Five Years of Iraq Lies (Professor Juan Cole)

[Octafish]

Five Years of Iraq Lies

How President Bush and his advisors have spent each year of the war peddling mendacious tales about a mission accomplished.

by Juan Cole
Published on Thursday, March 20, 2008 by Salon.com

Each year of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq has been represented by a thematic falsehood. That Iraq is now calm or more stable is only the latest in a series of such whoppers, which the mainstream press eagerly repeats. The fifth anniversary of Bush’s invasion of Iraq will be the last he presides over. Sen. John McCain, in turn, has now taken to dangling the bait of total victory before the American public, and some opinion polls suggest that Americans are swallowing it, hook, line and sinker. The most famous falsehoods connected to the war were those deployed by the president and his close advisors to justify the invasion. But each of the subsequent years since U.S. troops barreled toward Baghdad in March 2003 has been marked by propaganda campaigns just as mendacious. Here are five big lies from the Bush administration that have shaped perceptions of the Iraq war.

Year 1’s big lie was that the rising violence in Iraq was nothing out of the ordinary. The social turmoil kicked off by the invasion was repeatedly denied by Bush officials. When Iraqis massively looted government ministries and even private shops, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld joked that U.S. media had videotape of one man carrying off a vase and that they kept looping it over and over again. The first year of the war saw the rise of a Sunni Arab guerrilla movement that repeatedly struck at U.S. troops and at members and leaders of the Shiite-dominated Interim Governing Council appointed by the American government.

SNIP...

In Year 4, as major sectors of Iraq descended into hell, Bush’s big lie consisted of denying that the country had fallen into civil war. In late February 2006, Sunni guerrillas blew up the golden-domed Askariya shrine of the Shiites in Samarra. In the aftermath, the Shiites, who had shown some restraint until that point, targeted the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad and its hinterlands for ethnic cleansing. After May 2006, the death toll of victims of sectarian violence rose at times to an official figure of 2,500 or more per month, and it fluctuated around that level for the subsequent year. The Baghdad police had to form a new unit, the Corpse Patrol, to collect dozens of bodies every morning in the streets of the capital.

SNIP...

Year 5, the past year, has been one of troop escalation, or the “surge.” (Calling the policy a “surge” rather than an “escalation” is emblematic of the administration’s propaganda.) The big lie is that Iraq is now calm, that the surge has worked, and that victory is within reach.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/20/7791/

Warmongering torturers can also be war profiteers.

And when they do it as office holders, they are traitors.

[seemslikeadream]

1. COST OF WAR

http://www.joerebholz.com/CostofWar.html





Have you seen my new video? :hi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PhAkx41sDo

[Octafish]

7. Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His 'Techniques of Deceit'

Some day...



Until then, a lesson on how to spot lies that lead to war -- from before the war:

Lying Us Into War:

Exposing Bush and His "Techniques of Deceit"

By Dennis Hans
Monday, 10 February 2003, 10:06 pm
Scoop NZ

President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy team have systematically and knowingly deceived the American people in order to gain support for an unprovoked attack on Iraq.

Before I catalog the Bush administration’s “Techniques of Deceit,” let me acknowledge that no U.N. resolution requires the president to be honest with the American people. The fine print of Resolution 1441 imposes no obligation to treat Americans as citizens to be informed rather than suckers to be conned. He may mislead, distort, suppress, exaggerate and lie to his heart’s content without violating a single sentence in 1441.

So if compliance with 1441 is all that matters to you, read no further. Turn on the TV and tune in Brokaw, Rather, Jennings, Blitzer or Lehrer, to name five of the journalistic imposters who control what you hear and see, who seem psychologically incapable of conceiving of Bush as a liar, and who wouldn’t have the guts to call him one even if they reached that conclusion.

But if you are an American citizen who believes in the bedrock democratic principle of “the informed consent of the governed,” read on.

Why lie?

CONTINUED...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0302/S00061.htm

You taught the class, seemslikedream.

Thank you! Six films? Wow!

[chat_noir]

2. so many lies.....

[Octafish]

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

So many lies is right. Here's a sampler:

The Bush Administration’s Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism

Bring ‘em On!

by Steve Perry
Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by the Minneapolis City Pages

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, “Fuck 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. at same time. Not only UBL .... 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.

CONTINUED with 39 more Big Lies:

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

Thanks for giving a damn and for the great cartoons, chat_noir. The truth hurts traitors.

[enough]

3. k&r

[Octafish]

5. Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 - 2/14/08)

This lying America into war should be front-page news.

From Mother Jones:

In this timeline, we've assembled the history of the Iraq War to create a resource we hope will help resolve open questions of the Bush era. What did our leaders know and when did they know it? And, perhaps just as important, what red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them? This is the third installment of the timeline, with a focus on Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and torture in a time of terror.

http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/

Lies. Lies. Lies.

Thanks for giving a damn, enough. "Show me a liar and I'll show you a thief."

[genie_weenie]

6. For the Good of the Nation lies must be told.

As a shroud for the Truth as Winston Bush err... Churchill stated.

[Octafish]

8. The Bush administration’s campaign of lies and misinformation against Iran

With oil at $100 a barrel, they can't be doing it solely for the money.

The Bush administration’s campaign of lies and misinformation against Iran

By Peter Symonds
6 February 2007
World Socialist Web Site

As it prepares for military aggression against Iran, the Bush administration is once again resorting to a concoction of lies, misinformation and half-truths to provide the pretext. In his January 10 speech announcing an escalation of the war in Iraq, President Bush denounced Syria and Iran for backing anti-US insurgents and declared the American military would “seek out and destroy” these networks. He has since confirmed ordering US troops to “capture or kill” Iranian agents in Iraq.

Bush’s speech has been followed by a steady stream of top US officials condemning Iran’s alleged “meddling” in Iraq—all relayed to the world by a compliant media. To date not a shred of evidence has been provided to support the allegations. Nevertheless, like Bush’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the accusations against Iran are simply repeated ad naseum as fact.

US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, was due to present a “dossier” to the media on January 31 aimed at proving US contentions about Iranian activities in Iraq. The briefing in Baghdad, however, was cancelled without explanation—for a second time, with no future date given. While various excuses were given, the real reason for putting the dossier “on hold” was the lack of evidence and concern about the public reaction in the US.

According to the Los Angeles Times on February 1, US officials were concerned that “some of the material may be inconclusive”. They wanted to “avoid repeating the embarrassment that followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it became clear that the information cited to justify the war was incorrect,” the newspaper explained. “We don’t want a repeat of the situation we had when Colin Powell went before the United Nations. People are going to be sceptical,” one official explained.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/iran-f06.shtml

These turds aim to provoke WW 3 for real. And unlike WW 2, they're allied with the NAZIs.