Ray McGovern: The Iraq War’s Known Unknowns

[Octafish]

These three men knew Iraq was no threat to the United States of America. Yet, they willingly lied America into making illegal, immoral, unnecessary and disastrous war.



The Iraq War’s Known Unknowns

In September 2002, as the Bush-43 administration was rolling out its ad campaign for invading Iraq because of alleged WMD, the Joint Chiefs of Staff received a briefing about the paucity of WMD evidence. But the report was shelved and the war went on.

by Ray McGovern
Common Dreams, Wednesday, January 27, 2016

There is a lot more than meets the eye in the newly revealed Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence briefing of Sept. 5, 2002, which showed there was a lack of evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – just as President George W. Bush’s administration was launching its sales job for the Iraq War.

The briefing report and its quick demise amount to an indictment not only of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld but also of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers, who is exposed once again as a Rumsfeld patsy who put politics ahead of his responsibility to American soldiers and to the nation as a whole.

In a Jan. 24 report at Politico entitled “What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn’t Know About Iraq,” journalist John Walcott presents a wealth of detail about the JCS intelligence report of Sept. 5, 2002, offering additional corroboration that the Bush administration lied to the American people about the evidence of WMD in Iraq.

SNIP...

Imagine what might have happened had Myers gone public at that point. It is all too easy to assume that Bush and Cheney would have gotten their war anyway. But who can tell for sure? Sometimes it takes just one senior official with integrity to spark a hemorrhage of honesty. However the outcome would have turned out at least Myers would been spared the pain of looking into the mirror every morning – and thinking back on what might have been.

SNIP...

“Just read my book,” Myers said. I told him I had, and cited a couple of sentences from my copy: “You write that you told a senior Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, ‘I feel very strongly about this. And if Rumsfeld doesn’t defend the Geneva Conventions, I’ll contradict him in front of the President.’ Did you?”

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/27/iraq-wars-known-unknowns

[randys1]

1. Every vet and family member of every vet should class action sue the W administration

for pain and suffering.

[Octafish]

2. That might be just what's needed.

As it is, the people who lied America into war are laughing all the way to a taxpayer funded pension.

[Martin Eden]

3. War Criminals. They belong in prison.

More importantly, the American people need to know they were lied to by these war criminals.

Failure to understand the truth in this matter is the prelude to the next unnecessary disastrous war based on lies.

[Octafish]

4. Absolutely. Where is the oil-soaked monopoly press? AWOL.

Thank goodness for Ray McGovern:

Documentary Evidence Confirms That Iraq War Was About Oil

By Ray McGovern
CommonDreams.org, 23 April, 2011

EXCERPT...

Oil researcher Greg Muttitt’s new book Fuel on Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq presents that evidence, since Muttitt had better luck than American counterparts in getting responses to his Freedom of Information requests.

After a five-year struggle, he obtained more than 1,000 official documents which — how to say this — do not reflect well on the peerage, the captains of the oil industry, and the government of Tony Blair.

On April 19, the British Independent published a major story about these disclosures, which America’s FCM have avoided like the plague. ["Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq"]

Quoting the released British documents, the Independent showed BP salivating over an expected windfall of Iraqi oil, with the saliva politely sponged up by Foreign Office functionaries. From the Independent:

“The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq ‘post regime change.’ Its minutes state: ‘Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there.’ …

“Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had ‘no strategic interest’ in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was ‘more important than anything we’ve seen for a long time’ … it [BP] was willing to take ‘big risks’ to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world.”

Of course, BP was singing a different tune for the average folks. Lord Browne, then-BP chief executive, insisted on March 12, 2003, a week before the invasion of Iraq: “It is not, in my or BP’s opinion, a war about oil.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.countercurrents.org/mcgovern230411.htm

Thank you for grokking, Martin Eden. Without vision, you know what happens to We the People.

[Martin Eden]

6. They came up with the name Operation Iraqi Freedom ...

... because Operation Iraqi Liberation came too close to the truth.

Defenders of these war criminals and deniers of the truth argue that oil riches were not realized, but to the extent that's accurate it's more a result of the sheer incompetence of neocon group-thinkers in the Bush administration and it doesn't change their underlying motivations. They refused advice from anyone outside their circle who wasn't in sync with their agenda or who had a better understanding of Iraq and pointed out this would be no cakewalk.

Big Oil was certainly a big part of the Bush administration and the influence of the MIC cited by Eisenhower was also a factor, but the neocon ambitions went beyond corporate greed. They saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an historic opportunity for Pax Americana achieved through unchallengable military superiority. The invasion/occupation of Iraq was a key first step. 9/11 provided the "New Pearl Harbor" for obtaining the necessary political support by manipulating the public through fear. The false marketing campaign to sell this war was a matter of ends justify the means.

It was a deluded overreach for empire. The ends have no clear end in sight, but the clear direction is a steady erosion of US supremacy on the world stage. Though a big chunk of the American public may not have the vision to see these war crimes and criminals for what they are, the rest of the world is not so blinded by our corporate media. Status as Leader of the Free World cannot be maintained without genuine moral leadership perceived and acknowledged by the world community. Our criminal invasion of Iraq and the ensuing carnage (still ongoing 13 years later) is a self-inflicted wound to that status, but the costs go far beyond the damage to our national image and the numbers of the dead. The ultimate financial cost ($3 trillion or more including care for wounded vets for years to come) transformed a budget surplus into record deficits with no end in sight. Health care, education, insfrastructure, and so much else needed for keeping our country and its people strong is under funded.

Future historians will likely point to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as the tipping point in the decline and fall of the late great United States.

The consequences have been worse than I anticipated when I treavlled to our nation's capital in March 2003 to protest this war 4 days before it was launched. I knew at the time it was built on a foundation of lies and was wrong on multiple levels. If I was aware of all that, our elected representatives in the House and Senate knew it as well or they weren't qualified for the office they held.

I've never been one for political litmus tests. I understand that political parties and candidates have their good points and bad, some much more so than others. However, I swore in October 2002 that no politician who voted to give GW Bush authority to invade Iraq would ever get my vote in a Democratic primary, and to that I still hold. It is inexcusable and unforgivable.

[JEB]

5. K&R for the original post and subsequent informative posts and links. Bookmark.

[Octafish]

10. The Lie Factory

The Lie Factory

A Mother Jones Special Investigation: The inside story of how the Bush administration pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

EXCERPT...

Six months after the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.

The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting‚ -- and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.

Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.

Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore. You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."

Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory

Thank you, JEB! While I do add to the noise, my aim is to increase the size of the signal.

In this case, the war criminals who lied the USA into war run free.

[7wo7rees]

7. Mr. McGovern is a national treasure.

1st time I met him was when he came to Dallas in Jan of 2004. He had been invited to speak at a meeting of the World Affairs Council of Greater Dallas. You can read his account of what happened here:

http://www.opednews.com/populum/pagem.php?f=Dallas-Into-the-Belly-of-by-Ray-McGovern-090723-676.html

The elites in Dallas were not happy, many stalked out and person responsible paid dearly.

I've spent time with him several times since that first mtg. and he is top notch, first rate and we hold him in same high regard for truth as we do Daniel Ellsberg!

Thanks for posting Octa, you are DU's treasure for truth telling!!

Ms. 7wo7rees

[Octafish]

11. World Affairs Council all right.

Dallas: Into the Belly of the Beast

By Ray McGovern
OpEd News, 7/23/2009

EXCERPT...

I was, nonetheless, feeling a bit anxious, given what had happened during my last major speech there, when I addressed the World Affairs Council of Greater Dallas on Jan. 20, 2004. Then my topic was "Intelligence and War: Lessons From the Recent Past," and I was very intentional about being, well, fair and balanced in devoting equal time to listing the baleful lies of two Texans - Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush - both of whom got a lot of people killed in unnecessary war.

I even reached back into history to enlist help from a former president whom Bush had called his favorite - Teddy Roosevelt, who said:

"To announce that there is to be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but morally treasonable to the American people."

Suffice it to say that my attempt at evenhandedness failed miserably, even though I used up a lot of precious time rehearsing LBJ's perfidy on Vietnam - dissecting, in particular, his exploitation of dubious intelligence regarding the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident of Aug. 4, 1964. I gave pride of place to that well deserved castigation before I delved into a reconstruction of what was already discernible as of January 2004 with respect to the lies told by George W. Bush to "justify" attacking Iraq exactly 10 months before.

Okay, so maybe I laid it on a little thick in citing what Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering told his American interrogator in Nuremberg:

"Naturally, the common people do not want war. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a communist dictatorship....

"The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Oil executives and other Dallas insiders in the audience took that as a signal to bolt - and did. One of the early departed, Herbert Hunt of the Hunt Oil family expressed chagrin at having been tricked into attending on false pretenses. He told an associate that, hearing of my continuing friendship with George Herbert Walker Bush, [font color="red"]he was deceived into thinking I was "one of us."[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dallas-Into-the-Belly-of-by-Ray-McGovern-090723-676.html

Wow! Incredible McGovern report, yours, 7wo7rees! Thank you for your kind words, too!

[AikidoSoul]

8. I trust and respect Ray McGovern

And he has been through hell.

I hope he has fully recovered from cancer.

[Dont call me Shirley]

9. Ray McGovern speaks libraries of truth to false-power, which is what these criminals are. Prison for

for life for them all would be the best solution. More people need to speak truth to the false-power to imprison these war criminals.

[bobthedrummer]

12. I had the honor of meeting Ray many years ago when he was at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

for a couple of days. He gave me a different way of analyzing the history of the intelligence community and its leadership, and a respect for those that served during the Cold War that prevented nuclear war.

Some of Ray's rewards for his service include getting beaten by the NYPD, and arrested many times, including yesterday.

I'm very grateful that Ray McGovern was one of the founders of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity/VIPS, among other things.

K&R.

[7wo7rees]

13. Absolutely! He is one of the best ever!

Getting to spend moments with him can never be qualified. You are in an absolute place of peace and truth.

[Rex]

14. And yet, because we live in a plutocracy our working class must suffer and sacrifice for the wealthy

2016. SSDY.