Over 1,600 Americans dead, based on a pack of lies

As stated forcefully and truthfully by British PM Galloway in his testimony in the U.S. Senate this week, over 1,600 U.S. service men and women have had their lives snuffed out in Iraq based on a pack of lies. Bush administration lies.

This is at long last being reported as straight news, but since this is the Bush regime, even the most prominent press know that it must be soft-pedalled lest they get hammered and demeaned.

Apparently the Washington Post, that venerable paper, feels that proof that Bush, Powell, and others lied directly to the American public and the world which resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people and 1600 and counting U.S. service members only merits a story on page A26.

All of their scare tactics to stampede the country into war with Iraq was pure crap, and it was known at the time that the information was, at best, shaky when both Bush and Powell presented it to the world and the nation as solid fact.

People should be calling for Bush's head! Yet this story is on page A26 of the largest paper in D.C. Walter Pincus lays it out here.

It has been clear since the September report of the Iraq Survey Group -- a CIA-sponsored weapons search in Iraq -- that the United States would not find the weapons of mass destruction cited by Bush as the rationale for going to war against Iraq. But as the Walpole episode suggests, it appears that even before the war many senior intelligence officials in the government had doubts about the case being trumpeted in public by the president and his senior advisers.

The question of prewar intelligence has been thrust back into the public eye with the disclosure of a secret British memo showing that, eight months before the March 2003 start of the war, a senior British intelligence official reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that U.S. intelligence was being shaped to support a policy of invading Iraq.

Moreover, a close reading of the recent 600-page report by the president's commission on intelligence, and the previous report by the Senate panel, shows that as war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs.

These included claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa for its nuclear program, had mobile labs for producing biological weapons, ran an active chemical weapons program and possessed unmanned aircraft that could deliver weapons of mass destruction. All these claims were made by Bush or then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in public addresses even though, the reports made clear, they had yet to be verified by U.S. intelligence agencies.

For instance, Bush said in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that Hussein was working to obtain "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa, a conclusion the president attributed to British intelligence and made a key part of his assertion that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.