Tag Archives: Weapons of Mass Destruction

How I Tried To Prevent the 2003 US Invasion of Iraq, and Why I Failed, by Scott Ritter

Posted on January 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

Scott Ritter knew that the good guys often don’t win, but he fought his lonely fight anyway. From Scott Ritter at lewrockwell.com:

No amount of truth can stop the world’s most powerful war machine fueled by the lies of its president

In fulfillment of his solemn, constitutionally-enshrined obligation, the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, on January 28, 2003, stood before the rostrum in the chambers of the United States Congress and addressed the American people.

“Mr. Speaker,” the President began, “Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens, every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This year,” he intoned gravely, “we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead.” The “decisive days” Bush spoke of dealt with the decision he had already made to invade Iraq, in violation of international law, for the purpose of removing the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, from power.

Regime change had been the cornerstone policy of the United States toward Iraq ever since Bush 43’s father, Bush 41 (George H. W. Bush) compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and demanded Nuremberg-like justice for the crime of invading Kuwait. “Hitler revisited,” the elder Bush told a crowd at a Republican fundraiser in Dallas, Texas. “But remember: When Hitler’s war ended, there were the Nuremberg trials.”

American politicians, especially presidents seeking to take their country into war, cannot simply walk away from such statements. As such, even after driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait in February 1991, Bush could not rest so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power–the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler had to go.

The Bush 41 administration put in place UN-backed sanctions on Iraq designed to strangle the nation’s economy and promote regime change from within. These sanctions were linked to Iraq’s obligation to be disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction capabilities, including long-range missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. Until Iraq was certified as being disarmed by UN weapons inspectors, the sanctions would remain in place. But as Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, made clear, these sanctions would never be lifted until Saddam Hussein was removed from power. “We are not interested,” Baker said on May 20, 1991, “in seeing a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics, Propaganda, War

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On The Anniversary Of The Iraq Invasion, Bush Press Secretary Claims Bush Didn’t Lie, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

Caitlin Johnstone demolishes Ari Fleischer. From Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

On the sixteenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, as the US government threatens punitive action against International Criminal Court investigators for attempting to look into US war crimes, former George W Bush administration Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has decided to publish a Twitter thread claiming that Bush did not lie to the world about Iraq.

Here is a transcript of the full thread by Fleischer:

The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed “Bush lied. People died.” This accusation itself is a lie. It’s time to put it to rest.

The fact is that President Bush (and I as press secretary) faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded. The CIA, along with the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD. We all turned out to be wrong. That is very different from lying.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Intelligence, Military, Politics, War

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The Reclamation of George W. Bush Is an American Tragedy, by Maj. Danny Sjursen

Posted on November 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

A soldier who fought in George W. Bush’s insane wars refuses to either forgive or forget Bush. From Maj. Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

The whole charade plays best as farce. Absurdity incarnate. The sight of former President George W. Bush receiving a medal from Democrat Joe Biden – once an ardent opponent of Bush’s war policy – in Philadelphia for “his work with veterans,” on Veterans Day no less, induced nothing short of a gag from thisveteran of two Bush wars – Iraq and Afghanistan.

George W. Bush, after all, led the U.S. military – to which I’ve dedicated my adult life – into two ill-advised perpetual wars, one of which was objectively illegal and immoral. In that war, in Iraq, some 7,000 American troops – including three of mine – were killed fighting in an unwinnable quagmire. Furthermore, though it slipped the attention of an American citizenry best known for its provincial inwardness, at least 250,000 Iraqis – mostly civilians – were killed. In a just world this would be labeled what it is – a war crime – but in this era of American hegemony, the populace simply sighs with apathy.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Imperialism, Intelligence, Media, Military, Morality, Politics, War

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Clapper’s Credibility Collapses, by James McGovern

Posted on November 15, 2018 | 2 comments

James Clapper is a hack and a slimeball. From James McGovern at antiwar.com:

Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s key role in helping the Cheney/Bush administration “justify” war on Iraq with fraudulent intelligence was exposed on Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington by his own words quoted back to him from his memoir “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence.” Hard truths, indeed.

Clapper was appointed Director of National Intelligence by President Barack Obama in June 2010, almost certainly at the prompting of Obama’s intelligence confidant and Clapper friend John Brennan, later director of the CIA. Despite Clapper’s performance on Iraq, he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Obama even allowed Clapper to keep his job for three and a half more years after he admitted that he had lied under oath to that same Senate about the extent of eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA). He is now a security analyst for CNN.

In his book, Clapper finally places the blame for the consequential fraud (he calls it “the failure”) to find the (non-existent) WMD “where it belongs – squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.” (emphasis added).

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Posted in Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Horseshit, Intelligence, Media, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance

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What if Russiagate is the New WMDs? by Jack Hunter

Posted on August 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

Russiagate is the new WMDs: a bogus story concocted by the intelligence agencies. From Jack Hunter at americanconservative.com:

Democrats, certain in their accusations of guilt, sound a lot like Republicans in 2002.

“The evidence against Trump and Russia is huge and mounting every day,” declared liberal celebrity activist Rosie O’Donnell at a protest in front of the White House last week. “We see it, he can’t lie about it,” she added. “He is going down and so will all of his administration.”

“The charge is treason,” O’Donnell declared. Protesters held held large letters that spelled it out: “T-R-E-A-S-O-N.”

O’Donnell is by no means alone in her sentiments. Trump’s guilt in “Russiagate” is now assumed by much of the American left, and reaches greater levels of fervor with every passing day.

This kind of partisan religiosity is not new.

In the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, conservative pundit Ann Coulter accused war opponents of “treason” and insisted of Saddam Hussein, “We know he had weapons of mass destruction.”

Coulter was confident and she wasn’t alone. Virtually the entire mainstream American right—from pundits like Coulter and Sean Hannity to President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress—was deeply invested in the notion that Hussein possessed WMDs and that the Iraq war was justified based on that unshakeable premise. This belief was so ingrained for so long that many excitedly rushed to pretend that chemical weapons discovered in Iraq as reported by the New York Times in 2014 were somehow the same thing as the “mushroom cloud” the Bush administration said Saddam was capable of.

Unfortunately for the right (and America, and the world), that premise turned out to be false. There were no WMDs. Today, only a minority of delusional, face-saving hawks and unreconstructed neoconservatives still parrot that lie.

And far from being “traitors,” Iraq war opponents today are considered to have been on the right side of history.

To continue reading: What if Russiagate is the New WMDs?

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Government, Investigations, Media

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