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Powell Aide Says Case for War a 'Hoax'
PBS recently aired an interview with Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson (Ret), Chief of Staff at the Department of State from Aug 2002 - January 2005, addressing some of the skepticism surrounding the pre-war claims made by the Bush administration. Wilkerson claims in no uncertain terms that he "participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." This is not the first time that Wilkerson has spoken out against the administration and intelligence community.
Everyone outside the US already knows this.
I wonder whether he'll be marked - crazy, unreliable, or simply unpatriotic
I've been watching Wilkerson's speeches and interviews and opinions since early 2005. He's been one of the highest ranking officials to speak about the cabal that is in control of the White House now, but he also has inferred that the cabal has been in power for longer than the currency administration has been. For those who are anti-Bush, do not believe the Clinton was not part of the power party, either.
I strongly believe that the true case for war was to keep the petrodollar in power. I also believe that almost every war and military action we've been involved in since 1913 has been primarily for control of the global currency base, not for oil or trade or communism or any of the usual suspects.
Iran's current oil bourse theories came along just before the power party started beating the war drums against Iraq. I posted today the link to the Cheuvreux Report that reconfirms my crazy tinfoil hat theories about the control of the dollar, and this time from a huge international investment bank. War is the health of the State, said Randolph Bourne. For millenia, war was always about directly controlling others. Yet in the recent centuries, war has been about controlling others indirectly -- by controlling the means of barter between people.
No matter what Bush or Rice or Clinton or Nixon or Kennedy have said, hindsight lets us see what they were really about -- making sure that their peers and families and cronies were at the front of the welfare lines when our Federal Reserve was handing out newly printed paper dollars. To believe anything else is to continue to be a pawn to the system.
I really feel bad for him.
He should have either run for President or gotten out after Clinton and not come back.
Bush & Cheney took all the credibility he had built up and wasted it by sending him to the U.N. to tell fairytales.
You can read the speech here but it isn't really worth doing, as so many of the facts provided in that speech have been proven false and were apparently known to be false at the time the speech was given.
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o0t!
First let me say, I'm a Bush supporter. I'm in the Reserves, and I participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). I was lucky enough to be 1500 miles from the front lines, unlike the rest of my unit, but in any event I was there and I've got the tee-shirt to prove it. When the war first started, I was completely in favor of it. Today, I don't regret that we went in at all, and think in the long run the Iraqi people (and by extension the rest of the Middle East) will be much better off with a participatory democracy than living under the heel of a thug.
Having said all that, it's becoming more and more worrisome to me the degree to which the administration apparently ignored or possibly fabricated evidence. I remember saying at the time that it was a fool's errand to use WMD and/or terrorism as the reason to go to war, and that it seemed more like slick marketing than actual strategery. We had plenty of reasons to go in, and none of them had anything to do with WMDs or terrorism. Like the fact that the Iraqi forces habitually fired on US and UK aircraft patrolling the UN mandated No Fly Zones (considering that just prior to the war, I was working in the Turkish command center that controlled the Northern No Fly Zone and had friends and, literally, family flying over Iraq, yeah, I kinda took it personally).
But apparently someone, somewhere, decided that overt acts of aggression in violation of a cease-fire agreement weren't sufficient reason to justify reopening hostilities. So they decided to use weak or non-existant evidence to justify it, instead. Stupid. Just fucking stupid.
So now here we are, not-quite-three years later. We've spent billions of dollars, have hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, and have thousands of war dead. What's the solution? Well, on the right you have people saying "It wasn't a lie, it was just a mistake." Well, when it comes to something of this magnitude, does it really matter if the root was incompetence or malfeasance? Sure, maybe from a criminal point of view (for instance, I'm not convinced there's a case for impeachment here). But not a whom-do-you-trust-to-run-the-country point of view.
Then on the left we have people like Murtha and Kennedy screaming that we should leave, RIGHT NOW GODDAMNIT!!! That's just insane, we can't leave the Iraqis in a worse position than we found them. That would be like walking away from a car stuck underwater with a woman trapped inside. I mean, what kind of man does that?
So here's what I want to see from politicians: be willing to say "Looks like we screwed up. We completely apologize to the Iraqi people and ask that you forigive us. We promise, to our citizens and the world, that we'll never again invade another country without an individual declaration of war passed by the Congress, ensuring that there will be a full debate before we, as a nation, take the lives of other human beings. We also promise that, now that we're in Iraq, we need to do right by the Iraqis and help them fix all the problems we caused. To that end, we'll follow the policies implemented by the Iraqi National Congress, and be willing to lend whatever assistance they request of us.[1]" Any politician who can say that, consistently, with a straight face, would get my vote.
[1] I know this would be effectively giving the Iraqi government a blank check, but I think that would be worth it to gain some much needed good will.
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The reason Clinton got impeached for parsing words, is because the Republicans controlled Congress & they managed to get Articles of Impeachment passed. The Impeachment died in the Senate... because the Republicans couldn't convince 75% of the Senators that it was a good idea.
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In another news story today, Bush announced he will cut the deficit by cutting domestic programs. Is it safe to assume that, after this story aired, PBS will be one of the programs cut?
Are you arguing that Bush knew that Iraq had no WMDs (unlike the rest of the world) or that Bush was wrong about the WMDs (along with the rest of the world) or that Iraq did have WMDs, but they were exported before the invasion began (as claimed by an Iraqi Air Force general).
You are insinuating the rest of the world thought Iraq had WMDs. Most of the rest of the world did not believe Iraq had WMDs. Bush was, in fact, going against the world's opinion, not with the world's opinion. According to UN inspectors, Iraq could not have significant amounts of WMDs, nor could they have concealed WMD development programs.
These findings were verified by US inspectors after the initial phase of the war.
How many Iraqis have been saved from torture, mutilation, and rape?
Less than have died as a direct result of the war. Much fewer than those that have been mutilated as a direct result of the war. Seems we carried on the use of torture.
You're probably right about the rapes, though.
If our goal is to stop state-sanctioned torture, mutilation, and rape, why aren't we in Sudan right this minute? More people are being killed there than have ever died by Saddam Hussein's orders.
Were you oppsed (sic) to Clinton's actions in Kosovo/
At the time? Yes. But he at least had UN backing. As it turned out, we were really fighting al Queda there, unlike in Iraq which was known to be antagonistic towards al Queda from the beginning.
So, let me get this straight. It turns out that all the evidence was trumped up by somebody, that the US built its case for war on a pack of lies, and you don't care who's responsible? You don't mind being misled, lied to, and generally deceived?
I'm not that honorable. I do mind being lied to (though I wasn't misled: I didn't believe evidence used to prop up the push to war, as much of it had already been discredited). In fact, I fucking hate being lied to. I want to find out who is responsible for the lies, and I wan't that motherfucker's balls served up on a plate with a side of potato salad and a nice glass of chianti.
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back in 1998 hussein had WMDs and a WMD program. that's why all of those quotes are from 1998. in late 1998, clinton got pissed and bombed the shit out of iraq, targeting anything that looked remotely like a WMD storage or manfacture facility.
that isn't to say that some dems didn't speak of WMD programs in iraq after then, but just realize that using those statements from 1998 is about as disingenuous as using quotes from 1945 to 'prove' that the democrats thought germany was a threat to the US in 1973.
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