Subject: The Iraq War Told Entirely in Lies

i met this guy once, he's quite cool.

***

http://prorev.com/revision.htm

THE REVISION THING


A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies


By Sam Smith


Originally published in Harper's Magazine

All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, September 2003.

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.

It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. We had sources that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator told the world he did not have. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.


It was a different kind of war because we were fighting people who sent youngsters to suicidal deaths and they tried to find a dark cave. They were lurching around in the dark corners of some cities around the world, ooching around the dark corners of the world and looking out, peeping out around the corner.

It was also a war where the enemy didn't show up with airplanes that they own, or tanks or ships. These were suiciders. day we hauled a guy in named al Nashiri. That's not a household name here in America. could understand why some went blank when they heard his name - yeah, those foreign names sure shut us down.

In the old days you could count tanks and figure out how strong the enemy was. This was an enemy that hid in caves. They tried to find the darkest cave, the deepest cave. It was a different kind of hater than we were used to. The old haters used tanks.


Not in the final Harper's piece but too good to forget


Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.


* * *