We Needed A Big Gas Tax

Brent P wrote:
> Hank wrote:

> > Dems are also much better environmentally.

> No they aren't. They use the environment as tool to gain
> control over our lives. That's all it has become, a tool,
> an excuse for more power.

Your brainwashing and ignorance are so severe that
you tend to come across as less than sane.

> > If Al Gore has won, coal plant emission standards would be
> > tightened. Hell, you can't even eat Tuna now because of
> > the mercury in it....

> The so called standards you are refering to under the democrats
> were an all or nothing upgrade policy.

bu$h's policy is one of letting polluters write their
own laws. You may "think" ingesting mercury is a good
thing. Informed, intelligent people know it that is
isn't.

> > Ever wonder who benefits from the 150 MILLION
> > U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?

> Going for tangents?

Facts. I see you deleted them. One thing you right wing
extremists all seem to have in common is a very strong
aversion to facts and truth.

> I could go on and on about things too. I am glad you people
> woke up and are now examining government.

Hopefully, some day you will wake up, too. You look
like a very foolish tool, thanking the elite for the
privilege to serve them. Turn off Faux News and do
some reading....

-


Ever wonder who benefits from the 150 MILLION
U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0223-08.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=21

"They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
warfare or morality."
-bu$h describing his own war crimes in Iraq.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
-- George W. Bush

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
-- Adolf Hitler

"Brutal and sadistic? By what girly-man standards? Compared
to how Saddam treated his prisoners, a bit of humiliation was
a walk in the park. AFAIK, No one died or even lost any blood."
-Albert Nurick, a usenet kook, on the rape, torture and murder
at bu$h's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
(http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0512-10.htm)


George W. Bush: "Intelligence gathered by this and other
governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues
to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever
devised." March 17, 2003.

http://www.commondreams.org/
http://www.truthout.org/
http://counterpunch.org/
http://thirdworldtraveler.com
http://responsiblewealth.org/
http://globalresearch.ca/
http://www.wsws.org/

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"You know, when bu$h said that he's against nation building,
I didn't realize that he meant only the United States"
-- Al Franken

Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...

Hank wrote:
> "Michael Johnson, PE" wrote:
>
>
>>Hate can be blinding for the hater.
>
>
> Which is why most of the folks who support bu$h's war
> crimes and terrorism can't see the facts or the reality
> of the situation....

Oops, I forgot to include you in the "Blame America First" group too.

"Michael Johnson, PE" wrote:
> Hank wrote:

> > Which is why most of the folks who support bu$h's war
> > crimes and terrorism can't see the facts or the reality
> > of the situation....

> Oops, I forgot to include you in the "Blame America First" group too.

Earth to bu$h apologist! bu$h is mot America, nor does he
represent our values and ideas. He and his criminal,
treasonous regime have done more damage to The United States
of America than any terrorist could have hoped for. Support
for his criminal, incompetent regime borderlines on Treason...

-

Ever wonder who benefits from the 150 MILLION
U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0223-08.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=21

"They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
warfare or morality."
-bu$h describing his own war crimes in Iraq.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
-- George W. Bush

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
-- Adolf Hitler

"Brutal and sadistic? By what girly-man standards? Compared
to how Saddam treated his prisoners, a bit of humiliation was
a walk in the park. AFAIK, No one died or even lost any blood."
-Albert Nurick, a usenet kook, on the rape, torture and murder
at bu$h's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
(http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0512-10.htm)


George W. Bush: "Intelligence gathered by this and other
governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues
to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever
devised." March 17, 2003.

http://www.commondreams.org/
http://www.truthout.org/
http://counterpunch.org/
http://thirdworldtraveler.com
http://responsiblewealth.org/
http://globalresearch.ca/
http://www.wsws.org/

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"You know, when bu$h said that he's against nation building,
I didn't realize that he meant only the United States"
-- Al Franken

Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...

Hank wrote:

> Earth to bu$h apologist! bu$h is mot America, nor does he
> represent our values and ideas. He and his criminal,
> treasonous regime have done more damage to The United States
> of America than any terrorist could have hoped for. Support
> for his criminal, incompetent regime borderlines on Treason...



#ank #ank #ank......you are WACKO!

Hank wrote:
> "Michael Johnson, PE" wrote:
>
>>Hank wrote:
>
>
>>> Which is why most of the folks who support bu$h's war
>>>crimes and terrorism can't see the facts or the reality
>>>of the situation....
>
>
>>Oops, I forgot to include you in the "Blame America First" group too.
>
>
> Earth to bu$h apologist! bu$h is mot America, nor does he
> represent our values and ideas. He and his criminal,
> treasonous regime have done more damage to The United States
> of America than any terrorist could have hoped for. Support
> for his criminal, incompetent regime borderlines on Treason...

So is the majority of the voting public that ELECTED him guilty of
treason too? Since he was elected by a majority he does represent at
least 51% of America. Let me guess, that 51% must be too stupid to see
past his evil ways. Yeah, right.

You and your croanies keep on foaming at the mouth because it does more
to help the Republicans stay in power more than anything they could do
for themselves. You will never understand that when you attack
President Bush you are by proxy attacking a majority of the population
because so few people believe the far left have any real solutions for
the problems facing the country. This includes many Democrats. All you
can do is complain while offering no viable solutions.

Now let's hear some more of that mindless bitching and moaning your side
is so good at. How about throwing in some blatant lies just for a
giggle or two. I need some entertainment, damn it!

351CJ wrote:

> >> > And as
> >> > far as gun control, I don't think it's a big thing if someone has to
> >> > wait 24 hours to be checked out for a criminal record/mental health
> >> > issue before buying an AK-47, do you? But some seem to think doing
> >> > that background check is the begining of a slippery slope to banning
> >> > shotguns for quail hunting.

> >> You really need a little more information on this subject.
> >> The second amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with hunting or
> >> shotguns.

> > It's the right to bear arms. Or, basically, if you want to own a gun,
> > any gun, you're free to do so.

> >> Waiting periods are NOT about background checks. That has been covered
> >> since 1998 by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System
> >> (NICS).

> > Educate me. What's the waiting period for? And why is it a hassle?

> THERE IS NO WAITING PERIOD!!! There is NICS, the I is for Instant.

> When there was one, or in the misguided states that may still have one, it
> is simply a thinly veiled attempt by the anti-gunners to further infringe
> our second amendment rights.

> In Washington state prior to all this anti-gun waiting period, Instant
> Background Check crap, if you had a concealed weapons permit (remember the
> EXTENSIVE Background Check) you could walk into any gun store lay your cash
> and permit on the counter take you handgun or long gun and permit and be on
> your way.

> That is the way it should be for law abiding citizens.

Right, for "law abiding" citizens. After an instant background check
to make sure you don't have a rap sheet that includes assault with a
weapon or a history of serious mental health problems, you should be
able to pay your money and take your new gun.

> >> Or in the case of individuals who carry concealed weapons permits from
> >> one or multiple states, they have already passed one or more stringent
> >> background check.

> > Good.

> >> How many is enough?

> > I just don't want the guy who has had some "stress incidents" at work
> > and was seeing a doctor for maybe talking about suicide or suggesting a
> > little revenge on someone who ****ed him off; or the guy who just got
> > out of jail for armed robbery and was "just trying to get his life back
> > in order" being able to walk into any gun show, or worse a Wally World,
> > and *freely* buy a weapon. That scares me. Yeah, they could steal one
> > or buy one from a "dealer", but at least they obtained it illegally...
> > we didn't just give him a sales receipt and say have a nice day, thanks
> > for shopping at WalMart.

> You position is not logical, what if there were no record of his sudden loss
> of his faculties?

What could be done... the same for a person doing his *first time*
assault with a deadly weapon crime. But I'm telling you, if a person
has a history of gun crimes, or is a psycho, and they mow down a member
of my family or a friend with a gun they just walked into Wally world
and purchased, I'd be ****ed. However, if they illegally obtained the
weapon then at least I'd feel the system did all it could to keep the
weapon out of their possession. Don't you see the difference?

> The exact thing you think these thinly veiled
> infringements of our second amendment are supposed to protect you from could
> still happen, these misguided and ineffective laws would do nothing to stop
> this guy complete with "stress incidents" from legally buying his gun. THE
> GUN IS NOT THE PROBLEM, neither are the law abiding citizens.

Right, they *could*. No system is perfect. Case in point: Terrorism.
You can't stop it. You can only take precautions. However, in both
cases not taking some precautions is asinine.

> >> Should you have to retake your drivers exam once a month?

> > We have "exams"?! I only remember having to start the car, put it in
> > drive, turn the wheel a little, hit the brake once or twice and then a
> > driver's license spit out. But what a novel idea! I'd suggest a real
> > road course with curves, cones, water, heavy acceleration, braking and
> > turning. Followed by a written test about the rules of the road --
> > blinker use, tailgating, obstructing the left/passing lane and lane
> > discipline in general, paying attention to traffic signals (not running
> > them, or be talking on a cell phone and stopped, after it has changed
> > to green 5-10 seconds ago) and requiring every licensed driver pass
> > both exams about every 3-4 years.

> The truth is, the anti-gunners want registration and licensing not for
> safety, but to erect the record-keeping apparatus necessary to make
> confiscation of privately owned firearms achievable in the future.

That thinking, IMO, is paranoid.

> >> After all many more Americans die from automobiles than guns.

> > I'm just glad the average American isn't in the [immediate] possession
> > of gun as often as they drive a car.

> There are over 100,000,000 gun owners in the US. are you sure you know what
> you are saying?

Yes, I do. I'm saying *immediate possession*. Most folks aren't
packing on their way to, at, and from work.

> The number of privately owned guns in the U.S. is at an all-time high. The
> Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) estimates that
> there were about 215 million guns in 1999, when the number of new guns was
> averaging about 4.5 million (about 2%) annually. A report for the National
> Academy of Sciences put the 1999 figure at 258 million. According to the
> Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 30.7 million approved (new and
> used) NICS firearm transactions between 2000 2003.
> See BATF, "Firearms Commerce in the United States 2001/2002"
> (www.atf.gov/pub/index.htm#Firearms).

> >> Does your "no big thing" attitude apply to a person who already has one
> >> or more guns?

> > Why not?

> Because it is a misguided, and ineffective wasteful (man hours and money)
> thinly veiled infringement of our second amendment.

In this age, the technology is there to make it rather easy.

> >> What practical difference does that person waiting to buy their 2nd, 3rd,
> >> or 4th gun make?

> > Ask the folks who survived Columbine, CO. More weapons can mean more
> > carnage. Seen the video floating around with the high school kid
> > packing about 9-10 guns under everyday baggy clothing?

> Ask them WHAT? How many totally misguided, and ineffective anti-gun laws
> were broken (hint, more than 20) while these criminals were getting the guns
> they carried during that crime?

> Again, What practical difference does that person waiting to buy their 2nd,
> 3rd, or 4th gun make? Can you honestly say you think it makes a practical
> difference?

It would make a difference in a case where someone bought a first
weapon, then had an incident/crime with a weapon, and then later wanted
to buy another weapon.

> >> If you really wanted to do something about criminals with guns, you would
> >> stop supporting the harassment of honest law abiding Americans, and go
> >> after the criminals.

> > We already go after criminals... the cops do a great job... they get
> > them locked up. Unfortunately, the punishments don't fit the crimes.

> My point exactly! The feel good laws are totally misguided, and
> ineffective! They should be going after criminal activities, NOT LAW
> ABIDING CITIZENS!

To make sure you're not a ex-felon with a weapon history is not going
after law abiding citizens.

> >> If a criminal wants a gun they will get it with or without these silly
> >> little feel good infringements, and they do because they know there are
> >> no serious ramifications if they get caught with a gun.

> > Do you lock your doors at night? Do lock your car doors when you leave
> > it in a parking lot? Do you try to keep your house looking lived in
> > while you're gone out of town? Sure you do. But why do you do these
> > "little feel good infringements"? Because it's something... and it
> > helps, if even just a little.

> You obviously DO NOT HAVE A CLUE what the hell you are talking about.

> No I DO NOT Lock my doors at night, or when I go out (leave my property),
> unless it is for overnight. I don't lock my vehicles at home either.

> I do not try to keep my house looking lived in while I'm gone out of town.
> In order to determine whether our home looks lived in or not you would have
> to be trespassing, you would have had to navigate my closed locked
> (automatic) gate traveled my 1200 foot driveway and navigate another closed
> gate, then crossed my 1.5 acre fenced dog yard to see my house which is only
> visible from my property, or over 1 mile away.

> I carry a loaded sidearm. That is as feel good as I need it.

Most people don't have the luxury of living in a fortress and most
don't walk around packing heat. Most live in urban or suburban
neighborhoods with neighbors in close proximity where gates, fenced dog
yards and a weapon strapped to you isn't possible or practical. For
these folks, locking doors and making their homes look lived in when
they're gone is the only viable option.

> >> Law abiding Americans have an inalienable right to firearms,

> > I totally agree! You should be able to own an armory, as long as you
> > don't have a history of pointing guns at people or have serious mental
> > problems.

> No you do not totally agree, You believe many obstacles and fees are OK, I
> DO NOT!!! You see nothing wrong with limitless harassment of law abiding
> Americans and gun owners. I see that as a violation of my inalienable
> second amendment rights.

You're seeing things that are not there. I said nothing of fees, nor
did I say limitless harassment. I'm taking about a background check to
make sure you're not a criminal or psycho.

Patrick
'93 Cobra

Michael Johnson, PE wrote:
> Hank wrote:

>> Earth to bu$h apologist! bu$h is mot America, nor does he
>> represent our values and ideas. He and his criminal, treasonous regime
>> have done more damage to The United States of America than any
>> terrorist could have hoped for. Support for his criminal, incompetent
>> regime borderlines on Treason...

> So is the majority of the voting public that ELECTED him g
> uilty of treason too?

They're guilty primarily of being ignorant and gullible.
But now that we know beyond any doubt that bu$h is a liar,
a thief, an AWOL draft dodging coward, a war criminal,
a torturer, and a child butchering terrorist, the minority
of radical extremists who still support him, border on being
treasonous.

> Since he was elected by a majority he does represent at
> least 51% of America. Let me guess, that 51% must be too
> stupid to see past his evil ways. Yeah, right.

Why should that surprise you? Hitler enjoyed considerable
support while he was destroying his Country, too.

> You will never understand that when you attack
> President Bush you are by proxy attacking a majority
> of the population

Not anymore. The gullible and brainwashed extremists who
still support his illegal, immoral, and treasonous policies,
represent a rapidly shrinking minority.

> All you can do is complain while offering no viable solutions.
> Now let's hear some more of that mindless bitching and
> moaning your side is so good at.

Your mindless bitching and moaning serve no purpose. Do
you have any solutions? Pull the troops out of Iraq, invest
the hundreds of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars saved here
at home. End corporate welfare and repeal bu$h's obscene
tax breaks for the elite 1% - just for starters....

> How about throwing in some blatant lies just for a
> giggle or two.

These are kinda funny. Even funnier, is that folks like you
were gullible enough to believe 'em. <chuckle>

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0730-06.htm


The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
Bring 'em On!

by Steve Perry

1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly
maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that
diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to
prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the
contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's
March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security
adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN
sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W
peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "**** Saddam. We're taking
him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international
development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told
the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few
months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either
February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at
2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that
Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit
S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]....
Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual
light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told
Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes
Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on
September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront
a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had
been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency.
Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a
draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a
U.S. that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate
American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the
point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge
the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive"
wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent
drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never
changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle,
William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization
called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause
forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration
from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of
September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S.,
a belief supported by available intelligence evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass
destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq: "The
decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main
justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic
reasons.... [T]here were many other important factors as well." Right.
But they did not come under the heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence: They
set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and ignored
everything that contradicted it. In the end, this required that
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the findings of analysts from
the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy
bureau) and stake their claim largely on the basis of isolated,
anecdotal testimony from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed
Chalabi.) But the administration did not just listen to the defectors;
it promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public
opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there was a
connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place was that the
Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these sorts of claims to
every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of
the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe the Bush
administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American
people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has
had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us
the intelligence to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been
quoted as saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not
understand the nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure
of senior administration officials to speak honestly about what the
intelligence showed."

3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions, and here
is W's most notorious case in point: Once the administration decided
to issue a damage-controlling (they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of
African uranium, they were obliged to couch it in another, more
perilous lie: that the administration, and quite likely Bush himself,
thought the uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting
ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times
on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger in
2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the behest of the CIA and
Dick Cheney's office and found them to be groundless, describes what
followed this way: "Although I did not file a written report, there
should be at least four documents in U.S. government archives
confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's
report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the
embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer
from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have
been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I
have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard
operating procedure."

4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was just
as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit cagier in its
formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has
attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for
nuclear weapons production." This is altogether false in its
implication (that this is the likeliest use for these materials) and
may be untrue in its literal sense as well. As the London Independent
summed it up recently, "The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad
tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in
gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally
persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes
were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed
El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes
were not even suitable for centrifuges." [emphasis added]

5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for the
administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but
not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence
errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has taken
the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the Uranium address. As
the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as
it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a
second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The
Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to
produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ...
Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low,
with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the
push for war."

In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State of the
Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it again.

7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq
could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons.

Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no
such report existed.

8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of
9/11.

One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's fibs,
this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary threads
imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated, handpicked Iraqi
defectors that there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, a claim
CIA analysts did not corroborate and that postwar U.S. military
inspectors conceded did not exist; and second, old intelligence
accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad between a bin Laden emissary and
officers from Saddam's intelligence service, which did not lead to any
subsequent contact that U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up.
According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory
Thielman, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies well in advance
of the war was that "there was no significant pattern of cooperation
between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation."

9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as anyone who
has paid attention to the state of Arab popular sentiment already
realizes. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid
expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the U.S. wants westernized,
secular leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to
neutralize the politically ambitious anti-Western religious sects
popping up everywhere. If a little brutality and graft are required to
do the job, it has never troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically,
these standards describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein.
Judging from the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush
administration will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and
when they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown
Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than most
people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed choice to
lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his INC that
funneled compliant defectors to the Bush administration, where they
attested to everything the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and
Iraq (meaning, mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The
administration proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the
combined intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam
was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and posed no
imminent threat to anyone.

Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of Langley, but
it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi National Congress and
installed Chalabi at the helm back in the days following Gulf War I,
when the thought was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an
internal opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have
disliked and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous
ways have alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy
establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense,
and therefore the White House.

11) The United States is waging a war on terror.

Practically any school child could recite the terms of the Bush
Doctrine, and may have to before the Ashcroft Justice Department is
finished: The global war on terror is about confronting terrorist
groups and the nations that harbor them. The United States does not
make deals with terrorists or nations where they find safe lodging.

Leave aside the blind eye that the U.S. has always cast toward
Israel's actions in the territories. How are the Bushmen doing
elsewhere vis-à-vis their announced principles? We can start with
their fabrications and manipulations of Iraqi WMD evidence--which, in
the eyes of weapons inspectors, the UN Security Council, American
intelligence analysts, and the world at large, did not pose any
imminent threat.

The events of recent months have underscored a couple more gaping
violations of W's cardinal anti-terror rules. In April the Pentagon
made a cooperation pact with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an
anti-Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq. Prior to the 1979 Iranian
revolution, American intelligence blamed it for the death of several
U.S. nationals in Iran.

Most glaring of all is the Bush administration's remarkable treatment
of Saudi Arabia. Consider: Eleven of the nineteen September 11
hijackers were Saudis. The ruling House of Saud has longstanding and
well-known ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits, which it
funds (read protection money) to keep them from making mischief at
home. The May issue of Atlantic Monthly had a nice piece on the House
of Saud that recounts these connections.

Yet the Bush government has never said boo regarding the Saudis and
international terrorism. In fact, when terror bombers struck Riyadh in
May, hitting compounds that housed American workers as well, Colin
Powell went out of his way to avoid tarring the House of Saud:
"Terrorism strikes everywhere and everyone. It is a threat to the
civilized world. We will commit ourselves again to redouble our
efforts to work closely with our Saudi friends and friends all around
the world to go after al Qaeda." Later it was alleged that the Riyadh
bombers purchased some of their ordnance from the Saudi National
Guard, but neither Powell nor anyone else saw fit to revise their
statements about "our Saudi friends."

Why do the Bushmen give a pass to the Saudi terror hotbed? Because the
House of Saud controls a lot of oil, and they are still (however
tenuously) on our side. And that, not terrorism, is what matters most
in Bush's foreign policy calculus.

While the bomb craters in Riyadh were still smoking, W held a meeting
with Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Speaking publicly
afterward, he outlined a deal for U.S. military aid to the Philippines
in exchange for greater "cooperation" in getting American hands round
the throats of Filipino terrorists. He mentioned in particular the
U.S.'s longtime nemesis Abu Sayyaf--and he also singled out the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front, a small faction based on Mindanao, the
southernmost big island in the Philippine chain.

Of course it's by purest coincidence that Mindanao is the location of
Asia's richest oil reserves.

12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist elements, in
particular by crippling al Qaeda.

A resurgent al Qaeda has been making international news since around
the time of the Saudi Arabia bombings in May. The best coverage by far
is that of Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad. According to
Shahzad's detailed accounts, al Qaeda has reorganized itself along
leaner, more diffuse lines, effectively dissolving itself into a
coalition of localized units that mean to strike frequently, on a
small scale, and in multiple locales around the world. Since claiming
responsibility for the May Riyadh bombings, alleged al Qaeda
communiqués have also claimed credit for some of the strikes at U.S.
troops in Iraq.

13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from terror on
U.S. soil.

Like the Pentagon "plan" for occupying postwar Iraq, the Department of
Homeland Security is mainly a Bush administration PR dirigible
untethered to anything of substance. It's a scandal waiting to happen,
and the only good news for W is that it's near the back of a fairly
long line of scandals waiting to happen.

On May 26 the trade magazine Federal Computer Week published a report
on DHS's first 100 days. At that point the nerve center of Bush's
domestic war on terror had only recently gotten e-mail service. As for
the larger matter of creating a functioning organizational grid and,
more important, a software architecture plan for integrating the
enormous mass of data that DHS is supposed to process--nada. In the
nearly two years since the administration announced its intention to
create a cabinet-level homeland security office, nothing meaningful
has been accomplished. And there are no funds to implement a network
plan if they had one. According to the magazine, "Robert David Steele,
an author and former intelligence officer, points out that there are
at least 30 separate intelligence systems [theoretically feeding into
DHS] and no money to connect them to one another or make them
interoperable. 'There is nothing in the president's homeland security
program that makes America safer,' he said."

14) The Bush administration has nothing to hide concerning the events
of September 11, 2001, or the intelligence evidence collected prior to
that day.

First Dick Cheney personally intervened to scuttle a broad
congressional investigation of the day's events and their origins. And
for the past several months the administration has fought a quiet
rear-guard action culminating in last week's delayed release of
Congress's more modest 9/11 report. The White House even went so far
as to classify after the fact materials that had already been
presented in public hearing.

What were they trying to keep under wraps? The Saudi connection,
mostly, and though 27 pages of the details have been excised from the
public report, there is still plenty of evidence lurking in its
extensively massaged text. (When you see the phrase "foreign nation"
substituted in brackets, it's nearly always Saudi Arabia.) The report
documents repeated signs that there was a major attack in the works
with extensive help from Saudi nationals and apparently also at least
one member of the government. It also suggests that is one reason
intel operatives didn't chase the story harder: Saudi Arabia was by
policy fiat a "friendly" nation and therefore no threat. The report
does not explore the administration's response to the intelligence
briefings it got; its purview is strictly the performance of
intelligence agencies. All other questions now fall to the independent
9/11 commission, whose work is presently being slowed by the White
House's foot-dragging in turning over evidence.

15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on September
11, 2001.

Old questions abound here. The central mystery, of how U.S. air
defenses could have responded so poorly on that day, is fairly easy to
grasp. A cursory look at that morning's timeline of events is enough.
In very short strokes:

8:13 Flight 11 disobeys air traffic instructions and turns off its
transponder.

8:40 NORAD command center claims first notification of likely Flight
11 hijacking.

8:42 Flight 175 veers off course and shuts down its transponder.

8:43 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 175 hijacking.

8:46 Flight 11 hits the World Trade Center north tower.

8:46 Flight 77 goes off course.

9:03 Flight 175 hits the WTC south tower.

9:16 Flight 93 goes off course.

9:16 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 93 hijacking.

9:24 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 77 hijacking.

9:37 Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.

10:06 Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field.

The open secret here is that stateside U.S. air defenses had been
reduced to paltry levels since the end of the Cold War. According to a
report by Paul Thompson published at the endlessly informative Center
for Cooperative Research website (www.cooperativeresearch.org),
"[O]nly two air force bases in the Northeast region... were formally
part of NORAD's defensive system. One was Otis Air National Guard
Base, on Massachusetts's Cape Cod peninsula and about 188 miles east
of New York City. The other was Langley Air Force Base near Norfolk,
Virginia, and about 129 miles south of Washington. During the Cold
War, the U.S. had literally thousands of fighters on alert. But as the
Cold War wound down, this number was reduced until it reached only 14
fighters in the continental U.S. by 9/11."

But even an underpowered air defense system on slow-response status
(15 minutes, officially, on 9/11) does not explain the magnitude of
NORAD's apparent failures that day. Start with the discrepancy in the
times at which NORAD commanders claim to have learned of the various
hijackings. By 8:43 a.m., NORAD had been notified of two probable
hijackings in the previous five minutes. If there was such a thing as
a system-wide air defense crisis plan, it should have kicked in at
that moment. Three minutes later, at 8:46, Flight 11 crashed into the
first WTC tower. By then alerts should have been going out to all
regional air traffic centers of apparent coordinated hijackings in
progress. Yet when Flight 77, which eventually crashed into the
Pentagon, was hijacked three minutes later, at 8:46, NORAD claims not
to have learned of it until 9:24, 38 minutes after the fact and just
13 minutes before it crashed into the Pentagon.

The professed lag in reacting to the hijacking of Flight 93 is just as
striking. NORAD acknowledged learning of the hijacking at 9:16, yet
the Pentagon's position is that it had not yet intercepted the plane
when it crashed in a Pennsylvania field just minutes away from
Washington, D.C. at 10:06, a full 50 minutes later.

In fact, there are a couple of other circumstantial details of the
crash, discussed mostly in Pennsylvania newspapers and barely noted in
national wire stories, that suggest Flight 93 may have been shot down
after all. First, officials never disputed reports that there was a
secondary debris field six miles from the main crash site, and a few
press accounts said that it included one of the plane's engines. A
secondary debris field points to an explosion on board, from one of
two probable causes--a terrorist bomb carried on board or an Air Force
missile. And no investigation has ever intimated that any of the four
terror crews were toting explosives. They kept to simple tools like
the box cutters, for ease in passing security. Second, a handful of
eyewitnesses in the rural area around the crash site did report seeing
low-flying U.S. military jets around the time of the crash.

Which only raises another question. Shooting down Flight 93 would have
been incontestably the right thing to do under the circumstances. More
than that, it would have constituted the only evidence of anything
NORAD and the Pentagon had done right that whole morning. So why deny
it? Conversely, if fighter jets really were not on the scene when 93
crashed, why weren't they? How could that possibly be?

16) The Bush administration had a plan for restoring essential
services and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the shooting war
ended.

The question of what the U.S. would do to rebuild Iraq was raised
before the shooting started. I remember reading a press briefing in
which a Pentagon official boasted that at the time, the American
reconstruction team had already spent three weeks planning the postwar
world! The Pentagon's first word was that the essentials of rebuilding
the country would take about $10 billion and three months; this stood
in fairly stark contrast to UN estimates that an aggressive rebuilding
program could cost up to $100 billion a year for a minimum of three
years.

After the shooting stopped it was evident the U.S. had no plan for
keeping order in the streets, much less commencing to rebuild. (They
are upgrading certain oil facilities, but that's another matter.)
There are two ways to read this. The popular version is that it proves
what bumblers Bush and his crew really are. And it's certainly true
that where the details of their grand designs are concerned, the
administration tends to have postures rather than plans. But this
ignores the strategic advantages the U.S. stands to reap by leaving
Iraqi domestic affairs in a chronic state of (managed, they hope)
chaos. Most important, it provides an excuse for the continued
presence of a large U.S. force, which ensures that America will call
the shots in putting Iraqi oil back on the world market and seeing to
it that the Iraqis don't fall in with the wrong sort of oil company
partners. A long military occupation is also a practical means of
accomplishing something the U.S. cannot do officially, which is to
maintain air bases in Iraq indefinitely. (This became necessary after
the U.S. agreed to vacate its bases in Saudi Arabia earlier this year
to try to defuse anti-U.S. political tensions there.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to pay for whatever rebuilding it gets
around to doing with the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales, an enormous cash
box the U.S. will oversee for the good of the Iraqi people.

In other words, "no plan" may have been the plan the Bushmen were
intent on pursuing all along.

17) The U.S. has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in Iraq
during the postwar period.

"Some [looters] shot big grins at American soldiers and Marines or put
down their prizes to offer a thumbs-up or a quick finger across the
throat and a whispered word--Saddam--before grabbing their loot and
vanishing."

--Robert Fisk, London Independent, 4/11/03

Despite the many clashes between U.S. troops and Iraqis in the three
months since the heavy artillery fell silent, the postwar performance
of U.S. forces has been more remarkable for the things they have not
done--their failure to intervene in civil chaos or to begin
reestablishing basic civil procedures. It isn't the soldiers' fault.
Traditionally an occupation force is headed up by military police
units schooled to interact with the natives and oversee the
restoration of goods and services. But Rumsfeld has repeatedly
declined advice to rotate out the combat troops sooner rather than
later and replace some of them with an MP force. Lately this has been
a source of escalating criticism within military ranks.

18) Despite vocal international opposition, the U.S. was backed by
most of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member Coalition of the
Willing.

When the whole world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the outcry was
so loud that it briefly pierced the slumber of the American public,
which poured out its angst in poll numbers that bespoke little taste
for a war without the UN's blessing. So it became necessary to assure
the folks at home that the whole world was in fact for the invasion.
Thus was born the Coalition of the Willing, consisting of the U.S. and
UK, with Australia caddying--and 40-some additional co-champions of
U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, whose ranks included such
titans of diplomacy and pillars of representative government as
Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, and Micronesia. If the American
public noticed the ruse, all was nonetheless forgotten when Baghdad
fell. Everybody loves a winner.

19) This war was notable for its protection of civilians.

This from the Herald of Scotland, May 23: "American guns, bombs, and
missiles killed more civilians in the recent war in Iraq than in any
conflict since Vietnam, according to preliminary assessments carried
out by the UN, international aid agencies, and independent study
groups. Despite U.S. boasts this was the fastest, most clinical
campaign in military history, a first snapshot of 'collateral damage'
indicates that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi non-combatants died in
the course of the hi-tech blitzkrieg."

20) The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad was
unanticipated.

General Jay Garner himself, then the head man for postwar Iraq, told
the Washington Times that he had put the Iraqi National Museum second
on a list of sites requiring protection after the fall of the Saddam
government, and he had no idea why the recommendation was ignored.
It's also a matter of record that the administration had met in
January with a group of U.S. scholars concerned with the preservation
of Iraq's fabulous Sumerian antiquities. So the war planners were
aware of the riches at stake. According to Scotland's Sunday Herald,
the Pentagon took at least one other meeting as well: "[A] coalition
of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the
American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with U.S. Defense and
State department officials prior to the start of military action to
offer its assistance.... The group is known to consist of a number of
influential dealers who favor a relaxation of Iraq's tight
restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities....
[Archaeological Institute of America] president Patty Gerstenblith
said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities
through weakening the laws of archaeologically rich nations and
eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export.'"

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").

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.






-


Ever wonder who benefits from the 150 MILLION
U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0223-08.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=21

http://www.commondreams.org/
http://www.truthout.org/
http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/
http://counterpunch.org/
http://responsiblewealth.org/


"They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
warfare or morality."
-bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
-- George W. Bush

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
-- Adolf Hitler

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...

Hank wrote:
> Michael Johnson, PE wrote:
>
>>Hank wrote:
>
>
>>So is the majority of the voting public that ELECTED him g
>>uilty of treason too?
>
>
> They're guilty primarily of being ignorant and gullible.
> But now that we know beyond any doubt that bu$h is a liar,
> a thief, an AWOL draft dodging coward, a war criminal,
> a torturer, and a child butchering terrorist, the minority
> of radical extremists who still support him, border on being
> treasonous.

Did you hear that noise? It was the sound of 5 more people supporting
Bush because they just read the above foaming at the mouth rant. Keep
up the good work.

>>Since he was elected by a majority he does represent at
>>least 51% of America. Let me guess, that 51% must be too
>>stupid to see past his evil ways. Yeah, right.
>
>
> Why should that surprise you? Hitler enjoyed considerable
> support while he was destroying his Country, too.

Wow, now that was an impressive display of shoving a large festering,
stinking foot in your mouth. So now over half of the US population are
the equivalent of WWII Nazis party supporters? Let me guess the Germans
in 1943 German didn't know the Jews were being slaughtered? Yeah, right
and you think 51% of the population here is JUST LIKE THEM!!! That
sound you heard was another horde of Bush supporters being created after
reading yet another mindless "Hate America First" rant. At this rate
you are going to overtake Cindy Sheehan in the vote tally. You must
have consulted with Dick Durbin to come up with the above remark or are
you really this talented on your own?

>> You will never understand that when you attack
>>President Bush you are by proxy attacking a majority
>>of the population
>
>
> Not anymore. The gullible and brainwashed extremists who
> still support his illegal, immoral, and treasonous policies,
> represent a rapidly shrinking minority.

Well, I guess based on the outcome of the last election we have at least
51% of the population meeting the above description. Keep hating
America, Hank. Your rabid rants are just turning more people to the
conservative side.

>>All you can do is complain while offering no viable solutions.
>>Now let's hear some more of that mindless bitching and
>>moaning your side is so good at.
>
>
> Your mindless bitching and moaning serve no purpose. Do
> you have any solutions? Pull the troops out of Iraq, invest
> the hundreds of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars saved here
> at home. End corporate welfare and repeal bu$h's obscene
> tax breaks for the elite 1% - just for starters....

MY mindless bitching and moaning!!! LOL Pot, kettle, black there buddy.

>>How about throwing in some blatant lies just for a
>>giggle or two.
>
>
> These are kinda funny. Even funnier, is that folks like you
> were gullible enough to believe 'em. <chuckle>

What's even funnier is that some left wing, mouth foaming, rabid,
ranting idiot wasted that much effort compiling something so worthless.
Will you have another big, steaming pile for me in your next post?
BTW, please keep up the good work. The Republicans appreciate every
vote you push to their side.

><snipped one HUGE pile of steaming left wing bull****>

In article >, Hank wrote:
> Brent P wrote:
>> Hank wrote:
>
>> > Dems are also much better environmentally.
>
>> No they aren't. They use the environment as tool to gain
>> control over our lives. That's all it has become, a tool,
>> an excuse for more power.
>
> Your brainwashing and ignorance are so severe that
> you tend to come across as less than sane.

Down to insults already? Well, you did last longer than most liberals on
usenet.

The fact of the matter is, the environment is now an excuse to gain more
power over our lives. The kyoto treaty made that very, very clear.


>> > If Al Gore has won, coal plant emission standards would be
>> > tightened. Hell, you can't even eat Tuna now because of
>> > the mercury in it....

>> The so called standards you are refering to under the democrats
>> were an all or nothing upgrade policy.

> bu$h's policy is one of letting polluters write their
> own laws. You may "think" ingesting mercury is a good
> thing. Informed, intelligent people know it that is
> isn't.

*sigh* more crapola. Could you try examining things for once.

>> > Ever wonder who benefits from the 150 MILLION
>> > U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?

>> Going for tangents?

> Facts. I see you deleted them. One thing you right wing
> extremists all seem to have in common is a very strong
> aversion to facts and truth.

I don't follow needless tangents. Perhaps you'd like to discuss the vast
UFO coverup? I didn't think so.

>> I could go on and on about things too. I am glad you people
>> woke up and are now examining government.

> Hopefully, some day you will wake up, too. You look
> like a very foolish tool, thanking the elite for the
> privilege to serve them. Turn off Faux News and do
> some reading....

More insults. How lame.

BTW, democrats are the elites too. But you buy their 'for the common man'
bull****. Keep the delusion that their is a choice between these two so
called parties and liberty will continue to decline.

When you have some actual material to discuss, post again. Otherwise,
don't waste my time with insults.

Michael Johnson, PE wrote:
> Hank wrote:

>> They're guilty primarily of being ignorant and gullible.
>> But now that we know beyond any doubt that bu$h is a liar,
>> a thief, an AWOL draft dodging coward, a war criminal, a
>> torturer, and a child butchering terrorist, the minority
>> of radical extremists who still support him, border on being
>> treasonous.

> Did you hear that noise?

The voices of the radical extremists in your "mind"
are heard only by you. <chuckle>

>> Why should that surprise you? Hitler enjoyed considerable
>> support while he was destroying his Country, too.

> Wow, now that was an impressive display of shoving a large festering,
> stinking foot in your mouth. So now over half of the US population are
> the equivalent of WWII Nazis party supporters?

bu$h's approval rating is far less the half. The radical
extremists who support bu$h's lies, taxpayer theft, war
crimes and terrorism are a minority. There are still enough
of them to be a significant disgrace and embarrassment to
the rest of us and our Country, but they are most definitely
a minority.

> Let me guess the Germans in 1943 German didn't know the
> Jews were being slaughtered?

They may have known, but rallied behind Hitler's war
crimes and terrorism anyway - just like the radical
extremists who support bu$h's war crimes and terrorism
in Iraq. They know that tens of thousands of innocent
women and children have been murdered, but they are so
full of hate and ignorance that they just don't care.

> Yeah, right and you think 51% of the population here is
> JUST LIKE THEM!!!

Repeating the silly lie that the radical extremists
who support bu$h's war crimes and terrorism represent
the majority, only makes you look like a fool, and it
won't change the facts. Your anti American lies will be
continue to be exposed.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0504-12.htm

> That sound you heard

Again, no one but you hears the voices in your head
telling you that murdering tens of thousands of innocent
women and children over lies, hate, ignorance, and greed
is the right thing to do. Those demons exist only in your
gullible, hateful, simple, and confused mind.

http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

> another horde of Bush supporters being created after
> reading yet another mindless "Hate America First" rant.

If you realize that bu$h and his supporters hate The
United States of America, why are you in their camp?
Why do you reject the moral values that your many
betters cherish and embrace?

>> The gullible and brainwashed extremists who still
>> support his illegal, immoral, and treasonous policies,
>> represent a rapidly shrinking minority.

> Well, I guess based on the outcome of the last election
> we have at least 51% of the population meeting the above
> description.

I see your math is as weak as your knowledge of the
facts. 51% percent of voters is clearly not 51% of
the population. Are you really that clueless, or are
you being deliberately dishonest?
Also, we're discussing current support for bu$h's
illegal and immoral terror attack on the innocent
people of Iraq, which is well below 50%. Do try to
keep up. LOL...

> Keep hating America, Hank.

Wow, after all I've written, you still mistake
me for a supporter of bu$h's destructive and anti
American polices. I suppose this should be no surprise.
After all, you have demonstrated a remarkable ability
get your "facts" exactly and repeatedly dead wrong....

>> These are kinda funny. Even funnier, is that folks like you
>> were gullible enough to believe 'em. <chuckle>

> What's even funnier is that some left wing, mouth foaming,
> rabid, ranting idiot wasted that much effort compiling something
> so worthless.

Why do you hate The United States of America so much
that you consider the efforts of dedicated Patriots who
defend Her to be "worthless". If you hate the United States
so much that you rabidly support it's abuse and destruction
by treasonous war criminals, tortureres, terrorists, liars,
and thieves, why do you choose to live here?

<link restored because we can't afford to let the America
haters hide the Truth and Facts>

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0730-06.htm

>> <snipped one HUGE pile of steaming left wing bull****>

Nah, if it was bull****, you'd be able to refute it,
rather than just mindlessly cry about it.
Seems like the fact that your values and beliefs are
"supported" primarily by lies, ignorance, and hate,
while those you so rabidly attack are supported by truth,
integirty, and facts, would tell you something.....

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0730-06.htm

The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
Bring 'em On!

by Steve Perry

1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly
maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that
diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to
prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the
contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's
March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security
adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN
sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W
peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "**** Saddam. We're taking
him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international
development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told
the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few
months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either
February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at
2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that
Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit
S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]....
Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual
light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told
Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes
Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on
September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront
a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had
been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency.
Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a
draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a
U.S. that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate
American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the
point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge
the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive"
wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent
drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never
changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle,
William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization
called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause
forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration
from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of
September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S.,
a belief supported by available intelligence evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass
destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq: "The
decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main
justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic
reasons.... [T]here were many other important factors as well." Right.
But they did not come under the heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence: They
set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and ignored
everything that contradicted it. In the end, this required that
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the findings of analysts from
the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy
bureau) and stake their claim largely on the basis of isolated,
anecdotal testimony from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed
Chalabi.) But the administration did not just listen to the defectors;
it promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public
opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there was a
connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place was that the
Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these sorts of claims to
every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of
the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe the Bush
administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American
people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has
had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us
the intelligence to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been
quoted as saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not
understand the nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure
of senior administration officials to speak honestly about what the
intelligence showed."

3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions, and here
is W's most notorious case in point: Once the administration decided
to issue a damage-controlling (they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of
African uranium, they were obliged to couch it in another, more
perilous lie: that the administration, and quite likely Bush himself,
thought the uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting
ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times
on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger in
2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the behest of the CIA and
Dick Cheney's office and found them to be groundless, describes what
followed this way: "Although I did not file a written report, there
should be at least four documents in U.S. government archives
confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's
report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the
embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer
from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have
been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I
have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard
operating procedure."

4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was just
as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit cagier in its
formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has
attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for
nuclear weapons production." This is altogether false in its
implication (that this is the likeliest use for these materials) and
may be untrue in its literal sense as well. As the London Independent
summed it up recently, "The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad
tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in
gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally
persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes
were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed
El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes
were not even suitable for centrifuges." [emphasis added]

5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for the
administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but
not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence
errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has taken
the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the Uranium address. As
the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as
it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a
second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The
Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to
produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ...
Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low,
with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the
push for war."

In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State of the
Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it again.

7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq
could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons.

Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no
such report existed.

8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of
9/11.

One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's fibs,
this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary threads
imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated, handpicked Iraqi
defectors that there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, a claim
CIA analysts did not corroborate and that postwar U.S. military
inspectors conceded did not exist; and second, old intelligence
accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad between a bin Laden emissary and
officers from Saddam's intelligence service, which did not lead to any
subsequent contact that U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up.
According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory
Thielman, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies well in advance
of the war was that "there was no significant pattern of cooperation
between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation."

9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as anyone who
has paid attention to the state of Arab popular sentiment already
realizes. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid
expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the U.S. wants westernized,
secular leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to
neutralize the politically ambitious anti-Western religious sects
popping up everywhere. If a little brutality and graft are required to
do the job, it has never troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically,
these standards describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein.
Judging from the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush
administration will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and
when they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown
Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than most
people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed choice to
lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his INC that
funneled compliant defectors to the Bush administration, where they
attested to everything the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and
Iraq (meaning, mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The
administration proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the
combined intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam
was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and posed no
imminent threat to anyone.

Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of Langley, but
it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi National Congress and
installed Chalabi at the helm back in the days following Gulf War I,
when the thought was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an
internal opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have
disliked and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous
ways have alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy
establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense,
and therefore the White House.

11) The United States is waging a war on terror.

Practically any school child could recite the terms of the Bush
Doctrine, and may have to before the Ashcroft Justice Department is
finished: The global war on terror is about confronting terrorist
groups and the nations that harbor them. The United States does not
make deals with terrorists or nations where they find safe lodging.

Leave aside the blind eye that the U.S. has always cast toward
Israel's actions in the territories. How are the Bushmen doing
elsewhere vis-à-vis their announced principles? We can start with
their fabrications and manipulations of Iraqi WMD evidence--which, in
the eyes of weapons inspectors, the UN Security Council, American
intelligence analysts, and the world at large, did not pose any
imminent threat.

The events of recent months have underscored a couple more gaping
violations of W's cardinal anti-terror rules. In April the Pentagon
made a cooperation pact with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an
anti-Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq. Prior to the 1979 Iranian
revolution, American intelligence blamed it for the death of several
U.S. nationals in Iran.

Most glaring of all is the Bush administration's remarkable treatment
of Saudi Arabia. Consider: Eleven of the nineteen September 11
hijackers were Saudis. The ruling House of Saud has longstanding and
well-known ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits, which it
funds (read protection money) to keep them from making mischief at
home. The May issue of Atlantic Monthly had a nice piece on the House
of Saud that recounts these connections.

Yet the Bush government has never said boo regarding the Saudis and
international terrorism. In fact, when terror bombers struck Riyadh in
May, hitting compounds that housed American workers as well, Colin
Powell went out of his way to avoid tarring the House of Saud:
"Terrorism strikes everywhere and everyone. It is a threat to the
civilized world. We will commit ourselves again to redouble our
efforts to work closely with our Saudi friends and friends all around
the world to go after al Qaeda." Later it was alleged that the Riyadh
bombers purchased some of their ordnance from the Saudi National
Guard, but neither Powell nor anyone else saw fit to revise their
statements about "our Saudi friends."

Why do the Bushmen give a pass to the Saudi terror hotbed? Because the
House of Saud controls a lot of oil, and they are still (however
tenuously) on our side. And that, not terrorism, is what matters most
in Bush's foreign policy calculus.

While the bomb craters in Riyadh were still smoking, W held a meeting
with Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Speaking publicly
afterward, he outlined a deal for U.S. military aid to the Philippines
in exchange for greater "cooperation" in getting American hands round
the throats of Filipino terrorists. He mentioned in particular the
U.S.'s longtime nemesis Abu Sayyaf--and he also singled out the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front, a small faction based on Mindanao, the
southernmost big island in the Philippine chain.

Of course it's by purest coincidence that Mindanao is the location of
Asia's richest oil reserves.

12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist elements, in
particular by crippling al Qaeda.

A resurgent al Qaeda has been making international news since around
the time of the Saudi Arabia bombings in May. The best coverage by far
is that of Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad. According to
Shahzad's detailed accounts, al Qaeda has reorganized itself along
leaner, more diffuse lines, effectively dissolving itself into a
coalition of localized units that mean to strike frequently, on a
small scale, and in multiple locales around the world. Since claiming
responsibility for the May Riyadh bombings, alleged al Qaeda
communiqués have also claimed credit for some of the strikes at U.S.
troops in Iraq.

13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from terror on
U.S. soil.

Like the Pentagon "plan" for occupying postwar Iraq, the Department of
Homeland Security is mainly a Bush administration PR dirigible
untethered to anything of substance. It's a scandal waiting to happen,
and the only good news for W is that it's near the back of a fairly
long line of scandals waiting to happen.

On May 26 the trade magazine Federal Computer Week published a report
on DHS's first 100 days. At that point the nerve center of Bush's
domestic war on terror had only recently gotten e-mail service. As for
the larger matter of creating a functioning organizational grid and,
more important, a software architecture plan for integrating the
enormous mass of data that DHS is supposed to process--nada. In the
nearly two years since the administration announced its intention to
create a cabinet-level homeland security office, nothing meaningful
has been accomplished. And there are no funds to implement a network
plan if they had one. According to the magazine, "Robert David Steele,
an author and former intelligence officer, points out that there are
at least 30 separate intelligence systems [theoretically feeding into
DHS] and no money to connect them to one another or make them
interoperable. 'There is nothing in the president's homeland security
program that makes America safer,' he said."

14) The Bush administration has nothing to hide concerning the events
of September 11, 2001, or the intelligence evidence collected prior to
that day.

First Dick Cheney personally intervened to scuttle a broad
congressional investigation of the day's events and their origins. And
for the past several months the administration has fought a quiet
rear-guard action culminating in last week's delayed release of
Congress's more modest 9/11 report. The White House even went so far
as to classify after the fact materials that had already been
presented in public hearing.

What were they trying to keep under wraps? The Saudi connection,
mostly, and though 27 pages of the details have been excised from the
public report, there is still plenty of evidence lurking in its
extensively massaged text. (When you see the phrase "foreign nation"
substituted in brackets, it's nearly always Saudi Arabia.) The report
documents repeated signs that there was a major attack in the works
with extensive help from Saudi nationals and apparently also at least
one member of the government. It also suggests that is one reason
intel operatives didn't chase the story harder: Saudi Arabia was by
policy fiat a "friendly" nation and therefore no threat. The report
does not explore the administration's response to the intelligence
briefings it got; its purview is strictly the performance of
intelligence agencies. All other questions now fall to the independent
9/11 commission, whose work is presently being slowed by the White
House's foot-dragging in turning over evidence.

15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on September
11, 2001.

Old questions abound here. The central mystery, of how U.S. air
defenses could have responded so poorly on that day, is fairly easy to
grasp. A cursory look at that morning's timeline of events is enough.
In very short strokes:

8:13 Flight 11 disobeys air traffic instructions and turns off its
transponder.

8:40 NORAD command center claims first notification of likely Flight
11 hijacking.

8:42 Flight 175 veers off course and shuts down its transponder.

8:43 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 175 hijacking.

8:46 Flight 11 hits the World Trade Center north tower.

8:46 Flight 77 goes off course.

9:03 Flight 175 hits the WTC south tower.

9:16 Flight 93 goes off course.

9:16 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 93 hijacking.

9:24 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 77 hijacking.

9:37 Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.

10:06 Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field.

The open secret here is that stateside U.S. air defenses had been
reduced to paltry levels since the end of the Cold War. According to a
report by Paul Thompson published at the endlessly informative Center
for Cooperative Research website (www.cooperativeresearch.org),
"[O]nly two air force bases in the Northeast region... were formally
part of NORAD's defensive system. One was Otis Air National Guard
Base, on Massachusetts's Cape Cod peninsula and about 188 miles east
of New York City. The other was Langley Air Force Base near Norfolk,
Virginia, and about 129 miles south of Washington. During the Cold
War, the U.S. had literally thousands of fighters on alert. But as the
Cold War wound down, this number was reduced until it reached only 14
fighters in the continental U.S. by 9/11."

But even an underpowered air defense system on slow-response status
(15 minutes, officially, on 9/11) does not explain the magnitude of
NORAD's apparent failures that day. Start with the discrepancy in the
times at which NORAD commanders claim to have learned of the various
hijackings. By 8:43 a.m., NORAD had been notified of two probable
hijackings in the previous five minutes. If there was such a thing as
a system-wide air defense crisis plan, it should have kicked in at
that moment. Three minutes later, at 8:46, Flight 11 crashed into the
first WTC tower. By then alerts should have been going out to all
regional air traffic centers of apparent coordinated hijackings in
progress. Yet when Flight 77, which eventually crashed into the
Pentagon, was hijacked three minutes later, at 8:46, NORAD claims not
to have learned of it until 9:24, 38 minutes after the fact and just
13 minutes before it crashed into the Pentagon.

The professed lag in reacting to the hijacking of Flight 93 is just as
striking. NORAD acknowledged learning of the hijacking at 9:16, yet
the Pentagon's position is that it had not yet intercepted the plane
when it crashed in a Pennsylvania field just minutes away from
Washington, D.C. at 10:06, a full 50 minutes later.

In fact, there are a couple of other circumstantial details of the
crash, discussed mostly in Pennsylvania newspapers and barely noted in
national wire stories, that suggest Flight 93 may have been shot down
after all. First, officials never disputed reports that there was a
secondary debris field six miles from the main crash site, and a few
press accounts said that it included one of the plane's engines. A
secondary debris field points to an explosion on board, from one of
two probable causes--a terrorist bomb carried on board or an Air Force
missile. And no investigation has ever intimated that any of the four
terror crews were toting explosives. They kept to simple tools like
the box cutters, for ease in passing security. Second, a handful of
eyewitnesses in the rural area around the crash site did report seeing
low-flying U.S. military jets around the time of the crash.

Which only raises another question. Shooting down Flight 93 would have
been incontestably the right thing to do under the circumstances. More
than that, it would have constituted the only evidence of anything
NORAD and the Pentagon had done right that whole morning. So why deny
it? Conversely, if fighter jets really were not on the scene when 93
crashed, why weren't they? How could that possibly be?

16) The Bush administration had a plan for restoring essential
services and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the shooting war
ended.

The question of what the U.S. would do to rebuild Iraq was raised
before the shooting started. I remember reading a press briefing in
which a Pentagon official boasted that at the time, the American
reconstruction team had already spent three weeks planning the postwar
world! The Pentagon's first word was that the essentials of rebuilding
the country would take about $10 billion and three months; this stood
in fairly stark contrast to UN estimates that an aggressive rebuilding
program could cost up to $100 billion a year for a minimum of three
years.

After the shooting stopped it was evident the U.S. had no plan for
keeping order in the streets, much less commencing to rebuild. (They
are upgrading certain oil facilities, but that's another matter.)
There are two ways to read this. The popular version is that it proves
what bumblers Bush and his crew really are. And it's certainly true
that where the details of their grand designs are concerned, the
administration tends to have postures rather than plans. But this
ignores the strategic advantages the U.S. stands to reap by leaving
Iraqi domestic affairs in a chronic state of (managed, they hope)
chaos. Most important, it provides an excuse for the continued
presence of a large U.S. force, which ensures that America will call
the shots in putting Iraqi oil back on the world market and seeing to
it that the Iraqis don't fall in with the wrong sort of oil company
partners. A long military occupation is also a practical means of
accomplishing something the U.S. cannot do officially, which is to
maintain air bases in Iraq indefinitely. (This became necessary after
the U.S. agreed to vacate its bases in Saudi Arabia earlier this year
to try to defuse anti-U.S. political tensions there.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to pay for whatever rebuilding it gets
around to doing with the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales, an enormous cash
box the U.S. will oversee for the good of the Iraqi people.

In other words, "no plan" may have been the plan the Bushmen were
intent on pursuing all along.

17) The U.S. has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in Iraq
during the postwar period.

"Some [looters] shot big grins at American soldiers and Marines or put
down their prizes to offer a thumbs-up or a quick finger across the
throat and a whispered word--Saddam--before grabbing their loot and
vanishing."

--Robert Fisk, London Independent, 4/11/03

Despite the many clashes between U.S. troops and Iraqis in the three
months since the heavy artillery fell silent, the postwar performance
of U.S. forces has been more remarkable for the things they have not
done--their failure to intervene in civil chaos or to begin
reestablishing basic civil procedures. It isn't the soldiers' fault.
Traditionally an occupation force is headed up by military police
units schooled to interact with the natives and oversee the
restoration of goods and services. But Rumsfeld has repeatedly
declined advice to rotate out the combat troops sooner rather than
later and replace some of them with an MP force. Lately this has been
a source of escalating criticism within military ranks.

18) Despite vocal international opposition, the U.S. was backed by
most of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member Coalition of the
Willing.

When the whole world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the outcry was
so loud that it briefly pierced the slumber of the American public,
which poured out its angst in poll numbers that bespoke little taste
for a war without the UN's blessing. So it became necessary to assure
the folks at home that the whole world was in fact for the invasion.
Thus was born the Coalition of the Willing, consisting of the U.S. and
UK, with Australia caddying--and 40-some additional co-champions of
U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, whose ranks included such
titans of diplomacy and pillars of representative government as
Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, and Micronesia. If the American
public noticed the ruse, all was nonetheless forgotten when Baghdad
fell. Everybody loves a winner.

19) This war was notable for its protection of civilians.

This from the Herald of Scotland, May 23: "American guns, bombs, and
missiles killed more civilians in the recent war in Iraq than in any
conflict since Vietnam, according to preliminary assessments carried
out by the UN, international aid agencies, and independent study
groups. Despite U.S. boasts this was the fastest, most clinical
campaign in military history, a first snapshot of 'collateral damage'
indicates that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi non-combatants died in
the course of the hi-tech blitzkrieg."

20) The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad was
unanticipated.

General Jay Garner himself, then the head man for postwar Iraq, told
the Washington Times that he had put the Iraqi National Museum second
on a list of sites requiring protection after the fall of the Saddam
government, and he had no idea why the recommendation was ignored.
It's also a matter of record that the administration had met in
January with a group of U.S. scholars concerned with the preservation
of Iraq's fabulous Sumerian antiquities. So the war planners were
aware of the riches at stake. According to Scotland's Sunday Herald,
the Pentagon took at least one other meeting as well: "[A] coalition
of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the
American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with U.S. Defense and
State department officials prior to the start of military action to
offer its assistance.... The group is known to consist of a number of
influential dealers who favor a relaxation of Iraq's tight
restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities....
[Archaeological Institute of America] president Patty Gerstenblith
said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities
through weakening the laws of archaeologically rich nations and
eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export.'"

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").

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.





--
Ever wonder who benefits from the 150 MILLION
U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0223-08.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=21

http://www.commondreams.org/
http://www.truthout.org/
http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/
http://counterpunch.org/
http://responsiblewealth.org/


"They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
warfare or morality."
-bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
-- George W. Bush

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
-- Adolf Hitler

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...