The Smoking Gun

George Bush has lied to the American people about his reasons for invading Iraq.  Anyone who has read the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) knows the real reasons he invaded Iraq. In 1998 the members of PNAC (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney among others) wrote a letter to Bill Clinton urging him to use military force to topple Saddam Hussein so that the U.S. could establish bases from which to influence the oil rich Middle East. When these same people came to power in 2001, they immediately started planning their war in Iraq. Then September 11 came along and gave them perfect cover.
Yet Bush keeps dodging the truth. First the reason we had to quickly invade Iraq was weapons of mass destruction and an urgent threat to the U.S.; then it became regime change; and then that morphed into bringing democracy to the world. For someone with the PR created image of consistency, he certainly changes his spots a lot.

The smoking gun has finally surfaced. The newly uncovered pre-war secret memo (in the previous post) tells that President Bush had decided to remove Saddam Hussein by launching a war that is to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." What about the intelligence?  "The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirms that Bush has decided on war, but notes that stitching together justification would be a challenge, since "the case was thin."  Straw noted that Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

The White House spin machine has been busy blaming the absence of WMD on faulty intelligence. Now we have proof that "The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." And that America was sold a bill of goods. How many people have died from this deceit? If this is not “high crimes and misdemeanors”, then what is? Not surprisingly, no coverage of this story in the U.S. corporate media - yet.