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iraq If it weren't for our amazing field hospitals, the damage would've been far worse. As it is, the Pentagon admits to over 1,000 troops wounded in the Iraq war. That is in addition to over 250 dead. And about $4 billion a month. That doesn't including reconstruction costs, or the tens of billions already spent on the initial month of combat operations. All for a war predicated on LIES.
What's really fun about the administration's sudden troubles is that it puts them in classic Catch-22. They can either 1) claim lied about its WMD claims, or 2) claim it was too incompetent to properly assess the intelligence. LIES or INCOMPETENCE. I'm down with either option. There's no way the administration can win unless the press loses interest and moves on to the latest JLo/Ben news. Rumsfeld Doubles Estimate for Cost of Troops in Iraq
Gen. Tommy R. Franks said today that violence and uncertainty in Iraq made it unlikely that troop levels would be reduced "for the foreseeable future," and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nearly doubled the estimated military costs there to $3.9 billion a month. White House 'lied about Saddam threat' A former US intelligence official who served under the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war accused the White House yesterday of lying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The claims came as the Bush administration was fighting to shore up its credibility among a series of anonymous government leaks over its distortion of US intelligence to manufacture a case against Saddam.
This was the first time an administration official has put his name to specific claims. The whistleblower, Gregory Thielmann, served as a director in the state department's bureau of intelligence until his retirement in September, and had access to the classified reports which formed the basis for the US case against Saddam, spelled out by President Bush and his aides. There has been a lot of talk about the forged documents concerning Iraq, Niger, and uranium. I keep wondering about who did the forgeries and why they would do it, As the Pentagon scours Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to Al Qaeda, it's increasingly obvious that the Bush Administration either distorted or deliberately exaggerated the intelligence used to justify the war against Iraq. But an even bigger intelligence scandal is waiting in the wings: the fact that members of the Administration failed to produce an intelligence evaluation of what Iraq might look like after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they ignored fears expressed by analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department who predicted that postwar Iraq would be chaotic, violent and ungovernable, and that Iraqis would greet the occupying armies with firearms, not flowers.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, it turns out that the same people are responsible for both. According to current and former US intelligence analysts and government officials, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans funneled information, unchallenged, from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who in turn passed it on to the White House, suggesting that Iraqis would welcome the American invaders. The Office of Special Plans is led by Abram Shulsky, a hawkish neoconservative ideologue who got his start in politics working alongside Elliott Abrams in Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office in the 1970s. It was set up in fall 2001 as a two-man shop, but it burgeoned into an eighteen-member nerve center of the Pentagon's effort to distort intelligence about Iraq's WMDs and terrorist connections. A great deal of the bad information produced by Shulsky's office, which found its way into speeches by Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, came from Chalabi's INC. Since the INC itself was sustained by its neocon allies in Washington, including the shadow "Central Command" at the American Enterprise Institute, it stands as perhaps the ultimate example of circular reasoning.
According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's--and which has not previously been reported--prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad--which prides itself on extreme professionalism--had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official. thanks to thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse
MOSAIC OF LIES Who lied us into war?
The easy answer: George W. Bush. But that's too easy. It's highly unlikely the President of the United States got up there and knowingly fibbed about the existence of weapons that would surely not be found. No doubt he fully expected the evidence to turn up, verifying what he and other members of his administration had been saying all along: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction capable of posing a regional threat. When no such evidence was forthcoming, however, the President's partisan critics in Congress – most of whom supported the war, and voted for the authorization to use force – were quick to jump on this administration's growing credibility gap.
It turns out that the only smoking gun is the one left in the hands of the President after he shot off his mouth and propounded what the White House now acknowledges was inaccurate information. But who supplied the ammunition? What was the source of the intelligence that convinced White House speechwriters to include the reference to uranium? Anyone with elementary computer skills and a few minutes to spare could have debunked the Niger uranium story: yet the White House was bamboozled. Bush-haters of a partisan hue are inclined to believe the forgery was concocted by the President's men, but the Washington Post report on the official investigation took a different and far more interesting tack: "The FBI is looking into the forgery of a key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program, including the possibility that a foreign government is using a deception campaign to foster support for military action against Iraq." The author of the Post piece was silent on the question of which foreign government. However, CNN was quick to cite government officials who said: "They got the documents from the intelligence service of another country, which was not Britain and was not Israel, which they will not name."
That was another lie. thanks to thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse |