Bush’s Iraq commission and the “intelligence failure” fraud

[RBHam]

Part One
By Barry Grey, wsws.org
7 February 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/bush-f07.shtml
This is the first of a two-part article.

With the collapse of the edifice of lies used to justify the war in Iraq, the entire US political establishment has rallied around a new lie concocted to conceal the old ones—namely, the assertion that an “intelligence failure” is to blame for the false pre-war claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush on Friday named the members of his hand-picked—yet, somehow, “independent”—commission to look into this problem. Every one of the seven members of the panel is a trusted defender of US imperialism and the American ruling elite. The appointment of retired federal judge Laurence Silberman as co-chairman, in particular, exposes the utterly fraudulent character of the investigation (i.e., whitewash) that the commission will conduct.

Silberman, a long-time operative for the Republican right, is an old hand at covering up the crimes of Republican administrations. Appointed by Reagan to the Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., Silberman and fellow right-wing Republican judge David Sentelle in 1990 voided the convictions of Lt. Col. Oliver North and Admiral John Poindexter for crimes related to the Iran-Contra affair. At the heart of Iran-Contra was a secret operation sanctioned by Reagan to finance and arm, in violation of US law, the contra death squads that killed tens of thousands of people in Nicaragua. Silberman’s intervention played a key role in sabotaging the investigation by Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh.

The newly appointed commission, to which Bush’s handlers reluctantly agreed after Washington’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, resigned and declared there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country, is a transparent fraud that will have no credibility with the majority of people in America and the rest of the world. To insure that the panel will serve the purpose for which it was set up—to conceal the truth and smother any serious discussion of Washington’s real war aims—it will issue no report until well after the November 2004 presidential election. This alone establishes the utterly anti-democratic essence of the exercise.

more...

[RichM]

1. Here's a link to this top-notch analysis...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/bush-f07.shtml

[RBHam]

2. thanks

i'll fix the post

[teryang]

3. "I've never seen a government like this."

Bullseye. The analysis in this article skewers this radical rightist regime right through it rotten lying criminal heart.

"In an interview January 10 on the CBS news program “60 Minutes” and another published by Time magazine, former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, who was forced out of office a year ago, revealed that the Bush administration began top-level discussions of invading and occupying Iraq as soon as Bush entered the White House in January 2001."

Yet a Christian Science Monitor correspondent is on Cspan this morning saying "mainstream" media cannot assume that the commander in thief lied about WMD because "we cannot know what was going on in his mind. We can't make that leap." What happened to "We're taking him out."

There is an old saying in evidence and criminal law classes, "The state of a man's mind is as susceptible of proof as the state of the weather."