Thursday, May 05, 2005
Bush Lied. Thousands Died. "Liberal" Media Doesn't Care.
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The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."[...]OK, so we were right. The pro-war crowd was wrong. Nothing new here. We knew he wanted to go to war all along. We knew the war talk was started to give the Republicans an issue in the 2002 election. We knew he lied about WMDs, and Iraqs links to terrorism. A memo confirming the obvious doesn't really change that much for me, and it probably won't change much for the right wingers who will just close their eyes and scream "lalalalalala" whenever they hear word of this story. Not that they will hear very much of it, since our "liberal" media doesn't see a Republican president lying to the nation to start a war as a newsworthy story.
The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.[...]
Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."[...]
Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections."[...]
Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday.[...]
My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press …nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a story for "over there."
The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else.
Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look.[...]