A compendium of lies and deceit

Remember, people died. People are still dying. If this is a policy choice, it's one that has thousands upon thousands of people dying, many of them American, British, Polish, Unkrainian, Japanese, Bulgarian, Italian and a shameful number of dead and injured Iraqis. The thousands of horribly wounded Americans must be remembered too.

If the decision to go to war is a policy choice, one known as preemption, then we must remember the decision was based on lies, deceit, intimidation and a shameful and opportunistic use of political pressure leading up to the 2002 congressional elections.

Here, then, is a compendium of the lies and deceit:

The LA Times writes about how Curveball's revelations concerning WMDs were discredited months before they were put to use to sell the War. This led to, among other things, Colin Powell's knucklehead moment at the U.N.

National Journal's Murray Waas made clear that the Bush administration withheld key a intelligence briefing that revealed that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence of a Iraqi-Al Qaeda connection just ten days after 9/11. This document continues to be withheld from the Senate Intelligence Committee charged with investigating intelligence manipulation. Quite the smoking gun in more ways than one, don't you think?

An important reminder: While this almost daily drumbeat of revelations of the media manipulation and sexed-up non-intelligence used to phony up a war continues to pound, our President and Vice-President are calling war critics reprehensible, dishonest, shameless and corrupt. They accuse politicians and journalists of attempting to "rewrite history," the very history the Bush administration corruptly distorted. Talk about shameless. And talk about ineffective. Lies to cover lies, that's what they are doing now to justify their policy that has led to war and death.

Apparently not wanting anything that might hint that other wars were justified though fabrication, a National Security Agency study about the Gulf of Tonkin incident has been kept secret, even though it refers to events of more than 40 years ago. The gist of the study is known, that the second attack on an American destroyer never took place and that N.S.A. midlevel officers skewed the intelligence deliberately.

So much for the power of the Congress alone to wage war. Of course, there's the famous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, very much like the Iraq Resolution, both products of skewed intelligence. What power does Congress have if it's lied to?

We've already posted James Bamford's Rolling Stone article that speaks to the shady role of the Rendon Group, a PR firm in the employ of federal government, in selling war to the American public.

Let's not forget the most famous article debunking the Bushling run-up to the War: Joe Wilson's "What I Didn't Find in Africa" that led to his wife's outing as a CIA operative. George Tenet and Stephen Hadley fell over themselves trying to take the blame for Bush's famous 16 words taking us down the Yellowcake Road.

Seems rebel MPs are going after Tony Blair's own Iraqi road to war. Being a friend to W. gets more expensive every day.