The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism PART 4
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
31) The U.S. achieved its stated objectives in Afghanistan, and vanquished the Taliban.
According to accounts in the Asia Times of Hong Kong, the U.S. held a secret meeting earlier this year with Taliban leaders and Pakistani intelligence officials to offer a deal to the Taliban for inclusion in the Afghan government. (Main condition: Dump Mullah Omar.) As Michael Tomasky commented in The American Prospect, "The first thing you may be wondering: Why is there a possible role for the Taliban in a future government? Isn't that fellow Hamid Karzai running things, and isn't it all going basically okay? As it turns out, not really and not at all.... The reality... is an escalating guerilla war in which 'small hit-and-run attacks are a daily feature in most parts of the country, while face-to-face skirmishes are common in the former Taliban stronghold around Kandahar in the south.'"
32) Careful science demonstrates that depleted uranium is no big risk to the population.
Pure nonsense. While the government has trotted out expert after expert to debunk the dangers of depleted uranium, DU has been implicated in health troubles experienced both by Iraqis and by U.S. and allied soldiers in the first Gulf War. Unexploded DU shells are not a grave danger, but detonated ones release particles that eventually find their way into air, soil, water, and food.
While we're on the subject, the BBC reported a couple of months ago that recent tests of Afghani civilians have turned up with unusually high concentrations of non-depleted uranium isotopes in their urine. International monitors have called it almost conclusive evidence that the U.S. used a new kind of uranium-laced bomb in the Afghan war.
33) The looting of Iraqi nuclear facilities presented no big risk to the population.
Commanders on the scene, and Rumsfeld back in Washington, immediately assured everyone that the looting of a facility where raw uranium powder (so-called "yellowcake") and several other radioactive isotopes were stored was no serious danger to the populace--yet the looting of the facility came to light in part because, as the Washington Times noted, "U.S. and British newspaper reports have suggested that residents of the area were suffering from severe ill health after tipping out yellowcake powder from barrels and using them to store food."
34) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon a crowd of civilian protesters in Mosul.
April 15: U.S. troops fire into a crowd of protesters when it grows angry at the pro-Western speech being given by the town's new mayor, Mashaan al-Juburi. Seven are killed and dozens injured. Eyewitness accounts say the soldiers spirit Juburi away as he is pelted with objects by the crowd, then take sniper positions and begin firing on the crowd.
35) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon two separate crowds of civilian protesters in Fallujah.
April 28: American troops fire into a crowd of demonstrators gathered on Saddam's birthday, killing 13 and injuring 75. U.S. commanders claim the troops had come under fire, but eyewitnesses contradict the account, saying the troops started shooting after they were spooked by warning shots fired over the crowd by one of the Americans' own Humvees. Two days later U.S. soldiers fired on another crowd in Fallujah, killing three more.
36) The Iraqis fighting occupation forces consist almost entirely of "Saddam supporters" or "Ba'ath remnants."
This has been the subject of considerable spin on the Bushmen's part in the past month, since they launched Operation Sidewinder to capture or kill remaining opponents of the U.S. occupation. It's true that the most fierce (but by no means all) of the recent guerrilla opposition has been concentrated in the Sunni-dominated areas that were Saddam's stronghold, and there is no question that Saddam partisans are numerous there. But, perhaps for that reason, many other guerrilla fighters have flocked there to wage jihad, both from within and without Iraq. Around the time of the U.S. invasion, some 10,000 or so foreign fighters had crossed into Iraq, and I've seen no informed estimate of how many more may have joined them since.
(No room here, but if you check the online version of this story, there's a footnote regarding one less-than-obvious reason former Republican Guard personnel may be fighting mad at this point.)
37) The bidding process for Iraq rebuilding contracts displayed no favoritism toward Bush and Cheney's oil/gas cronies.
Most notoriously, Dick Cheney's former energy-sector employer, Halliburton, was all over the press dispatches about the first round of rebuilding contracts. So much so that they were eventually obliged to bow out of the running for a $1 billion reconstruction contract for the sake of their own PR profile. But Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root still received the first major plum in the form of a $7 billion contract to tend to oil field fires and (the real purpose) to do any retooling necessary to get the oil pumping at a decent rate, a deal that allows them a cool $500 million in profit. The fact that Dick Cheney's office is still fighting tooth and nail to block any disclosure of the individuals and companies with whom his energy task force consulted tells everything you need to know.
38) "We found the WMDs!"
There have been at least half a dozen junctures at which the Bushmen have breathlessly informed the press that allied troops had found the WMD smoking gun, including the president himself, who on June 1 told reporters, "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
Shouldn't these quickly falsified statements be counted as errors rather than lies? Under the circumstances, no. First, there is just too voluminous a record of the administration going on the media offensive to tout lines they know to be flimsy. This appears to be more of same. Second, if the great genius Karl Rove and the rest of the Bushmen have demonstrated that they understand anything about the propaganda potential of the historical moment they've inherited, they surely understand that repetition is everything. Get your message out regularly, and even if it's false a good many people will believe it.
Finally, we don't have to speculate about whether the administration would really plant bogus WMD evidence in the American media, because they have already done it, most visibly in the case of Judith Miller of the New York Times and the Iraqi defector "scientist" she wrote about at the military's behest on April 21. Miller did not even get to speak with the purported scientist, but she graciously passed on several things American commanders claimed he said: that Iraq only destroyed its chemical weapons days before the war, that WMD materiel had been shipped to Syria, and that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda. As Slate media critic Jack Shafer told WNYC Radio's On the Media program, "When you... look at [her story], you find that it's gas, it's air. There's no way to judge the value of her information, because it comes from an unnamed source that won't let her verify any aspect of it. And if you dig into the story... you'll find out that the only thing that Miller has independently observed is a man that the military says is the scientist, wearing a baseball cap, pointing at mounds in the dirt."
39) "The Iraqi people are now free."
So says the current U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, in a recent New York Times op-ed. He failed to add that disagreeing can get you shot or arrested under the terms of the Pentagon's latest plan for pacifying Iraq, Operation Sidewinder (see #36), a military op launched last month to wipe out all remaining Ba'athists and Saddam partisans--meaning, in practice, anyone who resists the U.S. occupation too zealously.
40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.
Not long after the September 11 attacks, neoconservative high priest Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One hears that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels there was a purpose behind his election all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world."
No, he really believes it, or so he would like us to think. The Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that Bush made the following pronouncement during a recent meeting between the two: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
Oddly, it never got much play back home.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This was truly a collaborative effort from start to finish. It began with the notion of running a week-long marathon of Bush administration lies at my online Bush Wars column (bushwarsblog.com). Along the way my e-mail box delivered more research assistance than I've ever received on any single story. I need to thank Jeff St. Clair and the Counterpunch website (counterpunch.org), which featured the Lies marathon in addition to posting valuable reportage and essays every day; I also received lots of lies entries and documentary links from BW readers Rob Johnson, Ted Dibble, and Donna Johnson, as well as my colleagues Mark Gisleson, Elaine Cassel, Sally Ryan, Mike Mosedale, and Paul Demko. Dave Marsh provided valuable editing suggestions.
I also found loads of valuable information through Cursor and Buzzflash, the two best news links pages on the internet, and through research projects on the Bushmen posted at Cooperative Research (cooperativeresearch.org), Whiskey Bar (billmon.org), and tvnewslies.org.
But the heart of the effort was all the readers of Bush Wars who sent along ideas and links that advanced the project. Many thanks to Estella Bloomberg, Vince Bradley, Angela Bradshaw, Gary Burns, Elaine Cole, George Dobosh, Deborah Eddy, David Erickson, Casey Finne, Douglas Gault, Jean T. Gordon, Doug Henwood, George Hunsinger, Peter Lee, Eric Martin, Michael McFadden, George McLaughlin, Eric T. Olson, Doug Payne, Alan W. Peck, Dennis Perrin, Charles Prendergast, Publius, Michele Quinn, Ernesto Resnik, Ed Rickert, Maritza Silverio, Marshall Smith, Robert David Steele, Ed Thornhill, Christopher Veal, and Jennifer Vogel. And my apologies to anyone else whose e-mails I didn't manage to save.
Editor's note: In the interest of relative brevity I've stinted on citing and quoting sources in some of the items below. You can find links to news stories that elaborate on each of these items at my online Bush Wars column.
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