They're Lying To Us Again - In the Name Of War By Gary Starkweather "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." Sydney Schanberg They are lying to us again. "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld September 2001 Remember the fake 'Tonkin Incident'? It got us into Vietnam. The '250,000 Iraqi troops' and '1,500 tanks' massed on the border of Saudi Arabia and the story told by 'Nayirah' about the Iraqis dumping 312 babies "on the cold floor to die" from Kuwati incubators? Both stories were instrumental in raising support in the US and globally for Desert Storm. Neither was true. 'Nayirah' turned out to be an alias for the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador at the time. Satellite images from the Saudi border showed no Iraqi build-up. From the Christian Science Monitor article below: "That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis – offering to hold the story if proven wrong. The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified. There were fake stories about Nicaragua and El Salvador back in Iran/Contra days... Oh yeah, that was Cheney and Rumsfeld as well. In February Rumsfeld closed the Office of Strategic Information, five days after the disinfomation/propaganda unit's existence was disclosed. There seems to be a pattern here. The Current Lie From http://msnbc.com/news/802167.asp?cp1=1 PRESIDENT MISSTATES ‘FACTS’ In his meeting with Blair, Bush cited a satellite photograph and a report by the U.N. atomic energy agency as evidence of Iraq’s impending rearmament. However, in response to a report by NBC News, a senior administration official acknowledged Saturday night that the U.N. report drew no such conclusion, and a spokesman for the U.N. agency said the photograph had been misinterpreted. Blair cited a newly released satellite photo of Iraq identifying new construction at several sites linked in the past to Baghdad’s development of nuclear weapons. And both leaders mentioned a 1998 report by the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency that said Saddam could be six months away from developing nuclear weapons. “I don’t know what more evidence we need,” Bush said, standing alongside Blair. “We owe it to future generations to deal with this problem.” In a joint appearance before the summit, the two leaders repeated their shared view that Saddam’s ouster was the only way to stop Iraq’s pursuit — and potential use — of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. “The policy of inaction is not a policy we can responsibly subscribe to,” Blair said as he joined Bush in trying to rally reluctant allies to deal with Saddam, perhaps by military force. IAEA: NUCLEAR ABILITY DESTROYED Contrary to Bush’s claim, however, the 1998 IAEA report did not say that Iraq was six months away from developing nuclear capability, NBC News’ Robert Windrem reported Saturday. Instead, Windrem reported, the Vienna, Austria-based agency said in 1998 that Iraq had been six to 24 months away from such capability before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the U.N.-monitored weapons inspections that followed. The war and the inspections destroyed much of Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure and required Iraq to turn over its highly enriched uranium and plutonium, Windrem reported. In a summary of its 1998 report, the IAEA said that “based on all credible information available to date ... the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material.” WHITE HOUSE ADMITS ERROR A senior White House official acknowledged Saturday night that the 1998 report did not say what Bush claimed. “What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report,” the official told NBC News’ Norah O’Donnell. Meanwhile, Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the U.N. agency, disputed Bush’s and Blair’s assessment of the satellite photograph, which was first publicized Friday. Contrary to news service reports, there was no specific photo or building that aroused suspicions, he told Windrem. The photograph in question was not U.N. intelligence imaging but simply a picture from a commercial satellite imaging company, Gwozdecky said. He said that the IAEA reviewed commercial satellite imagery regularly and that, from time to time, it noticed construction at sites it had previously examined. Gwozdecky said the new construction indicated in the photograph was no surprise and that no conclusions were drawn from it. “There is not a single building we see,” he said. Desert Storm Lies From http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.htm In war, some facts less factual When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier. But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert. "It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story. And farther down the page: John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda. "These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago," Mr. MacArthur says. "They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way." The Gulf of Tonkin Lie From the bottom of http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam -- sailed through Congress on Aug. 7. (Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, provided the only "no" votes.) The resolution authorized the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The rest is tragic history. Nearly three decades later, during the Gulf War, columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident." Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public." And he added: "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." Gary Starkweather