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Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War

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John Prados calls HOODWINKED "a case study in government dishonesty" (p. xii). Based on his meticulous research, he concludes that "deception was systematic and carried out purposefully" (p. xii). The topic, of course, is the propaganda campaign that culminated in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Prados is now a Research Fellow with the National Security Archive, based at George Washington University. He has been researching U.S. national security issues since the early 1980s. One of his more well-known books is "The Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from WWII Through the Persian Gulf." The Archive was created in 1985, and is the single largest user in the U.S. of the FOIA, Freedom of Information Act. The NSA makes available declassified documentation of U.S. foreign policy and national security policy (www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/).

You might think that a book on the topic of the intelligence used to go to war with Iraq would be outdated now that the Senate Intelligence Committee report has been issued (www.intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf). But if you recall, the Republicans prevented the Committee from releasing any findings about Executive Branch manipulation of the intelligence. The report, therefore, indicted the CIA for its faulty intelligence about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," but did not make any charges about the Bush Administration. That is where HOODWINKED is still VERY relevant. Because what the book consists of is a careful, line by line analysis of the key pieces of intelligence available to the Administration and a comparison of those documents to the public statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell. Prados reaches the following conclusion:

"What the intelligence record shows, however, is that contrary to the reports it put out, what the Bush Administration knew indicated that Iraqi weapons programs were either nascent, moribund, or non-existent -- exactly the opposite of the President's repeated message to Americans. This book is an attempt to compile and share with the American public for the first time the actual intelligence available to the Bush Administration as it made its case for war. It then aims to show how this information was consistently distorted, manipulated, and ignored, as the president, vice president, secretaries of defense and state, and others, sought to persuade the country that facts about Iraq were other than what the intelligence indicated" (p. xi).

In other words, they were lying through their teeth! There was no imminent threat -- the war was an offensive war, a preventive war against a threat that did not exist.

HOODWINKED includes the entire text of several crucial declassified documents, including the October 2002 CIA White Paper, the October 2002 letter from DCI George Tenet to Senate Intelligence Committe Chair Bob Graham, the December 2002 State Department/CIA Fact Sheet, the May 2003 CIA/DIA paper on biological warware production plants, and the June 2003 Pentagon press briefing. Prados meticulously compares the information presented in these documents to Administration statements and documents the manipulations and distortions -- the lies. He focuses on four issues -- 1) the Iraqi nuclear program, 2) unmanned aerial vehicles, 3) uranium from Niger, and 4) Saddam Hussein's supposed links to Al Qaeda and 9/11.

I see it as interesting and suspicious that the Senate's report on Iraq intelligence has been buried by the press as it turned to the more recent release of the 9/11 Commission report. If the public knew how systematically Cheney & Rumsfeld twisted the intelligence in order to get the outcome they wanted, Bush wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of reelection.

I would like to make a point about our government's propaganda that everyone seems to ignore. The very term and concept of WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION lumps together two very different things -- nuclear weapons on the one hand, and chemical & biological weapons on the other. If the public was clear that there was no way Iraq could have hidden a nuclear weapons program with the inspections regime in place, which is what all informed analysts knew, then the perceived threat would have been very different. The "mass destruction capability" of chemical & biological weapons is simply nowhere near as great as that of nuclear weapons. So even if there were stockpiles of chemical weapons, as most analysts suspected, this was not something to be terribly afraid of. How would Iraq deliver large amounts of chemical weapons, or even a primitive atomic bomb, to the U.S.? When you actually think about it, the prospect is ludicrous, but most people were easily scared by the idea of WMD as an umbrella category, not knowing exactly what was in it or how dangerous it was. Never mind that the U.S. government has plenty of WMD, including big anti-personnel bombs that are not ordinarily considered to be WMD at all.

There is a ton of junk information in the world these days, thanks to the internet. HOODWINKED is the prime stuff -- it is the crucial information that U.S. citizens need in order to make the right decision this November. That is if Bush avoids impeachment when people discover the truth.

It was just after Christmas 1979. The Marxist-Leninist Government of Afghanistan was visibly tottering, and the Soviet Union, always nervous about problems on its borders, especially in the "Stans" - and doubtlessly for other reasons too - invaded and took control - well, sort of.

The reaction of the West, most particularly the USA, was hostile - trade embargo, boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and supply of money and weapons to the Mujahedin, including a Mr. O. bin Laden.

Fast-forward one-quarter of a century. The USA invaded Iraq and took control - well, sort of. It did not invade Saudi Arabia, from where nearly all the 9/11 terrorists came. It invaded a country half a world away, which represented no direct threat at all to the USA and which was not about to collapse in chaos. The US promptly added the missing chaos.

And yet the USA regarded this as OK. Is this really the appropriate action for a country that constantly portrays itself as the shining beacon of democracy and decency? The country whose WW2 military tribunals decreed the unpleasant Japanese practice of waterboarding to be torture? Can anyone detect just the slightest double standard here?

Certainly Iraq had a bombastic, opportunistic leader who was a thoroughly nasty man, but then the world is full of such people, some even US allies. Moreover, the fanatical puritans of the 9/11 Al Quaeda regarded Saddam Hussein as an apostate.

This book does not seek to answer the most perplexing question of all (why?), but to show how the Bush Administration set out to convince the US people that a war against Iraq was necessary, even essential, to the security of the USA. Using official documents, the book shows the systematic distortions, exaggerations, half-truths and downright lies used by the Bushies to sell a totally unnecessary war. The excuse was Saddam's reported desire for, and even alleged near-possession of, "weapons of mass destruction". The con-artistry described here is mind-boggling. The lies, humbug and distortions went right to the very top, and everyone - the intelligence agencies, the UN and its weapons inspectorate - were pressured to deliver the desired results, and all evidence to the contrary of that needed to make the case for war was doctored, ignored or buried .

The resulting war has cost over 4000 American lives and (usually unmentioned) those of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It has left the country in a mess from which it will take a very long time to recover. It introduced terrorism and religious fanaticism into an area where previously there were none. It has dragged the US's former good name through the mud. Worst of all, it empowered Iran, to which it supplied an excuse to seek nuclear weapons. Moreover, as Iraq has a Shia majority, eventual US withdrawal could lead to an even further extension of the power of the mullahs.

All in all, this book makes for thoroughly depressing reading. One can only hope that this is required reading in government circles everywhere, so that the exercise will never be repeated. Mind you, given the continued fabrications of Dubya and his British buddy Phoney Bliar, one wonders...