posted on August 25, 2003 08:37:14 AM new
yep, more and more are seeing the light, how we the people have been lied too, by using fear, threats and death to convince the people that war is good........NOT.......IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT AND BRING HOME THE TROOPS NOW !!! spread the word
The Air Is Thick With Lies
by Jimmy Breslin
August 24, 2003
I was a few hundred yards up on Liberty Street when the Two Tower of the World Trade Center blew. I put my nose inside my shirt and ran through smoke that turned day into night. In the smoke were computers, asbestos, pulverized glass, human bodies, lead. I got on another street and One Tower blew up. Again, the air was black with a pulverized 110-story building.
I did not feel well for two months. I never said anything because I was too embarrassed. A couple of thousand had died. So many others were scorched and broken and maimed. I had no right to open my mouth, I thought. Besides, from the first day, the government's Environmental Protection Agency had announced that air was remarkably clean. Work on. Breathe on. You're fine.
They lied. They lied because the administration did not want people not going to work. They lied the first week and they lied the week after that and they have lied every day of the past two years to the people of this city.
Christine Whitman was the EPA head until recently. I wasn't disturbed that her education was a jump horse school, but I thought she was better than standing up and doing what she was told by George Bush's White House, telling lies to a public who had to breathe this air. Turns out she isn't much of a human being.
The EPA has just admitted that they lied for all this time.
Now what are we supposed to do? By now I feel better physically because I have adjusted to feeling lousy. I'm not going near a doctor. Once I read what was in that air, and in it for all those days I spent around there, I didn't want to know anything more. Don't scare me. My friend Dan Collins, whose office is on Broadway, only yards up from the site, said he has not taken a good breath for two years. "They tell me it's good and I know it's bad," he said.
This lying with the lives of the people of the nation is not solely the habit of Bush and his crew, although it is more widespread and being done in so many cases by so many of their people that it looks like a generation of liars.
This war with Iraq started with the full government standing right up and looking you in the eye and openly lying about why we had to invade Iraq immediately. Bush said the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. Why, they were starting to make nuclear bombs. He had a statement about this in his State of the Union speech. When it was shown to be a lie, Bush had people like Condoleezza Rice say, Why are you so worried about 26 words in a speech? That the 26 words were about nuclear weapons seemed beyond her. Out in the streets, you can scare people with only three words: "Stick 'em up."
I sit here in New York and I don't believe one single solitary word of what the government says. Can you believe anything Bush says? Only if you're a rank sucker. Then you put that Rumsfeld on and he grimaces and tells you the first thing he thinks of, and here is Powell, who I thought would be our first black national candidate and he's as bad as the rest of them.
What I would like to do is sit here and type in anger only about Bush and his vile people. The trouble is in my memory there is a corrupted past of people I favored.
There was the day in 1962 when John F. Kennedy was in Cleveland on some sort of appearance and a courier from Washington brought him photos taken of Russian missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy canceled the stop and flew back to Washington. His press people announced that he had a severe cold. This was reported to the country.
Kennedy was rushing back to begin secret meetings about the chances of whether the country was going to go into a nuclear war with Russia over the missiles.
Talk worked. We're here. But only one person complained about the false report of Kennedy's cold. That was David Wise and he worked on a newspaper I was on. He said that it was a dangerous precedent to lie to the nation for any reason.
At the time, I thought it a minor complaint about an enormous occurrence. I didn't have the wisdom to understand that once government gets away with lying, it becomes virtually impossible to dislodge the habit from any of them. I don't know what other lies Kennedy told, but it couldn't have been his last and he had our lives in his hands.
It was only in August of 1964 when Robert McNamara, the defense secretary who presented himself as being a person of unparalleled brilliance, told Lyndon Johnson that a North Vietnamese PT boat had attacked the American destroyers Turner Joy and the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, off Haiphong, east of Hanoi. On a night of confusion, McNamara persuaded Johnson that it was an actual attack. Johnson acted. He put the country into a war right there.
The attack on the destroyers never happened. McNamara lied. And the lie grew, and anybody who took the time to build evidence of this was attacked. "This is a just war," Johnson said.
The war blew up 58,000 of our young.
And now we have this administration welding their lies together on two matters: the air you breathe and the war they insist is good for us. We've just dealt with 40 years of lying and death. It is getting worse. "We're winning in Iraq," your poor president says.
posted on August 25, 2003 08:57:04 AM new
Caught in His Own Lies
George Bush's Iraq scandal is not going away any time soon. His Administration lied six ways to Sunday to browbeat the American public into going along with the war. Now those lies have finally caught up with him, and he is hopelessly entangled in their web, even as he spins more strands.
With U.S. soldiers dying at the appalling rate of one a day in Iraq, those lies are unsustainable. They haunt surviving family members, and they indict our democratic system of checks and balances.
The lies, exaggerations, and distortions go way beyond the one in his State of the Union address about uranium from Africa, though that was a whopper.
There was the lie that the Administration believed Saddam already possessed nuclear weapons.
There was the exaggeration that Saddam had vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons. "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent," Bush said in his State of the Union address. Where is it all?
There was the lie that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda. When Bush was asked point-blank at his July 30 press conference about the links he had drawn between Al Qaeda and Saddam, all that Bush could say was, "It's going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered." That just doesn't cut it.
There was the lie that Saddam's weapons presented a direct threat to the United States. Even CIA Director George Tenet said it was highly unlikely that Saddam would use them against the United States unless Washington invaded (and still he didn't use them).
Jonathan Steele QuoteThere was the lie about aluminum tubes, which Condoleezza Rice said were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." Actually, many intelligence experts, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded that the tubes were more likely to be used for artillery rockets.
There was the lie about Saddam's unmanned aircraft. On October 7, Bush warned the nation about a growing fleet of these aircraft that could be used "for missions against the United States." Turns out these aircraft were hardly formidable. They appear to be "made of balsa wood and duct tape, with two small propellers attached to what look like the engines of a weed whacker," the AP reported in March.
And there was the lie that the Administration exhausted all means to resolve the conflict peacefully. Anyone who watched the U.N. Security Council debate knows that the United States stymied efforts to bring more weapons inspectors on board and to allow Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei time to complete their work.
At his July 30 press conference, Bush fobbed off other questions about the flimsy claims he peddled in the lead-up to the war. "In order to placate the critics and cynics about the intentions of the United States, we need to produce evidence," he said. "And I'm confident that our search will yield that which I strongly believe: that Saddam had a weapons program. I want to remind you he actually used his weapons program on his own people at one time, which is pretty tangible evidence."
Note the subtle shift to "weapons programs" and away from the weapons themselves. It's much easier for Bush to say he will find evidence of "weapons programs" than to find the weapons themselves.
Note also that while Bush and Rice before the war talked about not wanting to wait until a "smoking gun turns into a mushroom cloud"--a clear allusion to the threat of Saddam's nuclear arsenal--Bush avoided the subject of Saddam's nuclear weapons entirely at the press conference.
Vice President Dick Cheney was even more brazen. Cheney surfaces only to break ties in the Senate, raise money for Republican candidates, or speak before such cozy audiences as the American Enterprise Institute, where he appeared on July 24.
There, he repeated the lie that "every measure was taken to avoid a war," that "it was Saddam Hussein himself who made war unavoidable," and that Bush launched the war only "when all else failed." Then he recycled some of the old propaganda about Saddam's threat--"a menace to our future peace and security." One thing Cheney did not recycle, however, was his own claim, back on March 16, that "we believe he [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Instead, Cheney had the chutzpah to quote a National Intelligence Estimate that said, "If left unchecked, it [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."
Which is it, Mr. Vice President?
Back in March, you said you believed he already had nuclear weapons. Now you're saying he was several years off?
Cheney's got a lot of nerve.
Either he doesn't think anyone remembers what he said just four months previously, or he thinks that merely to put the three words together--Saddam, nuclear, and weapons--and then rinse and repeat is all it takes to persuade Americans that Iraq was the "grave" or "gathering" or "unique" threat that Bush and Cheney falsely said it was all along.
Cheney, who didn't take questions from his cronies at the American Enterprise Institute, has not answered for his own deceit, which played a big part in pushing the United States into war.
Instead, he acts as though he--and Bush--did nothing wrong.
Even for Cheney, this was an embarrassingly cynical performance.
Robert Fisk QuoteAfter using lies and deception to justify the invasion, Bush is resorting to them again to characterize the occupation. Chief among these is that the resistance to the U.S. occupation consists of a "few remaining holdouts" of the Ba'ath regime, as Bush said on July 22, or "the violent remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, joined by terrorists and criminals," who are "making a last attempt to frighten the Iraqi people," as he put it in his news conference. Bush suggested that after U.S. forces killed Qusay and Uday Hussein, the attacks would fade. "That changes attitudes in Iraq," he said at his press conference. He also, as is his wont, said, "Saddam's sons were brought to justice"--repeating his equation of justice with liquidation.
Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute made a similar case. "There are still some holdouts of the regime, joined by terrorists from outside the country," he said.
While some of the opposition may come from people who refused to get out of the Ba'ath Party, much of it appears to flow from two other sources: Iraqi nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.
If the Bushies think these sources will all of a sudden dry up, they're kidding themselves.
Two days before Bush eliminated Saddam's notorious sons (and a grandson, by the way, along with a bodyguard), thousands of Shiites held a demonstration denouncing the United States.
They shouted, "No to America, no to colonialism, no to tyranny, no to the devil," according to The New York Times.
Remember, these were Shiites, and the Shiites were supposed to welcome their "liberation." They weren't natural Saddam lovers. Saddam, a Sunni, had long oppressed them.
Some Shiite clerics are now telling their followers that they have a religious obligation to resist the U.S. occupation.
"The potential rise of Islamist resistance, both Sunni and Shia, ought to be worrying the Americans more than the issue of the discredited Hussein family," wrote Jonathan Steele in The Guardian on July 25.
Then there is the nationalism that swells when people see their country occupied by a foreign power, especially a foreign power that did so much to ravage their land in two wars and more than a decade of punitive sanctions.
Plus, the vaunted U.S. military has not yet been able to provide the rudiments of clean water, adequate food, and electricity to the Iraqi people. On July 3, U.S. forces were attacked in three places, which "suggested that sapping the resistance might not be as simple as capturing or killing Mr. Hussein," reported the Times. "The attacks occurred in diverse locations: a Sunni area west of Baghdad that staunchly supported the former government, a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad that did not, and the center of the city." After the assault in central Baghdad, a crowd gathered and shouted, "God bless Muhammad," the Times wrote. One man said, "It's not because of Saddam that people are doing these things. It is because there's no government, there's no electricity, and just false promises."
On top of everything else, some U.S. troops, who have been put in a terrible situation, may have been ordered to use brutal tactics that further alienate the population.
Amnesty International issued a memorandum on July 23 that discussed "possibly unlawful killings of demonstrators" and "reports of torture or ill-treatment by Coalition Forces."
U.S. forces, in at least one incident, used a tactic that the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibit. Colonel David Hogg, commander of the Second Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division, told The Washington Post that "his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: 'If you want your family released, then turn yourself in.' "
U.S. forces have also not spared the innocent in the Saddam manhunt. "Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday [July 27] into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to eleven, including two children, their mother, and crippled father," Robert Fisk reported for The Independent. "At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants." One doctor treating the victims told Fisk: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him."
The day before, in Karbala, "a thirty-year-old cafeteria worker was shot during a confrontation between soldiers and an unruly crowd," the Times reported. "During the man's funeral, mourners chanted, 'There is no God but God, and America is the enemy of God.' "
These are the factors that are contributing to what even the chief U.S. military commander in Iraq, General John P. Abizaid, admits is a "guerrilla war." This, just two weeks after Donald Rumsfeld said, "I guess the reason I don't use the phrase guerrilla war is because there isn't one."
Senator Joe Biden QuoteBush should pull U.S. troops out of Iraq. They never belonged there in the first place. They are not welcome there now. They are 146,000 sitting ducks. The obvious option is to turn the entire operation over to the United Nations, which has some experience in what Bush used to sneeringly call "nation-building." But the hardliners in the Bush Administration still don't want to deal with the United Nations.
Cheney and Wolfowitz are resisting Colin Powell's effort even to get U.N. blessing for other countries' troops to come in.
This should be a no-brainer.
Going to the United Nations would relieve tens of thousands of U.S. troops.
But for Cheney and Wolfowitz, that's not a good enough reason. They would rather sacrifice more U.S. troops than let the United Nations take a primary role.
Why?
Because they view the United Nations as an impediment to U.S. global rule. And they don't want to let any other country in on the spoils of Iraq. Giving the United Nations a larger role might jeopardize the ability of U.S. companies to get the inside track on future contracts.
"Wolfowitz said the Administration would welcome a new United Nations resolution to attract peacekeepers . . . but only if it did not restrict the authority of L. Paul Bremer III, the senior American civil administrator in Iraq," the Times reported. In testimony before Congress on July 29, Wolfowitz said, "I'd be very enthusiastic about the right kind of resolution, and very concerned about the wrong kind."
As a substitute, the Pentagon is now feverishly trying to train an Iraqi militia to do some of the work for the U.S. troops. Just as President Nixon tried his Vietnamization program to get the locals to do the fighting for us, Wolfowitz said, "We don't need more American troops. What we need most of all are Iraqis fighting with us."
But that's a tall order. Anthony Cordesman is a military specialist for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. You might have seen him on television during Gulf War I or II with his pointer. Even he warns that "the United States may end up fighting a third Gulf War," this time "against the Iraqi people."
That is nothing to look forward to, and no amount of lies or blandishments will make it so.
