Het gore
lef wat sommigen hebben is niet zelden ten hemel schreiend, zoals de
perschef van president Bush (deze oorlogsmisdadiger en top-idioot mag zich president blijven noemen). Ari Fleischer (de perschef) nam het besluit e.e.a. via Twitter de wereld in
te helpen, waarschijnlijk als reactie op de dreigementen van de VS
tegen het Internationaal Strafhof dat men actie zal nemen tegen de
functionarissen, die zich bezig houden met onderzoek naar VS
oorlogsmisdaden…….
Ongelofelijk wat ploert Fleischer durft te zeggen, terwijl de hele wereld weet (of kan weten) dat de
VS heeft gelogen, leugens die meer dan 2 miljoen Irakezen het leven
heeft gekost, ofwel die mensen zijn in feite vermoord door de
VS……
Fleischer
doet net of de geheime diensten van de VS, Israël en nog een paar
landen zeker wisten dat er massavernietigingswapens lagen in Irak,
weliswaar klopte dit niet, maar dat is iets anders dan liegen, aldus de hufter….. ha!
ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Alsof
die geheime diensten ook maar de neiging hebben om de waarheid te vertellen,
jezus!!
De
wapeninspecteurs van de VN, o.l.v. Blix, hebben uit en te na gewezen op
het feit dat Irak (onder Saddam Hoessein) geen
massavernietigingswapens had en deze zelfs niet voor hen verborgen kon
hebben…..
Overigens liet de Hoop Scheffer, oorlogsmisdadiger van het CDA, vorig jaar weten nog steeds achter de illegale oorlog tegen Irak te staan, ondanks het enorme aantal slachtoffers, een land dat voor een groot deel in puin ligt en waar de oorlog nog lang niet is afgelopen…… Irak, een land waarnaar Nederland vluchtelingen deporteert, rechtstreeks de oorlog in, dit op basis van ambtsberichten van Buitenlandse Zaken, terwijl hetzelfde ministerie nog steeds een negatief reisadvies voor Irak afgeeft….
Caitlin
Johnstone schreef op haar site een uiterst scherp artikel over
deze zaak en laat van Fleischer en anderen geen spaan heel, lezen
mensen, het gaat hier om geschiedvervalsing van de eerste orde, ook
de reguliere (massa-) media doen net of hun neus bloedt als het om de
illegale Irak oorlog gaat, terwijl zij deze oorlog op valse feiten
van A tot Z hebben gepropageerd, waar de kennis over het tegendeel voor het oprapen lag…….. (over het brengen van fake news gesproken….)
On
the Anniversary Of The Iraq Invasion, Bush Press Secretary Claims
Bush Didn’t Lie
On
the sixteenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, as the US
government threatens
punitive action against International
Criminal Court investigators for attempting to look into US war
crimes, former George W Bush administration Press Secretary Ari
Fleischer has decided to publish
a Twitter thread claiming
that Bush did not lie to the world about Iraq.
Here
is a transcript of the full thread by Fleischer:
The
Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the
war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs
were found, the left claimed “Bush lied. People died.” This
accusation itself is a lie. It’s time to put it to rest.
The
fact is that President Bush (and I as press secretary) faithfully and
accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community
concluded. The CIA, along with the intelligence services of
Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD. We
all turned out to be wrong. That is very different from lying.
After
the war, a bipartisan group was created to determine what went wrong,
particularly why the intelligence community’s conclusions about Iraq
were so different from what was found on the ground after the
war. The group of experts was named the Robb-Silberman
commission. It’s report was issued in March 2005. It
can be found in full here.
Its key finding was that that a “major intelligence failure”
took place. It also stated that no intelligence service was pressured
by the Bush Administration to conclude that Saddam had WMDs.
Here
are the key quotes from their report:
“Overall
Commission Finding: The Intelligence Community’s performance in
assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a
major intelligence failure.
Nuclear
Weapons Summary Finding: The Intelligence Community seriously
misjudged the status of Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program in the
2002 NIE* and other pre-Iraq war intelligence products. This
misjudgment stemmed chiefly from the Community’s failure to analyze
correctly Iraq’s reasons for attempting to procure high-strength
aluminum tubes.
Biological
Warfare Summary Finding: The Intelligence Community seriously
misjudged the status of Iraq’s biological weapons program in the 2002
NIE and other pre-war intelligence products. The primary reason
for this misjudgment was the Intelligence Community’s heavy reliance
on a human source–codenamed ‘Curveball’–whose information later
proved to be unreliable.
Chemical
Warfare Summary Finding: The Intelligence Community erred in its 2002
NIE assessment of Iraq’s alleged chemical warfare program. The
Community’s substantial overestimation of Iraq’s chemical warfare
program was due chiefly to flaws in analysis and the paucity of
quality information collected. In the case of Iraq, collectors of
intelligence absorbed the prevailing analytic consensus and tended to
reject or ignore contrary information. The result was ‘tunnel vision’
focusing on the Intelligence Community’s existing assumptions. The
Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgments
in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion,
but the pervasive conventional wisdom that Saddam retained WMD
affected the analytic process. The CIA took too long to admit
error in Iraq, and its Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and
Arms Control Center actively discouraged analysts from investigating
errors.
Finally,
we closely examined the possibility that intelligence analysts were
pressured by policymakers to change their judgments about Iraq’s
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs. The analysts
who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no
instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of
their analytical judgments.”
That
is what the investigators reported, after been given full access to
people throughout the intelligence community. Which leads me to
conclude that there was a liar and his name was Saddam Hussein. He
created an elaborate system of lies to fool western intelligence
services and he succeeded. He wanted us to believe he had WMDs.
The
allegaton that “Bush lied. People died” is a liberal myth
created to politically target President Bush. I understand the anger
that was felt after no WMDs were found. But that doesn’t justify
calling the President a liar. I can only hope that serious historians
and other experts do their homework and resist falling for this myth.
The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed “Bush lied. People died.” This accusation itself is a lie. It’s time to put it to rest.
11.2K
Ari
Fleischer is lying. It is an absolute proven fact that George W Bush
and his administration lied
extensively about
the degree of certainty in intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein
possessing weapons of mass destruction, having ties to Al Qaeda, and
seeking nuclear weapons, all of which (along with Vice President
Cheney’s claim that the US invaders would be “greeted
as liberators“)
proved false. The Bush administration did not know the things they
claimed to know with any degree of certainty, but they claimed that
they were certain in order to manufacture support for war. Claiming
to know something you do not know is lying, especially when it’s to
advance an ulterior motive.
“Evidence
from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by
people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects
terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda,” Bush claimed
in January 2003.
“Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his
hidden weapons
to terrorists, or help them develop their own.”
“Simply
stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
destruction,” Cheney claimed
in August 2002.
“There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our
friends, against our allies, and against us.”
“The
United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,”
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said
in December 2002.
“Any country on the face of the earth with an active
intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass
destruction.”
“We
are absolutely sure they have continued to develop weapons of mass
destruction, and we are sure they have in their possession weapons of
mass destruction,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said
in December 2002.
“My
colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources,
solid sources,” Powell told the United Nations Security Council
in his infamous Iraq
presentation in
February 2003. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving
you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
“People
will continue to debate this issue, but there is no doubt in my
mind,” Powell said in the same presentation. “These illicit
procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on
putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons
program, the ability to produce fissile material.”
Powell was
not nearly as certain as
he claimed to be. None of them were. Facts revealed after the
invasion prove that for all their public claims of complete and total
certainty that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, was aiding and
abetting Al Qaida, and was developing nuclear weapons, behind the
veil of government secrecy there was nothing like certainty at all.
For
starters, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who was cited in Powell’s
presentation and who Fleischer refers to by the code name “Curveball”
in the above thread, was
known to have been lying about
bioweapons long before the invasion. Despite the confident assertions
made by the Bush administration about Janabi’s claims to the public,
no American personnel were present when he made those claims, and
he told
the Guardianin
2011 that
the BND (the German intelligence agency who interrogated him) had
known he was lying all along.
“The
BND [German intelligence] knew in 2000 that I was lying after they
talked to my former boss, Dr Bassil Latif, who told them there were
no mobile bioweapons factories,” Janabi said. “For 18
months after that they left me alone because they knew I was telling
lies even though I never admitted it.
Believe
me, back then, I thought the whole thing was over for me. Then all of
a sudden [in the run up to the 2003 invasion] they came back to me
and started asking for more details about what I had told them. I
still don’t know why the BND then passed on my information to the CIA
and it ended up in Powell’s speech.”
Colonel
Lawrence Wilkerson was Powell’s chief of staff and helped him prepare
his UN presentation on Iraq. When asked on MSNBC if he believed he
was lied to about Janabi following the 2011 revelation,
Wilkerson told
Cenk Uygur that
“I cannot come to any other conclusion, especially when I have
discovered that no US personnel were present when Curveball was
interrogated by the BND, the German intelligence service. That we
accepted that, that we even had a head of the European division for
the CIA, Tyler Drumheller, who at the last minute during Powell’s
preparation, during my preparation of the secretary, had told both
Tenet and McLaughlin that Curveball might not be reliable. That
information was never relayed to the Secretary of State, or to me. I
have some serious doubts about it now. I think there was some
manipulation of this material, and there was some outright lying.”
When asked
by Uygur who
he thought lied to him, Wilkerson said one of WINPAC’s two WMD
experts at the time may have been answering directly to Dick Cheney’s
office.
A declassified
report from 2002 titled Iraq:
Status of WMD Programs reveals
that while the Bush administration was making its claims of absolute
certainty regarding the dangers posed by the Iraqi government, behind
the scenes it was damn near the opposite. Some choice excerpts:
“Our
assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather
than hard evidence.
The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for
Iraqi nuclear programs.”
“We
range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their
program.”
“Our
knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based
largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”
“We
cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce,
test, fill, or store biological weapons.”
“Our
knowledge of what biological weapons the Iraqis are able to
produce is nearly complete. Our knowledge of how and where they
are produced is nearly 90% incomplete.”
“We
do not know the status of enrichment capabilities. We do not know
with confidence the location of any nuclear-weapon-related
facilities.”
“Please
take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD. It
is big.” (That one was from Rumsfeld.)
“We
don’t know with any precision how much we don’t know.”
This
is not the language of certainty. Yet certainty was presented to the
public to manufacture support for a war which murdered a million
Iraqis.
The
2002 Downing
Street memo,
made public in 2005, reveals a secret meeting between senior
officials of the British government, intelligence and defense
agencies discussing what they knew about America’s plans for war.
The text
of the document contains
an assertion by the head of MI6 that Bush had already determined that
the invasion of Iraq would take place, and it was only a matter of
fixing bits of intelligence around a narrative to make the case.
“Military
action was now seen as inevitable,” the document reads. “Bush
wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN
route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi
regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the
aftermath after military action.”
“It
seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action,
even if the timing was not yet decided,” the document quotes
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying. “But the case was thin.”
In
a 2008
hearing before the House Judiciary Committee,
attorney and author Vincent Bugliosi pointed out that the fact
that Bush lied about Iraq could be proven by the difference between
the classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and its
declassified white paper which was made available to the public. The
classified version contained dissents from the consensus and language
which made it clear that the reader was reading assessments and
opinions by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, whereas the
unclassified version saw these things deleted, presenting the
assessments as absolute fact.
“The
evidence that he lied about weapons of mass destruction, by the way,
which is not the basis for this book, are right in front of
me,” Bugliosi
said.
“I have it right here. Here is the evidence. This document here
is the National Intelligence Estimate. I didn’t name it before. I
talked about a classified report. This is it right here. October 1st,
2002, classified NIE report. It is called Iraq’s Continuing Programs
of Weapons of Mass Destruction. In this document right here, the CIA
and 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies use words like this, ‘we
assess that’ or ‘we judge that’ Hussein has weapons of mass
destruction. This document here is the white paper that was given to
you folks here in Congress and the American people. And the words ‘we
assess that’ or ‘we judge that’ were removed, meaning that you folks
here heard a fact, and in fact, it was only an opinion.
“Number
two, on nuclear weapons, this document right here, the classified
report has several important dissents. This document right here, the
white paper that you folks were given and the American people, all of
those dissents were deleted.”
Over
and over and over again we saw the same thing: uncertainty presented
as certainty. Guesses presented as fact. Opinions presented as proof.
That’s a lie. Bush lied. We know this with as much certainty as his
administration was pretending to have in the lead-up to the Iraq
invasion. There was a pre-existing agenda to invade Iraq, and
justifications were advanced to provide an excuse for that invasion
with such extreme aggression that now-National Security Advisor John
Bolton literally threatened
to murder an international official’s children for
making diplomacy work with Saddam.
Here
are a few more courtesy
of Vox:
In
October 2002, Bush said that Saddam Hussein had a “massive
stockpile” of
biological weapons. But as CIA Director
George Tenet noted
in early 2004, the CIA had informed policymakers it had “no
specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or
stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.” The “massive stockpile”
was just literally made up.
In
December 2002, Bush declared, “We
do not know whether or not [Iraq] has a nuclear weapon.” That
was not what the National Intelligence Estimate said. As Tenet would
later testify, “We said that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon
and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009.”
Bush did know whether or not Iraq had a nuclear weapon — and lied
and said he didn’t know to hype the threat.
On
CNN in September 2002, Condoleezza Rice claimed that aluminum tubes
purchased by Iraq were “only really suited for nuclear weapons
programs.” This was precisely
the opposite of what nuclear experts at the Energy Department were
saying; they argue that not only was it very possible the tubes were
for nonnuclear purposes but that it was very likely they were too.
Even more dire assessments about the tubes from other agencies were
exaggerated by administration officials — and in any case, the
claim that they’re “only really suited” for nuclear weapons is
just false.
On
numerous occasions, Dick Cheney cited a report that 9/11 conspirator
Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer.
He said this after the
CIA and FBI concluded that this meeting never took place.
More
generally on the question of Iraq and al-Qaeda, on September 18,
2001, Rice received
a memo summarizing intelligence on the relationship,
which concluded there was little evidence of links. Nonetheless Bush
continued to claim
that Hussein was “a threat because he’s dealing with
al-Qaeda” more
than a year later.
In
August 2002, Dick
Cheney declared,
“Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction.” But as Corn
notes,
at that time there was “no confirmed intelligence at this point
establishing that Saddam had revived a major WMD operation.” Gen.
Anthony Zinni, who had heard the same intelligence and attended
Cheney’s speech, would later
say in a documentary,
“It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was
saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD,
through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece
of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”
In
2007 General Wesley Clark told Democracy
Now that
he’d actually been informed of the decision to invade Iraq
immediately after 9/11, while the crosshairs were turning on
Afghanistan and well before the public narrative was being amped up
in demand of an invasion of Iraq. His comments read as follows:
About
ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary
Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to
say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work
for me, and one of the generals called me in.
He
said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.”
I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.”
He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.”
This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going
to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He
said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said,
“Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to
al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s
nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with
Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do
about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down
governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you
have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So
I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were
bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with
Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He
reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said,
“I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the
Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said,
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven
countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is
it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well,
don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I
said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t
show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. If you’ve been
following the behaviors of the US war machine, Iraq won’t be the only
painfully familiar name on that list.
It remains important to learn what we’ve attacked and where. How widespread?
In addition to military targets, I hope we targeted Assad’s palace in Damascus. Leave him alive but destroy his prestige. Leave him without a home, as Assad has left millions of Syrians w/o theirs.
1,914
2:12 AM – Apr 14, 2018 · New York, USA
“In the last few months of 2018, Iran officially entered a deep recession.” Time to step up the sanctions… en.radiofarda.com/a/iran-officia…
941
Iran’s Official Figures Indicate Alarming Unemployment Rate Later This Year
The official unemployment rate has reached 27 percent among young Iranians and over 40 percent among university graduates, says Omid Ali Parsai, chairman of the Iranian Statistical Center.
Ari
Fleischer is a liar. He was
in the thick of
the Bush administration’s campaign to sell the Iraq war to the
American public, and to this day he continues trying to
sell them
on new
acts of depraved
US interventionism.
He’s just as much a warmongering neocon inside as he was when he was
behind a podium defending Bush’s wars in the press room, so it’s no
wonder he wants to preserve the image of his insatiable death cult.
Fleischer wants to preserve his legacy, yes, but he also wants to
preserve support for the war machine whose feet he worships at, hence
his ham-fisted attempt at narrative manipulation regarding the
unforgivable Iraq invasion.
The
responses to Fleischer’s Twitter thread have been overwhelmingly
negative, though, so it doesn’t look like anyone’s buying it. In our
new political landscape, where the image of George W Bush is
being continually
rehabilitated,
that gives me a bit of hope.
These
monsters lied to start a war which snuffed out a million human lives
and destabilized an entire region, and they did it right in front of
our faces. The fact that they’re now trying to lie about the thing we
all watched them do is as insulting as it is infuriating. Never let
them pull the wool over your eyes, and never forget what they did.
Forgiveness is highly
overrated.
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Caitlin
Johnstone |
March 20, 2019 at 3:25 pm | Tags: Ari
Fleisher, bush, george
w bush, invasion, iraq, lied, news, Politics, war |
Categories: Article, News |
URL: https://wp.me/p9tj6M-1Bl
* NIE: National Intelligence Estimate
===============================
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