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Opposed to the war since before it began, the US public joined worldwide protests skeptical of The Bush Administration's reasons for occupying Iraq. But there has been little national discussion about why no major TV network, including MSNBC, would cover the findings and leaks that told the pre-War tale. The Huffington Post chronicled domestic protests held in DC 2010, 2008 and Rachel Maddow even guest blogged a war escalation "Drinking Game" in 2007 but held off publicizing whistleblower accounts that were readily available at the time.
Over a million took to the streets across the globe in 2003, anticipating Bush's Iraq Team, led by Dick Cheney, would declare the US at war even as our best foreign relations wonks and the whole wired world knew Iraq's military capability had been long contained. UN weapons inspectors reported no WMD and Saddam Hussein, reduced to a tinpot dictator, was smuggling oil via Chevron in violation of UN sanctions while Condoleezza Rice served as their international public affairs director.
We know now that bald lies duped Congress into the war - convicted Plamegate perjurer Scooter Libby fed Judith Miller lies about WMD in Iraq (disguised as leaks) to completely besot the NY Times reporter, but at the time it touched off a chain reaction of liars lying in the liarsphere: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell all spread out to ring the alarm bells in the media, in Congress and at the UN. Note carefully the heavy leaning on Powell's credibility as President Bush himself said the following on Polish TV on May 29, 2003, denouncing the protesters:
"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
Rumsfeld was later busted in the same lie, challenged on live TV by Thomas Friedman and Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation, but the mainstream media did not expand on this in the evening news.
Beginning in 2006, PBS broke the silence - Colin Powell's #2 took public an account of duplicity long absent from US headlines. Originally ordered to look into the Abu Ghraib scandal by Powell, State Dept. Chief of Staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson found things that shook him to the core, making him question his loyalty to an administration who he felt had violated the Constitution. Not news?
Powell's long time aide announced the Iraq War was a "hoax" and recounted the doubts expressed at the time by Secretary Powell as CIA Director George Tenet played organ grinder monkey for a war-crazed Dick Cheney. Also on that PBS program, the chief weapons inspector for the UN Hans Blix revealed that Cheney also threatened he should lie in a meeting to President Bush or be discredited.
Previous to this airing, only indie US and international media seemed to care about the claims of the lying Iraqi bioweapons witness Curveball, the so-called Italian Letter, and Nigerian Yellowcake forgeries that fooled Congress to authorize war, shouting over resistance by the public and real journalists. The Berlusconi and Blair administrations would tumble, tainted by shoddy vetting of this provably faked intel, along with blood money from defense contractors like BAE and the Saudi royalty.
A piece on CNN World explained Wilkerson's grappling with his own conscience as a member of the State Dept. team that lied us into war, but here at home the story remained buried.
The most widely watched TV networks in the US whitewashed these stories, but after Wilkerson spoke out first hand, there was no excuse, suggesting the erection of a media firewall providing Bush and Cheney major cover. The blackout continues today, even after Col. Wilkerson divulged Cheney and Libby delivered Secretary Powell a 50 page script of lies for his UN speech that was thrown in the garbage with disgust.
Powell's testimony ultimately rested on assurances from Tenet that Curveball was credible, so Powell had Tenet stand next to him during the speech. This week TV viewers learned that Tyler Drumheller, the head of the CIA's European division had in fact informed Tenet as well as his deputy John McLaughlin that Curveball's accounts were unreliable.
In a days-long charade played out for Powell's team, key CIA experts were trotted out from the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) unit in a full-steam sales pitch to get Powell's endorsement and get the public behind the war. According to Wilkerson, the WINPAC agents were actually reporting to Cheney, who would allow nothing to prevent this war.
Meanwhile, Drumheller's aide Margaret Henoch was unable to verify any of the bio-weapons labs really existed, so the CIA was both for and against the intel. But the WINPAC faction had already written the claims into an incredibly consequential Oct. 2002 NIE and as shown in the debate over aluminum tubes, showed they didn't like being questioned even when they got things wrong.
As BBC trumpeted the Downing Street Memos and Seymour Hersh's leaks told the world the story of covert plants illegally "tuning up" detainees with electrodes and sexual humiliation, images leaked by Australian media showed the world exactly what was going on. Rumsfeld's #2 Stephen Cambone stood accused of giving the orders for unconstitutional cruelty and violations of US human rights treaties, military code and judicial conventions.
But TV viewers in the US were still not privy to the backstory crystallizing around the Iraq War hoax. In November of 2007, a 60 Minutes broadcast spotlighted claims by Curveball (aka Rafid Ahmed Alwan) and how the administration handled them. Soon after, George Washington University's National Security Archive published a detailed chronology which shows tense, internal wranglings within the CIA and to me, a distinct lack of credibility or competence on the part of Tenet and McLaughlin.
Trying up to the last second to have mention of mobile labs removed from Bush's State of the Union speech, Drumheller's misgivings were well documented and corroborated, yet Tenet and his deputy still deny knowledge of anyone red-flagging Curveball until 2004.
Incredibly, the Silbermann-Robb investigation commissioned by President Bush to find out what went wrong faulted "the intelligence community" including Drumheller, who was right all along, for not alerting Tenet that Curveball was a fabricator, after the 25-year CIA veteran had done just that.
Drumheller quit in 2005 and went public in 2006, explaining he had not only doubted Curveball in writing, he had himself cultivated a high-level Iraqi source named Naji Sabri who told the CIA Saddam's weapons program was in shambles. This crucial intel was presented directly to George Bush in the Oval Office but was immediately dismissed, and not relayed to Powell. Why was this not on TV by 2007?
In 2009, Lawrence Wilkerson did appear on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show but did not speak on the topic of fudged pre-Iraq War intel, instead telling Maddow the State Dept. knew Gitmo detainees were innocent and harshly interrogated anyway, asserting the White House also knew this. But Rachel never asked on air whether the Office of the Vice President pressured Powell to lie to Congress or the UN Security Council.
A year later, Lawrence O'Donnell guest-hosted an episode of Keith Olbermann's Countdown where Wilkerson actually likened Cheney and Karl Rove to cowardly Nazis for draft-dodging and illegal waterboarding, revealing more laws were broken when Rove, a civilian, was briefed on classified interrogation procedures.
George Tenet admitted the war was "sold" to the public by Bush and Cheney in his own "CYA" memoir. But even more revealing was White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book, confirming a "massive operation" inside the White House, under the senior direction of Karl Rove was directly providing "comprehensive talking points to Conservative talk show personalities" to manipulate the media and control the message regarding the war in Iraq and the war on terror (a violation of anti-propaganda laws if government sources are not disclosed).
Another Bush administration defector was David Wurmser, Cheney's former Middle East adviser who resigned in disgust after the White House's push for elections in Gaza resulted in a decisive and table-turning win for Hamas, unexpected because Bush and Rice had secretly been sponsoring Fatah intimidation squads, squandering taxpayer cash of $20 million or more through Iran-Contra style subterfuge.
J. Gerald Hebert was yet another Bush DOJ veteran who called for an investigation of Bush era crimes and eventually even Bush's own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told Fiasco author Thomas Ricks in a memoir the Iraq War was unnecessary, based on 'series of lies' and that the administration's WMD spin job was intentional deception.
In January 2009, then President-Elect Obama polled the American public through the website Change.gov in a special "Open for Questions" section. Spurred by Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, the top question with over 22,000 votes became "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor...to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?".
HuffPo covered this diligently with "Obama Prompted to Prosecute Bush". But when Bush left office and gave up his pardon pen, neither Obama nor John Conyers' House Judiciary Committee looked backwards, missing the opportunity to capitalize on popular support as the MSM tiptoed around the story.
Last week we saw Cenk Uygur premiere his show on MSNBC by inviting Col. Wilkerson to respond to recent comments by Curveball which reveal that the US knew German intelligence agents never verified his story. Wilkerson implicated the OVP for whitewashing this in the NIE sent to Congress and withholding it from him and Powell. But the US media won't report this!
According to Bob Woodward, Secretary Powell was told we would be invading Iraq two days after Cheney and Rumsfeld had already briefed Saudi Prince Bandar, sharing with him a top secret war map, itself a violation of security protocol.
With Wilkerson's video headlined at HuffPo, it seems Arianna Huffington and AOL will no longer be part of the network whitewash of detailed allegations of criminal malfeasance and war crimes by the Bush White House. For years, we have heard these stories, but today we discuss openly why they were published only in the indie media, only in drips and drabs - and we discuss the new specificity the Huffington Post and MSNBC now brings to inform the American public about these stories.
UPDATE: Colin Powell has weighed in since Curveball has resurfaced, crying out for an explanation from the Pentagon and CIA. George Tenet commented on his website, offering an excerpt from his book in which he lamely reminds us he was simply not in the know until 2005. But this was quickly refuted by Germany's former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer whose new book details the heavy disclaimer that came with the Curveball intel.
A vindicated Tyler Drumheller said Curveball's confession at the very least should put to rest any remaining belief that Iraq had WMD, presumably meaning viewers of Fox News.
HuffPo blogger Eric Margolis offers us How 'Curveball' Made Monkeys of U.S. Intelligence and the Bush White House confirming a media firewall, but missing the names of the culprits. Who in the media do you mean?
And even a staffer from the Iraqi National Congress has chimed in. Intefadh Qanber says of Curveball's intention to come home and political aspirations: "He is a liar, he will not serve his country. He fabricated the story about WMD and that story gave the USA a suitable pretext to lead the 2003 invasion, which hurt Iraq. For most Iraqis, it was obvious that Saddam was a dictator, but they wanted to see him ousted on the basis of his crimes against human rights, not a fabricated story about weapons of mass destruction".
