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Rumsfeld Lies About Iraq and the War on Terror ... Again
ABC News reports today on Diane Sawyer's recent interview with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld claims:
Powell
-- along with other top Bush administration officials and advisers --
truly believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction at the time of
his famous presentation to the United Nations in February 2003.
The truth, however, is that everyone knew that Iraq didn't have WMDs.
ABC also notes:
Asked if he turned the conversation inside the administration to Iraq in the wake of 9/11, Rumsfeld said "absolutely not."
But as I have repeatedly pointed out, the reality is that Rumsfeld tried to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to attack Iraq:
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".
He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently saying that Dick Cheney's vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map ....
***
What does this mean?
Well,
as I have repeatedly pointed out, the "war on terror" in the Middle
East has nothing to do with combating terror, and everything to do with
remaking that region's geopolitical situation to America's advantage.
For example, as I noted in January::
Starting
right after 9/11 -- at the latest -- the goal has always been to
create "regime change" and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya,
Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon; the goal was never really to destroy Al
Qaeda. As American reporter Gareth Porter writes in Asia Times:Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military
objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but
overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other
countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted
extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas
Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.
Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of
remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat
of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military
leaders.Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling
for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a
series of states...***
General
Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and
deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down
included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon].***
When this writer asked Feith . . . which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them."
***
The
Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military
aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to
terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to
isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy"
their military capacities - not necessarily limited to weapons of mass
destruction (WMD)...Rumsfeld's paper was
given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a US
military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the
Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld's proposal called
explicitly for postponing indefinitely US airstrikes and the use of
ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order
to try to catch bin Laden.Instead, the
Rumsfeld paper argued that the US should target states that had
supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas.***
After
the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa [in 1998] by al-Qaeda
operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael
Sheehan proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in
Afghanistan against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime. However,
senior US military leaders "refused to consider it", according to a
2004 account by Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at
Tufts University.A senior officer on the
Joint Staff told State Department
counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".No wonder former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is "a mythical historical narrative".
***
The number two man at the State Department, Lawrence Wilkerson, said:
The vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy.
***
And
at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions
between top administration officials, several lines below the
statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam
Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case."
In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that
Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as
an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President
Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S.
intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of
Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible
evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al
Qaeda".And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:
(2)
acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is
consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take
the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist
organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons
who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks
that occurred on September 11, 2001.Therefore, the
Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by
representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11
attacks. See this.Indeed, the torture program which Cheney created was specifically aimed at producing false confessions in an attempt to link Iraq and 9/11.
Rumsfeld had a big hand in torture as well.
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Every story regarding 9/11 IS a conspiracy theory.
I thought we gave him the poison gas for a pipline deal.
We both know that even Hell is too good for him.
his suffering should be worse than hell, he should be forced to live with sarah palin!
Man. That's just mean. That's cold bro. That's cold.
ATTENTION GEORGE WASHINGTON
Question:
When the Administration has a bad news story they don't want too much coverage on... or when they are trying to do something sneaky and underhanded that they don't want to see lead the headlines for a week... what do they do?
Correct!
Story goes out Friday afternoon.
But sometimes G.W. ... sometimes Friday isn't Friday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU
Unusual day to release this kind of earth-shattering news wasn't it?
A statistical anomaly or just a co-incidence perhaps?
Damn 503 error caused double post
ATTENTION GEORGE WASHINGTON
You are killing me here ZerOhead, great to have you back!