Thursday, November 17, 2005

Burlington Area Progressives

Bu$h et al think it's irresponsible for Americans to want to know how they used the intelligence leading up to the war on Iraq, as was promised. Me thinks they doth protest too much.

People forget that there were WMD inspectors on the ground in Iraq for several months before the invasion and they weren't find anything (despite bu$h's later statement that Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in and so we had to invade, which is a lie). If Rumsfeldt knew exactly where the WMDS were as he stated presumably he would have directed the inspectors to those locations. But since they were cooking the intelligence to get the war they wanted from day one of this administration and before, they couldn't do that because the inspectors would have found nothing, harming their hidden agenda.

Similarly, when Powell went to the UN, two of his most compelling points were the aerial photographs of the mobile chemical weapons trailers and the terrorist training camp in northeastern Iraq. The WMD trailers were described as being in central Iraq. Everybody knows we had total aerial dominance. So why would these photographed trailers not be traced and why weren't the weapons inspectors directed to their locations? The answer is obvious. The trailers turned out to be producing hydrogen for weather balloons despite the artist renderings that Powell produced at the time. Hardly cause to justify their war.

Furthermore the location of the terrorist training camp in northeastern Iraq was beyond Saddam's control in the independent Kurdish north. So the administration's use of this camp to link Saddam to his Al Qiada enemies is another obvious cooked intel lie. By the way, since the Kurds were our allies and we had aerial dominance of the entire country, it begs the question of why was this terrorist camp allowed to remain operating unmolested when we could have easily taken it out.

And these are just small pieces of a string of lies and misinformation that betrayed the trust of the American people and violated the democratic principle of informed consent. Their lies are coming home to roost. Reality can be denied only so long. They're starting to get a little of what they deserve. It's such a same that so many others have paid so high a cost for their crimes.

It's a shame. If people and the press would only have been paying better attention at that time and engaging their skepticism and critical thinking skills, we might have avoided this cooked up disaster, instead of waiting until now to wake up see the truth. Unfortunately, ignorance/apathy, which are two sides of the same coin, is by far the greatest problem facing our democracy and the root cause of most, if not all of the other problems we're facing.

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