic shift from prior intelligence assessments," that the
Bush administration had slapped together over the course of some
handful of weeks.
"The October 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE), together with the creation of an independent
intelligence entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that
the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by
policymaker’s views sometime in 2002."
In other words, no, the Bush
administration did not simply feed us the same intel the other
administrations did. They "unduly influenced" the intelligence
community to come up with something more terrifying.
If you didn’t hear about this Carnegie
Endowment report, despite the fact it was a major release from a major
non-partisan organization that reached significant, detailed
conclusions, don’t be surprised. That is just the right-wing
domination of the media at work. It is still a significant work from
a major, internationally respected organization and was taken very
seriously everywhere except in America.
David Kay’s Bush-supporting claims are
a major frontpage story. The Bush-scam-delineating Carnegie
Report is, for the most part, entirely ignored.
The most important thing to notice is
the payoff of the most basic game the Bush/Limbaughians use: the
tell a lie, tell it big, tell it often game.
Despite much evidence and testimony, the
Bush administration repeatedly tells the lie that they did not
exaggerate, that they did not mislead. More testimony comes saying
they did, like the Carnegie Endowment Report, it gets ignored, their
lying continues on.
Which sets up the now familiar drool
test. As they create with elections by calling President Bush or
Arnold Schwarzenegger the unbeatable, unquestionable frontrunner,
regardless of all else, they set up what both have referred to at
one point as a "drool test," as in as long as they show up and
aren’t drooling all over themselves they will win.
It is the same in this case. Despite
mountains of evidence directly documenting the administration’s
abuse of truth and reality in the lead up to war – such as the above
report and video documentary, which is also an excellent source –
all the administration needs is one David Kay and the message will
get out there for most Americans to take that the President didn’t
do anything wrong at all.
Except, of course, for those Americans
smart enough to get their news from The Moderate Independent.
The Carnegie Report is 111 pages of
detailed evidence. The Truth Uncovered video is 90 minutes of
testimony from experts. Paul O’Neil’s testimony in Suskind’s
recent book on the subject, The Price of Loyalty, tells the same
story.
Today, resigned weapons inspector David
Kay sat on Capitol Hill and told the nation that the Bush
administration did not exaggerate nor pressure the intelligence
community to exaggerate WMD evidence so that they could justify a
war. We at M/I have a book, a video, and a report which combines the
work of numerous experts who combined say, "Really, David? That’s
nice of you to say, but next time you should try something like
sticking up for your nation rather than just for your own personal
interests and friends."
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