The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism PART 3
commondreams.org
Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by the Minneapolis City Pages
The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
Bring 'em On!
by Steve Perry
<Continued from Prior Post>
21) Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups.
This is very concisely debunked in Walter Pincus's July 21 Washington Post story, so I'll quote him: "'Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,' President Bush said in Cincinnati on October 7.... But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating October 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States."
22) Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological attack in 45 minutes.
Again the WashPost wraps it up nicely: "The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public 'dossier' on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair--and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable."
23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable Palestinian state.
The interests of the U.S. toward the Palestinians have not changed--not yet, at least. Israel's "security needs" are still the U.S.'s sturdiest pretext for its military role in policing the Middle East and arming its Israeli proxies. But the U.S.'s immediate needs have tilted since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the Bushmen need a fig leaf--to confuse, if not exactly cover, their designs, and to give shaky pro-U.S. governments in the region some scrap to hold out to their own restive peoples. Bush's roadmap has scared the hell out of the Israeli right, but they have little reason to worry. Press reports in the U.S. and Israel have repeatedly telegraphed the assurance that Bush won't try to push Ariel Sharon any further than he's comfortable going.
24) People detained by the U.S. after 9/11 were legitimate terror suspects.
Quite the contrary, as disclosed officially in last month's critical report on U.S. detainees from the Justice Department's own Office of Inspector General. A summary analysis of post-9/11 detentions posted at the UC-Davis website states, "None of the 1,200 foreigners arrested and detained in secret after September 11 was charged with an act of terrorism. Instead, after periods of detention that ranged from weeks to months, most were deported for violating immigration laws. The government said that 752 of 1,200 foreigners arrested after September 11 were in custody in May 2002, but only 81 were still in custody in September 2002."
25) The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment of terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees.
The entire mumbo-jumbo about "unlawful combatants" was conceived to skirt the Geneva conventions on treatment of prisoners by making them out to be something other than POWs. Here is the actual wording of Donald Rumsfeld's pledge, freighted with enough qualifiers to make it absolutely meaningless: "We have indicated that we do plan to, for the most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with the Geneva conventions to the extent they are appropriate." Meanwhile the administration has treated its prisoners--many of whom, as we are now seeing confirmed in legal hearings, have no plausible connection to terrorist enterprises--in a manner that blatantly violates several key Geneva provisions regarding humane treatment and housing.
26) Shots rang out from the Palestine hotel, directed at U.S. soldiers, just before a U.S. tank fired on the hotel, killing two journalists.
Eyewitnesses to the April 8 attack uniformly denied any gunfire from the hotel. And just two hours prior to firing on the hotel, U.S. forces had bombed the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera, killing a Jordanian reporter. Taken together, and considering the timing, they were deemed a warning to unembedded journalists covering the fall of Baghdad around them. The day's events seem to have been an extreme instance of a more surreptitious pattern of hostility demonstrated by U.S. and UK forces toward foreign journalists and those non-attached Western reporters who moved around the country at will. (One of them, Terry Lloyd of Britain's ITN, was shot to death by UK troops at a checkpoint in late March under circumstances the British government has refused to disclose.)
Some days after firing on the Palestine Hotel, the U.S. sent in a commando unit to raid select floors of the hotel that were known to be occupied by journalists, and the news gatherers were held on the floor at gunpoint while their rooms were searched. A Centcom spokesman later explained cryptically that intelligence reports suggested there were people "not friendly to the U.S." staying at the hotel. Allied forces also bombed the headquarters of Abu Dhabi TV, injuring several.
27) U.S. troops "rescued" Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital.
If I had wanted to run up the tally of administration lies, the Lynch episode alone could be parsed into several more. Officials claimed that Lynch and her comrades were taken after a firefight in which Lynch battled back bravely. Later they announced with great fanfare that U.S. Special Forces had rescued Lynch from her captors. They reported that she had been shot and stabbed. Later yet, they reported that the recuperating Lynch had no memory of the events.
Bit by bit it all proved false. Lynch's injuries occurred when the vehicle she was riding in crashed. She did not fire on anybody and she was not shot or stabbed. The Iraqi soldiers who had been holding her had abandoned the hospital where she was staying the night before U.S. troops came to get her--a development her "rescuers" were aware of. In fact her doctor had tried to return her to the Americans the previous evening after the Iraqi soldiers left. But he was forced to turn back when U.S. troops fired on the approaching ambulance. As for Lynch's amnesia, her family has told reporters her memory is perfectly fine.
28) The populace of Baghdad and of Iraq generally turned out en masse to greet U.S. troops as liberators.
There were indeed scattered expressions of thanks when U.S. divisions rolled in, but they were neither as extensive nor as enthusiastic as Bush image-makers pretended. Within a day or two of the Saddam government's fall, the scene in the Baghdad streets turned to wholesale ransacking and vandalism. Within the week, large-scale protests of the U.S. occupation had already begun occurring in every major Iraqi city.
29) A spontaneous crowd of cheering Iraqis showed up in a Baghdad square to celebrate the toppling of Saddam's statue.
A long-distance shot of the same scene that was widely posted on the internet shows that the teeming mob consisted of only one or two hundred souls, contrary to the impression given by all the close-up TV news shots of what appeared to be a massive gathering. It was later reported that members of Ahmed Chalabi's local entourage made up most of the throng.
30) No major figure in the Bush administration said that the Iraqi populace would turn out en masse to welcome the U.S. military as liberators.
When confronted with--oh, call them reality deficits--one habit of the Bushmen is to deny that they made erroneous or misleading statements to begin with, secure in the knowledge that the media will rarely muster the energy to look it up and call them on it. They did it when their bold prewar WMD predictions failed to pan out (We never said it would be easy! No, they only implied it), and they did it when the "jubilant Iraqis" who took to the streets after the fall of Saddam turned out to be anything but (We never promised they would welcome us with open arms!).
But they did. March 16, Dick Cheney, Meet the Press: The Iraqis are desperate "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.... [T]he vast majority of them would turn on [Saddam] in a minute if, in fact, they thought they could do so safely").
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