Bush’s Iraq commission and the “intelligence failure” fraud

[Euphen]

Bush’s Iraq commission and the “intelligence failure” fraud
Part One
By Barry Grey
7 February 2004

This is the first of a two-part article.

With the collapse of the edifice of lies used to justify the war in Iraq, the entire US political establishment has rallied around a new lie concocted to conceal the old ones—namely, the assertion that an “intelligence failure” is to blame for the false pre-war claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

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Three points should be emphasized about the Bush commission. First: Its premise and framework are themselves arbitrary and politically motivated. Prior to any investigation, it is declared that the reason for the total discrepancy between the claims of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice, etc., about Iraqi WMDs and the true situation is a “failure of intelligence.” The commission’s premise already assumes a conclusion tailor-made to whitewash the Bush government and exonerate its leading figures of the political crime of deliberately dragging the country into an unprovoked war based on false and misleading claims.

Second: The subjective mental state of Bush and company—to what extent they knowingly lied or were themselves “misled”—is an entirely secondary question. One could just as well exonerate Enron boss Kenneth Lay or, for that matter, any other corporate criminal, because he really believed the fraudulent data he was giving out to the public.

Third: The political responsibility for bombarding the people of the US and the world with false stories of an imminent threat of chemical, biological and even nuclear attack at the hands of Saddam Hussein rests not with CIA analysts, or even with CIA director George Tenet—whatever their culpability. It rests with Bush and his cohorts in the administration. They are the political leaders who chose to make these claims, and use them as the pretext for an aggressive war—one that has already cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis and well over 500 American soldiers, and consumed more than $160 billion.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/bush-f07.shtml