WAR ON TRUTH: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Invasion of Iraq but Your Government Wouldn't Tell You (Paperback)

~ Neil Mackay (Author)

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Product Description

The War on Truth investigates all aspects of the lead up to the war in Iraq, its execution, and its aftermath. Neil MacKay contends that the public was systematically fed untruths in a manner that questions what kind of democracy we really have. MacKay, award winning investigative journalist for Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper has covered the West's intelligence agencies for many years.

In this book he questions why 'intelligence' missed 9/11 and why the best funded intelligence networks in history got things so badly wrong. The WMD debate is also covered. MacKay's extensive contacts in the intelligence community make a telling contribution to this investigation and we see an intimate picture of how intelligence is gathered, how it is interpreted and why things go wrong.

We also gain an insight to Neo-Cons, the radical think tank that surround George W. Bush and some of whom stated before 9/11, that the US "needed another Pearl Harbor" to condition the American people (and their allies) into supporting war against Saddam Hussein. Author Neil MacKay is a three-times finalist as British Reporter of tile Year in the British Press Awards, Britain's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. MacKay revealed the identity of the Omagh bomber, exposed the British Army colonel who used loyalist terrorists as proxy assassins throughout the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland and unmasked "Stakeknife", the highest-ranking British army spy inside the IRA.

His investigations into the war on terror and the invasion of lraq have won international acclaim. More than 200,000 US readers regularly turn to his stories on the internet every Sunday. In 1999, MacKay famously wrote an article based on briefings with CIA operatives in Pakistan that reported that aI-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden planned to use planes to attack mainland America. He has appeared on TV and radio regularly as a commentator in the UK, France. Italy. Japan. America. Canada, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and throughout the Middle East.

John Pilger: "Neil's masterly and prodigious scoops are the stuff of newspaper legend"

Truthout.org: "the gold standard of investigative journalists"

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John Pilger: "Neil's masterly and prodigious scoops are the stuff of newspaper legend" British Press Awards: "the cool journalist - the guy who's first with the news."Truthout.org: "the gold standard of investigative journalists"

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Casemate / Flashpoint (February 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932033629
• ISBN-13: 978-1932033625
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,341,768 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Fine study of the rotten roots of the Iraq war, January 6, 2008

By	William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Neil Mackay, a reporter for the Sunday Herald, has spent four years researching the rotten roots of the Iraq war.

He reveals how the Bush team planned the attack long before they seized power, how the US and British states set up secret units to lie about the `threat' from Iraq, how the media followed them in lying for war, how the Bush and Blair governments tried to destroy those who sought to expose their lies, how they sanctioned the torture of Iraqis, how their forces used WMD against the people of Iraq, and how we could and should impeach Blair for war crimes.

Mackay shows in detail that, in the 1990s, 24 US and 16 British firms, among others, armed Iraq with WMD. Then, under UN pressure, Iraq destroyed all its WMD. Bush and Blair knew this and knew that it had not restored its WMD programme.

Yet they lied that Iraq was a threat. As the former head of the Foreign Office's Iraq desk admitted, "We told downright lies." As the head of MI6 reported back from his visit to Washington, "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy." Similarly, we now know from the International Atomic Energy Authority that Iran has no nuclear weapons programme, but Bush and Brown lie that it is a threat.

The Joint Intelligence Committee told Blair before the war that the Al Qa'ida "threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq." So Blair knew that the war would worsen terrorism, but he told us the opposite.

In May 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty International both told Blair and Bush that their troops were torturing Iraqi prisoners. Blair and Bush did nothing until after the pictures from Abu Ghraib had horrified the world, a year later.

Blair and Bush lied about Iraq's WMD, and then used WMD - depleted uranium (DU) and phosphorus bombs. Mackay cites the Ministry of Defence website, which said that DU was not a risk to health: at the same time, the Ministry was telling British soldiers that DU "has the potential to cause ill-health."

The fact that Britain invaded Iraq without majority support undermines Britain's claim to be a democracy. As Mackay writes, "No democratic country starts illegal wars which its people don't support, bombs innocent people or allows rape and murder and torture to be committed by its own troops."

This book is a heartfelt plea for people to think for themselves and not let Blair or Rupert Murdoch or Alastair Campbell tell them what to think.