Bush and Iraq: Denial and Deception

On October 7, 2002, President George Bush gave a speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center in which he made the following statements:

"[T]he regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."

"[T]he regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons."

"Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles..."

"[I]raq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas."

"[I]raq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program..."

Source: White House Press Release

All of these statements were wrong. And we now know that much of the "intelligence" behind these statements came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander who was tortured by the Egyptian government at the C.I.A.'s request.

To pile sickening irony on top of the horror of the U.S. outsourcing torture, this is the image that appears at the top of the press release:

Ironic because it was denial of reality and deception by the government that got us into Iraq. Sickening because over four thousand Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis are dead because of the Bush administration's denial and deception.

It gets worse. Having learned nothing from their failure to act to prevent the attacks on 9/11 (Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US was the President's Daily Brief given to President Bush on August 6, 2001), seven years later we are told that our troops in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda is busy reconstituting itself and is undoubtedly planning new attacks against the U.S., don't have the manpower and equipment to finish off the real enemy. In other words, seven years, tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later, Bin Laden is still determined to strike in the US.

All this information and more is contained in a new book, "The Dark Side", by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. It demonstrates how the the Bush administration is putting every American at risk through a continuing policy of denial and deception.