Subject: UK Inquiry: Blair Conspired with Bush as Early as February 2002 to
Plot Iraq Invasion
Date: Tuesday, November 24, 2009, 7:14 PM
UK
Inquiry:
Blair Conspired with Bush as Early as
February 2002 to Plot Iraq Invasion
By dlindorff
11/24/2009 -
Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about
it, but across the Atlantic
in the UK, a commission reluctantly established
by Prime Minister Gordon
Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in
Britain is beginning
hearings into the actions and statements of British
leaders that led to the
country's joining the US invasion of Iraq in
2003.
Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday,
news began
to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the
government of
former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public
about the country's
involvement in war planning.
Britain's Telegraph
newspaper over the weekend published documents from
British military
leaders, including a memo from British special forces head
Maj. Gen. Graeme
Lamb, saying that he had been instructed to begin "working
the war up since
early 2002."
This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members
of a House of
Commons committee that there were "no preparations to invade
Iraq," was
lying.
Things are likely to heat up when the commission
begins hearing testimony.
It has the power, and intends to compel testimony
from top government
officials, including Blair himself.
While some
American newspapers, including the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
have run an
Associated Press report on the new disclosures and on the
commission, key
news organizations, including the New York Times, have not.
The Times
ignored the Telegraph report, but a day later ran an article about
the
British commission that focused entirely on evidence that British
military
leaders in Iraq felt "slighted" by "arrogant" American military
leaders who,
the article reported, pushed for aggressive military action
against
insurgent groups, while British leaders preferred negotiating with
them.
While that may be of some historical interest, it hardly
compares with the
evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration
were secretly
conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March
2002.
Recall that back in the fall of 2002, the Bush/Cheney argument to
Congress
and the American people for initiating a war against Iraq was that
Iraq was
allegedly behind the 9-11 attacks and that it posed an "imminent"
danger of
attack against the US and Britain with its alleged weapons of mass
destruction.
Of course, such arguments, which have subsequently been
shown to have been
bogus, would have had no merit if the planning began a
year earlier, and if
no such urgency was expressed by the two leaders at
that time. Imminent,
after all, means imminent, and if Blair, Bush and
Cheney had genuinely
thought an attack with WMDs was imminent back in the
early days of the Bush
administration, they would have been acting
immediately, not secretly
conjuring up a war scheduled for a year later.
(The actual invasion began on
March 19, 2003).
As I documented in my
book, The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press,
2006), there is plenty
of evidence that Bush and Cheney had a scheme to put
the US at war with Iraq
even before Bush took office on Jan. 20, 2001. Then
Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill in his own tell-all book, The Price of
Loyalty, written after he was
dumped from the Bush Administration, recounts
that at the first meeting of
Bush's new National Security Council, the
question of going to war and
ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was on the
agenda. Immediately after the
9-11 attacks, NSC anti-terrorism program czar
Richard Clarke also recalled
Bush ordering him to "find a link" to Iraq.
Meanwhile, within days, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ordering top
generals to prepare for an Iraq
invasion. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was heading
up the military effort in
Afghanistan that was reportedly closing in on
Osama Bin Laden, found the rug
being pulled out from under him as Rumsfeld
began shifting troops out of
Afghanistan and to Kuwait in preparation for
the new war.
It is
nothing less than astonishing that so little news of the British
investigation into the origins of the illegal Iraq War is being conveyed to
Americans by this country's corporate media-yet another example
demonstrating that American journalism is dead or dying.
It is even more
astonishing that neither the Congress nor the president here in America is
making any similar effort to put America's leaders in the dock to tell the
truth about their machinations in engineering a war that has cost the US
over $1 trillion (perhaps $3 trillion eventually when debt payments and the
cost of veterans care is added in), and over 4000 lives, not to mention as
many as one million innocent Iraqi lives.
Source URL:
http://www.thiscant behappening. net/?q=node/ 421
Links:
[1] http://www.philly. com/inquirer/ world_us/ 71316362. html
=======
S1000+
=======
From: ruxpert <homepu...@comcast. net>
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"World-thread" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/world-thread?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
