Bush learned well at his daddy's knee. He learned how to lie, cheat and fabricate evidence in order to dupe Congress (such an easy thing to do, alas) and start a bloody, oil-driven war that benefited no one but himself and his friends. That anyone in Congress has failed to spot the similarities between the exposed frauds of George H. Bush in the run up to Gulf War I and those perpetrated by his son now proves how colossally stupid the majority of those in Congress and the media truly are. In fact, the next emergency preparedness drill ought to center around Capitol Hill - instead of a small pox scare it should be a BRAIN DAMAGE ALERT! Alas, there's no vaccine for that Congressional epidemic, as it appears to be both chronic and intractable.

Anyway, Bush, Jr. had the CIA sign off on his phony "evidence" of Iraq's efforts to obtain the ingredients for nukes from Africa. This was a Bush directive - for months now CIA and FBI agents, present and former have warned that Bush was pressuring them relentlessly to come up with evidence that did not exist and refused to listen when they presented their real findings. Findings which indicated, of course, that Saddam had no ties to Al Queda, that the evidence for an active WMD program was slim to nonexistent and that there was absolutely no shred of evidence for a push to get a nuke program going.

. That John McCain could actually state with a straight face today that he is sure Bush was ignorant of the faulty information on Iraq's alleged efforts to get nukes is just more proof of the deepening extent of Congressional brain damage. Now when Bush is called on his lie, he has done what every weasle has always done since the dawn of human history: hang someone else out to dry. So the CIA guys who were ignored and pressured to cook the intelligence books are now getting the blame for feeding poor little innocent Georgie bad info. The only person in the Agency going along with this load of horse poop is George Tenet who proved himself more than willing to grovel and lie and sell out all those agents for whom he is supposed to be responsible. But being near retirement, GT felt there were far too many security issues at risk to tell the truth. Security issues like securing that condo in the Bahamas or that lifetime membership at Pebble Beach - all just another year or two away if GT keeps his head down and goes along with the Bush program.

But, as I said, the fabrication of evidence scheme is just a rerun of Gulf War I. Here is an excerpt from a commentary by an organization of former CIA agents who call themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity."

"Fabricated evidence also played an important role in the first President Bush’s attempt to secure congressional and UN approval for the 1991 Gulf War.

(a) Few will forget the heart-rending testimony before a congressional committee by the sobbing 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah on October 10, 1990:

“I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

No congressperson, no journalist took the trouble to probe the identity of “Nayirah,” who was said to be an escapee from Kuwait but was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. With consummate skill, the story had been manufactured out of whole cloth and the 15 year-old coached by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which has a rich history of being “imbedded” in Republican administrations. Similar unsubstantiated yarns made their debut several weeks later at the UN, where a team of seven “witnesses,” also coached by Hill & Knowlton, testified about atrocities in Iraq. (It was later learned that the seven had used false names.) And in an unprecedented move, the UN Security Council allowed the US to show a video created by Hill & Knowlton.

All to good effect. The PR campaign had the desired impact, and Congress voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq on January 12, 1991. (The UN did so on November 29, 1990.) “Nayirah’s” true identity did not become known until two years later. And Hill & Knowlton’s coffers bulged when the proceeds arrived from its billing of Kuwait.

Interestingly, the General Manager of Hill & Knowlton’s Washington, DC office at the time was a woman named Victoria Clarke. She turned out to be less successful in her next job, as Press Secretary for the re-election campaign of President George Bush in 1992. But she is now back in her element as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

(b) There was a corollary fabrication that proved equally effective in garnering support in Congress for the war resolution in 1991. The White House claimed there were satellite photos showing Iraqi tanks and troops massing on the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. This fueled the campaign for war and frightened the Saudis into agreeing to cooperate fully with US military forces.

On September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress, claimed “120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.” But an enterprising journalist, Jean Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten days before the Gulf War began) that commercial satellite photos taken on September 11, the day the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence to support the president’s claim, it refused to do so—and continues to refuse to this day.

But thankfully, there are actually honest men and women in the CIA - active and retired - who really and truly believe that their primary job is (or was) to contribute to national security. Real national security, that is - as in avoiding unnecessary and bloody conflicts when possible, protecting Americans from real threats from within and without and preventing the overthrow of the US government by treasonous elements. These people are not likely to see what Bush has done as conducive to these goals. In fact, long about now, they probably don't see G.W. Bush as conducive to these goals.

Unfortunately, their story may never be told. Why? Because there is no one in the media anymore with the guts and integrity to tell it.


To read the entire Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity commentary see
www.commondreams.org/views03/0425-11.htm