IRAK: PROGPAGANDA WATCH

Tompaine.com: Credibility Bomb

The "powerful odor of mendacity" (to borrow Tennessee Williams’ phrase) hung over George Bush’s primetime virtual declaration of war Monday night.

When Bush proclaimed that "The Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," that was a lie. What are the "most lethal weapons ever devised?" Why, nuclear weapons, of course. That Iraq possesses nukes, or is even close to making them, is something for which Bush has been unable to provide any evidence that would withstand scrutiny. The United Nations’ inspectors have found none. And that which the administration has produced turned out to be fraudulent -- like the centerpiece documents about Nigerian uranium shipments to Iraq, which were childish forgeries

Bush asserted that Iraq "has aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda." The last part of that was a lie. Pieces of the crucial document of U.S. "proof" that Saddam Hussein has aided his ideological enemy Al Qaeda -- a cut-and-paste British report assembled by Tony Blair’s public relations strategist, and recommended heartily as the fundament for this assertion by Colin Powell in his prosecutor’s brief at the United Nations -- turned out to have been plagiarized from a paper by a graduate student, based on data a decade old, and augmented by more plagiarizing from press cuttings.....

By asserting the United States' right to invade whomever it likes whenever it likes, Bush’s speech brought the world to the most dangerous moment in its history since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. A first-strike on Iraq, unprovoked by any aggressive act on Saddam’s part, will start a new nuclear arms race by countries that have nothing further to lose by creating a nuclear deterrent to the unchecked imperial power of Washington.