The Lie Factory

[trof]

Folks, this is long, complicated, and the cast of characters is huge. But it's worth your time to read it and become educated.
trof

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
Mother Jones February 2004 Issue
It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

[Chicago Democrat]

1. This is the most important story...

...since Watergate.

Dreyfuss was on DemocracyNOW yesterday for an interview. I encourage all to listen to it.

http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl

[dennis4868]

7. This is the most important story since....

The Pentagon Papers controversy....Watergate is nothing compared to Bush's crimes.

[hang a left]

2. I sure hope this sees the light of day.

The American people should storm DC, and throw everyone of those POS to the lions.

[tlcandie]

3. Here's a nice tidbit that helps to put it ALL together.... from article

<snip>
Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
<snip>

[Whoa_Nelly]

4. An article with HUGE impact

I sent this one on to moveon.org, of only to help add to the movement of bringing the facts to light and bringing these criminals to their day in court.

[Karenina]

5. Extra! Extra!

Read all about it!!! :kick:

[reprehensor]

6. Bump (n/t)