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3/10/2004
EAR PLUGS
The Hollis Gillespie book signing at Paris on Ponce, with Kingsized and Dames
A'Flame. Now - in color!
http://www.degeneratepress.com/vault/hollis_gillespie_mar_2004/index.html
BLASPHEMY
There's a very educational article on salon.com by Karen Kwiatkowski, a
high-ranking military official within the Bush administration, about the lies
that led us to war with Iraq and the forces behind those lies, many of whom were
the same people that brought you Iran-Contra.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp/
It's a bit long and convoluted for the modern American attention span, but if
you won't read the whole thing at least read this excerpt:
War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons
given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate
and so misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design.
Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country
on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S.
muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of
the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro
and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more
accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their
merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported
the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance
for an honest debate.
President Bush has now appointed a commission to look at American intelligence
capabilities and will report after the election. It will "examine intelligence
on weapons of mass destruction and related 21st century threats ... [and]
compare what the Iraq Survey Group learns with the information we had prior..."
The commission, aside from being modeled on failed rubber stamp commissions of
the past and consisting entirely of those selected by the executive branch,
specifically excludes an examination of the role of the Office of Special Plans
and other executive advisory bodies. If the president or vice president were
seriously interested in "getting the truth," they might consider asking for
evidence on how intelligence was politicized, misused and manipulated, and
whether information from the intelligence community was distorted in order to
sway Congress and public opinion in a narrowly conceived neoconservative push
for war. Bush says he wants the truth, but it is clear he is no more interested
in it today than he was two years ago.
In case you ain't figured it out by now, we were duped into this war.
Yet I still feel in the long run it MIGHT turn out to be a good thing for the
Iraqi people. I just wish we'd gone into it with the right reasons and less
destructive methods.
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