Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Everyone knew the WMD claims were fake. For example, the number 2 Democrat in the Senate, who was on the Senate intelligence committee, admitted that the Senate intelligence committee knew before the war started that Bush's public statements about Iraqi WMDs were false. And if the committee knew, then the White House knew as well.
The CIA warned the White House that claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions (using forged documents) were false, and yet the White House made those claims anyway.
- Falsified documents which were meant to show that Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime had been trying to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger can be traced back to Vice President Dick Cheney
And you may have heard that the Energy Task Force chaired by Cheney prior to 9/11 collected maps of Iraqi oil fields and potential suitors for that oil. But you probably don't know that a secret document written by the National Security Council on February 3, 2001 directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states, such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields .
In other words, it is difficult to brush off Cheney's Energy Task Force's examination of Iraqi oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy with known oil reserves because the N.S.C. explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change. Indeed, a former senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. said:
If this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.(and see this).
Cheney's role in getting the U.S. into unnecessary military confrontations is not new. According to former high-level intelligence officer Melvin Goodman, during the Ford administration, Cheney orchestrated phony intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for covert arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola.
And in the 1970's, Cheney was instrumental in generating fake intelligence exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to undermine coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which conveniently justified huge amounts of cold war spending. See also this. This scheme foreshadowed Mr. Cheney's role in generating fake intelligence in Iraq by 30 years.
And Cheney was the guy who directed all counter-terrorism activities in 2001 and who directed the U.S. response on 9/11, accidentally allowing hijacked planes to fly all over the place, and perhaps - as implied by Secretary of Transportation Norm Minetta - to slam into the Pentagon (confirmed here). Heck of a job, Dick ...
The government also apparently planned the Afghanistan war before 9/11 (see this and this).
But you don't even have to even think about all of the complex facts discussed above. It's really simple: when asked to specify exactly why we are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama cannot really explain why we are still there.
The Wars Are Unnecessary and Are Killing the Economy
Bottom line: The wars are unnecessary, and they are draining resources which could be used to reduce unemployment and help the economy.
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