Sunday, August 28, 2005
As Promised from today's Show
Information about Larry Pratt’s radio show is available here.
My new segment “WAR” is based on the work of two “frozen in time” sites, BushWarsBlog and TruthAboutWar (a project I coordinated and worked on). The material from the BushWarsBlog was arranged by its author, Steve Perry (most likely not of Journey fame) for the City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul), one of the key cities we at the TruthAboutWar project aired our radio spots in the weeks leading up to the attack on Iraq. Perry’s chronicled 40 whoppers by the virtuously Christian administration of George W. Bush (sorry, that just stick in my craw). I’ll probably just take each item in order.
Here's #1) The administration was NOT bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward. They had merely exhausted diplomatic options. THAT’S A LIE.
Some compelling evidence for this claim was already available BEFORE the unconstitutional March 19, 2003 attack on Iraq. Click here to see what we said at TruthAboutWar about it.
Here’s what Steve Perry wrote:
[Note: I realize this is a family website, and I don’t want people who have child safety features to be blocked from coming to my site because of the President’s apparently salty language, so I’ve edited the direct quotes of Dubya by Mr. Perry]
Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "F@$% Saddam. We're taking him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.
Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.
After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.
One more note by yours truly:
Mr. Perry is, IMHO, understating his final point. Joe Plummer with StoptheLies.com, an expert on the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, has an excellent soundbite on this. He says,
Imagine a candidate who campaigned with the primary plank of his platform being, ‘ending pornography now,’ who, once elected, lined his cabinet with pornographers. George Bush said in his 2000 campaign that we should have a humble foreign policy, that he wouldn’t create a ‘nation-building corps.’ But once elected, he surrounded himself with the Project for the New American Century gang, each of whom believed in a new version of Manifest Destiny for the Middle East and that we should spend, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding the Middle East according to their specifications.
Information about Larry Pratt’s radio show is available here.
My new segment “WAR” is based on the work of two “frozen in time” sites, BushWarsBlog and TruthAboutWar (a project I coordinated and worked on). The material from the BushWarsBlog was arranged by its author, Steve Perry (most likely not of Journey fame) for the City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul), one of the key cities we at the TruthAboutWar project aired our radio spots in the weeks leading up to the attack on Iraq. Perry’s chronicled 40 whoppers by the virtuously Christian administration of George W. Bush (sorry, that just stick in my craw). I’ll probably just take each item in order.
Here's #1) The administration was NOT bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward. They had merely exhausted diplomatic options. THAT’S A LIE.
Some compelling evidence for this claim was already available BEFORE the unconstitutional March 19, 2003 attack on Iraq. Click here to see what we said at TruthAboutWar about it.
Here’s what Steve Perry wrote:
[Note: I realize this is a family website, and I don’t want people who have child safety features to be blocked from coming to my site because of the President’s apparently salty language, so I’ve edited the direct quotes of Dubya by Mr. Perry]
Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "F@$% Saddam. We're taking him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.
Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.
After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.
One more note by yours truly:
Mr. Perry is, IMHO, understating his final point. Joe Plummer with StoptheLies.com, an expert on the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, has an excellent soundbite on this. He says,
Imagine a candidate who campaigned with the primary plank of his platform being, ‘ending pornography now,’ who, once elected, lined his cabinet with pornographers. George Bush said in his 2000 campaign that we should have a humble foreign policy, that he wouldn’t create a ‘nation-building corps.’ But once elected, he surrounded himself with the Project for the New American Century gang, each of whom believed in a new version of Manifest Destiny for the Middle East and that we should spend, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding the Middle East according to their specifications.
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