How we got into this mess: A review of Lies-to-War and the message given to the media's echo/amplification machine by Rove, Libby, Bush & Cheney
HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS in one brief page:
Here, in a brief and concise Wikipedia entry (reprinted below our comments) is a review of how the press & media echoed and amplified the WMD lies-to-war, and how they have muffled, mixed, confused, distorted, distracted, and ultimately CENSORED, from the mainstream-media, this simple story of how the WMD-lies were indeed presented to the American public as a premeditated con job by the Bush administration, to take America to war on false pretenses.
Note the CENTRAL ROLE played by the NEW YORK TIMES (and especially their "star" international security reporter, JUDITH MILLER) in the LIES-to-war echo and amplification, and the supporting role played by Tim Russert and NBC's "MEET THE PRESS," as well as supporting contributions by CBS and CNN in creating the drumbeat of WMD stories that were picked up, repeated, echoed and amplified throughout America by local news papers, reporters, TV, and talk radio. Fox 'news' doesn't even rate an entry in this brief Wikipedia compilation, although of course they were the most ardent advocates in the entire media for the need to rush to war based on the 'evidence' supplied by the WHIG group and White House. Notice too how the WHIG group was set up by Andrew Card and Karl Rove, Card was President Bush's Chief of Staff and Rove had been George W. Bush's lead campaign strategist through every one of the younger Bush's major political campaigns.
Over at the Project for a New American Century ("PNAC") notice how Jeb Bush, I. Lewis Libby, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz all signed the PNAC "statement of principles" calling for a more muscular US foreign policy in June of 1997, ("Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today..."), and how a few short months later (in January of 1998), the group specifically called for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in a letter to President Clinton. (The link is even titled "IraqClintonLetter".) Thus we clearly see how the "MORAL CLARITY" of death squads, torture, mercenaries, (both our own and hiring or bribing foreign warlords), and a neo-con economic system imposed under almost farcical extremes of profiteering and no-bid, no-oversight contracts & monopoly resource looting (the later monopoly resource extortion termed, in true Orwellian fashion, "FREE MARKET ECONOMICS," of course); and all the other attributes of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq are all sprung from the PNAC manifesto and neo-con ideology as early as 1998, and how the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Chief of Staff to the President, Chief of Staff to the Vice President (Lewis "Scooter" Libby), Assistant Secretary of Defense (Wolfowitz), and the president's brother (Florida Gov. Jeb Bush) were all signers of either the PNAC statement of principles or the letter to Clinton advocating an Iraq war, in 1997 & 1998 respectively.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
(Note some of the FALSE ASSUMPTIONS inherent in the PNAC documents and neo-con manifesto from the get-go. For example, despite the "US military strength and MORAL CLARITY" avowed by PNACers to President Reagan, it WAS REAGAN who RETREATED from Lebanon following the terrorist bombings of the US embassy and Marine barracks there in 1983. While the neo-cons and PNAC like to GLOSS OVER Reagan's RETREAT from those terrorist actions, there is an IR (internationals relations) theory that holds that by withdrawing from Lebanon, Reagan greatly REDUCED the confrontational pressures in that region, and that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachov was able to go to his military and politburo leaders and push his Glasnost and Perestroika policies throughout the 1980s without more opposition than he would have faced had the US been pursing large military bases in the mideast. Historical "what ifs" are always dangerous, but given that Gorbachov's "openess" policies were anathema to the secretive bureaucrats of the Politburo (much less the demigod chiefs of the Red Army and Soviet military), it is not hard to imagine a scenario where Gorbachov's _liberalizing_ policies would have been rejected_outright had the US been invading and occupying Mideast nations at the time. Reagan's "RETREAT FROM TERRORISTS" in Lebanon might therefore have been an ESSENTIAL element in the string of events to led to America's bloodless victory collapse of the Iron Curtain. We would also include President Carter's putting a "White Hat" back on America's worldwide image (following the debacle of the Vietnam war and America's previous support of blood-soaked dictators such as Markos and Noriega) as contributing to that groundswell of events leading to Glasnost, Perestroika, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Speaking of, there is more professional speculation that Carter WOULD HAVE WON RE-ELECTION in 1980 if not for the machinations of the "October Surprise" efforts by REPUBLICANS, COOPERATING WITH IRAN's Revolutionary government (i.e. "terrorists") TO HOLD THE KIDNAPPED US HOSTAGES _PAST_ the November 1980s election, in order to give Republican candidates Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (Sr.) elected in that election. Given that George H.W. Bush (Senior) was a former DCI (Director of Central Intelligence, i.e. the CIA), he is at the very center of speculation that Republicans ILLEGALLY set up a PARRALLEL foreign policy apparatus - a PARRALLEL, ILLEGAL GOVERNMENT - TO DEAL WITH AMERICA's ENEMIES behind President Carter's back. Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews.com is the leading expert on the events leading up to the Republican's "October Surprise" efforts of the 1980 election, but what is important (dodging, that is, the question of treason), is that Republican "MORAL VALUES CLARITY" was rooted from the early 1980s, before even Reagan's election that year, IN DEALING WITH TERRORIST REGIMES in covert, two-timing, back-door fashion.
Note: President Bush continues to talk about staying the course in Iraq until "THE MISSION IS ACCOMPLISHED."
What the president actually means by "WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR" and "UNTIL THE MISSION IS ACCOMPLISHED" is THE IMPOSITION here in America (and throughout the world) of a draconian, dictatorial national security state answering to no one but the president and the inner clique of the Republican Party.
(i.e., the Communist China secular model, or the Saudi Wahabi state sectarian model, both of which are no more apologetic for their use of the death penalty than George W. Bush was when he was governor of Texas, book of which exert absolute control over their press/media, and neither of which will ever apologize for summary arrest and indefinite detention or torture powers. Stripped of academic, intellectual, or rhetorical niceties, the Right-Wing neo-con agenda is thus some variation between either sectarian or secular dictatorship.)
The election of a Democratic House and Senate majority may have temporarily DELAYED the reactionary-right's consolidation of one-party rule here in America, BUT the administration's _gutting_ of HABEAS CORPUS continues on only marginally or tokenly impeded. Incoming Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy has pledged to hold hearings limiting or overseeing the government's pervasive, unlimited electronic data and telephone surveillance (aka spying on American citizens and compiling extensive data profiles) but Leahy himself has all but announced that he will rubber-stamp Robert Gates' confirmation to replace Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.
Gates (as former DCI, or Director of the CIA), James Baker, and even Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton were all at the nexus of the Democrat's abject FAILURE to effectively prosecute the Iran-Contra scandal in the early 1990s, and just as importantly (as supplying Central American death squads and Iran's military in the 1980s) the other huge SCANDALS of the 1980s era Republican administrations, including BCCI, Iraq-gate, and the Savings & Loan scandal. All of which, to be sure, included Democratic players enmeshed in the scandals, the most famous of whom was Senator John Glenn who, along with Senator John McCain, were two of the "Keating Seven" senators who, in return for contributions from Charles Keating, effectively LOBBIED their fellow senators on behalf of legislation favorable to Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan.... which ultimately collapsed requiring two billion dollars of taxpayer financed bailouts.
See chapter one of Robert Parry's "Secrecy and Privilege", which outlines how the Democrat's failure to prosecute the criminal web of Republican participation in the Iran-Contra/Iraq-gate/BCCI and S&L scandals helped the Republicans CREATE THE MYTH of Republican "moral values" superiority, and thereby paved the way for the Republican super-Trifecta of one-party rule controlling the entire US government from 2002 to 2006.
(www.ConsortiumNews.com)
Senator Leahy has pledged to conduct hearings to oversee the data-mining and spying on American travelers (and, presumably, non-traveling citizens just as easily),
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/12/02/leahy_to_scrutinize_traveler_screening/
but Leahy's passive reluctance to strenuously investigate the Gates nomination, and this article "Killing Habeas Corpus" by the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin,
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061204fa_fact
suggest that Leahy and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership may be unaware about the true extent of the nexus between the electronic surveillance state and the aggressive co-mingling of an aggressive foreign policy and dictatorial police-state powers here in America.
At any rate, here (below) is Wikipedia's brief review, outline and timeline of the premeditated and orchestrated deceptions, prepared from July 2002 to the launch of the US war in Iraq in March 2003, by the WHITE HOUSE INFORMATION GROUP, seeking to justify and bolster support for the US invasion of Iraq. The WHIG (group) was headed by Douglas Feith out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense as an ALTERNATE INTELLIGENCE SERVICE to the existing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department's own intelligence service, the NSA and the president's own National Security Advisor (then Condoleeza Rice). Undoubtedly the Defense Department's own Intelligence Agency (DIA) was subordinated by Rumsfeld to the WHIG group to support the political objective of justifying the launch of the war. The fact that an intel operation based in the Department of Defense, whose main task was to convince the American media and public of the necessity for war in Iraq (i.e. a propaganda function), was named the WHITE HOUSE Information Group, indicates just how central this propaganda function was to the Bush-Cheney White House.
------------------------------------------
(Today on MSNBC at 11:49 am est. MSNBC reporter Andrea Mitchell asked Wayne Downing "What changes will Robert Gates bring to the Department of Defense when he replaces Don Rumsfeld there" - clearly implying that the Gates confirmation is a forgone conclusion. Mitchell, who is married to former Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and thereby one of the penultimate Washington insiders, didn't even waste her breath mentioning the possibility that Gates would not be confirmed.)
=========================================
White House Iraq Group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Iraq_Group
The White House Iraq Group (aka, White House Information Group or WHIG) was the MARKETING ARM of the White House whose purpose was to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the public. The task force was set up in August 2002 by White House Chief of Staff ANDREW CARD and chaired by KARL ROVE to coordinate all the executive branch elements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. One example of the WHIG's functions and influence is the "escalation of rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the U.S., including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud'"[1].
Similar in name and function, was the 1967 White House Information Group under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
----------------------------------------------
- - "Up to the Invasion"
Soon after WHIG was formed, the Bush Administration's CLAIMS ABOUT THE DANGER IRAQ POSED ESCALATED SIGNIFICANTLY:
* July 23, 2002: The Downing Street Memo was written, in which British intelligence said "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
* August, 2002: White House Iraq Group formed
* September 5, 2002: In a WHIG meeting, chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson proposes the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor to sell the American public on the supposed nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. According to Newsweek columnist Michael Isikoff, "The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times [NEW YORK TIMES] reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece [about aluminum tubes], one of them leaked Gerson's phrase — and the administration would soon make maximum use of it." (Hubris, p. 35.)[2]
* September 6, 2002: In an interview with the New York Times, Andrew Card did not mention the WHIG specifically but hinted at its mission: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." On September 17, 2002, Matt Miller stated on NPR that the above quote from Andrew Card was in response to the question: "... why the administration waited until after Labor Day to try to sell the American people on military action against Iraq" [3]
* September 7, 2002: JUDITH MILLER of the NEW YORK TIMES reports Bush administration officials said "In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."[4] In fact, many government officials had concluded the tubes were unsuitable for uranium refinement. [note: the tubes had a chromate or anodized finishes that made them entirely unsuitable for use as high-speed centrifuge separation vessels. ed]
* September 7-8, 2002: President Bush and nearly all his top advisers BLANKETED THE AIRWAVES, talking about the dangers posed by Iraq.[5]
* On NBC's "MEET THE PRESS," Vice President Richard Cheney CITED THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE, and accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons over the past fourteen months to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms.
* On CNN, Condi Rice acknowledged that "there will always be some uncertainty" in determining how close Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon but said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
* On CBS, President Bush said U.N. weapons inspectors, before they were denied access to Iraq in 1998, concluded that Saddam was "six months away from developing a weapon." He also cited satellite photos released by a U.N. agency Friday that show unexplained construction at Iraq sites that weapons inspectors once visited to search for evidence Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms. "I don't know what more evidence we need," Bush said.
* October 14, 2002: President Bush says of Saddam "This is a man that we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army." [6]
* January 21, 2003: Bush says of Saddam "He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies." [7]
* February 5, 2003: Colin Powell addresses the United Nations, asserting that there was "no doubt in my mind" that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons.
* March 19, 2003: The U.S. invades Iraq.
Here, in a brief and concise Wikipedia entry (reprinted below our comments) is a review of how the press & media echoed and amplified the WMD lies-to-war, and how they have muffled, mixed, confused, distorted, distracted, and ultimately CENSORED, from the mainstream-media, this simple story of how the WMD-lies were indeed presented to the American public as a premeditated con job by the Bush administration, to take America to war on false pretenses.
Note the CENTRAL ROLE played by the NEW YORK TIMES (and especially their "star" international security reporter, JUDITH MILLER) in the LIES-to-war echo and amplification, and the supporting role played by Tim Russert and NBC's "MEET THE PRESS," as well as supporting contributions by CBS and CNN in creating the drumbeat of WMD stories that were picked up, repeated, echoed and amplified throughout America by local news papers, reporters, TV, and talk radio. Fox 'news' doesn't even rate an entry in this brief Wikipedia compilation, although of course they were the most ardent advocates in the entire media for the need to rush to war based on the 'evidence' supplied by the WHIG group and White House. Notice too how the WHIG group was set up by Andrew Card and Karl Rove, Card was President Bush's Chief of Staff and Rove had been George W. Bush's lead campaign strategist through every one of the younger Bush's major political campaigns.
Over at the Project for a New American Century ("PNAC") notice how Jeb Bush, I. Lewis Libby, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz all signed the PNAC "statement of principles" calling for a more muscular US foreign policy in June of 1997, ("Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today..."), and how a few short months later (in January of 1998), the group specifically called for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in a letter to President Clinton. (The link is even titled "IraqClintonLetter".) Thus we clearly see how the "MORAL CLARITY" of death squads, torture, mercenaries, (both our own and hiring or bribing foreign warlords), and a neo-con economic system imposed under almost farcical extremes of profiteering and no-bid, no-oversight contracts & monopoly resource looting (the later monopoly resource extortion termed, in true Orwellian fashion, "FREE MARKET ECONOMICS," of course); and all the other attributes of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq are all sprung from the PNAC manifesto and neo-con ideology as early as 1998, and how the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Chief of Staff to the President, Chief of Staff to the Vice President (Lewis "Scooter" Libby), Assistant Secretary of Defense (Wolfowitz), and the president's brother (Florida Gov. Jeb Bush) were all signers of either the PNAC statement of principles or the letter to Clinton advocating an Iraq war, in 1997 & 1998 respectively.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
(Note some of the FALSE ASSUMPTIONS inherent in the PNAC documents and neo-con manifesto from the get-go. For example, despite the "US military strength and MORAL CLARITY" avowed by PNACers to President Reagan, it WAS REAGAN who RETREATED from Lebanon following the terrorist bombings of the US embassy and Marine barracks there in 1983. While the neo-cons and PNAC like to GLOSS OVER Reagan's RETREAT from those terrorist actions, there is an IR (internationals relations) theory that holds that by withdrawing from Lebanon, Reagan greatly REDUCED the confrontational pressures in that region, and that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachov was able to go to his military and politburo leaders and push his Glasnost and Perestroika policies throughout the 1980s without more opposition than he would have faced had the US been pursing large military bases in the mideast. Historical "what ifs" are always dangerous, but given that Gorbachov's "openess" policies were anathema to the secretive bureaucrats of the Politburo (much less the demigod chiefs of the Red Army and Soviet military), it is not hard to imagine a scenario where Gorbachov's _liberalizing_ policies would have been rejected_outright had the US been invading and occupying Mideast nations at the time. Reagan's "RETREAT FROM TERRORISTS" in Lebanon might therefore have been an ESSENTIAL element in the string of events to led to America's bloodless victory collapse of the Iron Curtain. We would also include President Carter's putting a "White Hat" back on America's worldwide image (following the debacle of the Vietnam war and America's previous support of blood-soaked dictators such as Markos and Noriega) as contributing to that groundswell of events leading to Glasnost, Perestroika, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Speaking of, there is more professional speculation that Carter WOULD HAVE WON RE-ELECTION in 1980 if not for the machinations of the "October Surprise" efforts by REPUBLICANS, COOPERATING WITH IRAN's Revolutionary government (i.e. "terrorists") TO HOLD THE KIDNAPPED US HOSTAGES _PAST_ the November 1980s election, in order to give Republican candidates Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (Sr.) elected in that election. Given that George H.W. Bush (Senior) was a former DCI (Director of Central Intelligence, i.e. the CIA), he is at the very center of speculation that Republicans ILLEGALLY set up a PARRALLEL foreign policy apparatus - a PARRALLEL, ILLEGAL GOVERNMENT - TO DEAL WITH AMERICA's ENEMIES behind President Carter's back. Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews.com is the leading expert on the events leading up to the Republican's "October Surprise" efforts of the 1980 election, but what is important (dodging, that is, the question of treason), is that Republican "MORAL VALUES CLARITY" was rooted from the early 1980s, before even Reagan's election that year, IN DEALING WITH TERRORIST REGIMES in covert, two-timing, back-door fashion.
Note: President Bush continues to talk about staying the course in Iraq until "THE MISSION IS ACCOMPLISHED."
What the president actually means by "WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR" and "UNTIL THE MISSION IS ACCOMPLISHED" is THE IMPOSITION here in America (and throughout the world) of a draconian, dictatorial national security state answering to no one but the president and the inner clique of the Republican Party.
(i.e., the Communist China secular model, or the Saudi Wahabi state sectarian model, both of which are no more apologetic for their use of the death penalty than George W. Bush was when he was governor of Texas, book of which exert absolute control over their press/media, and neither of which will ever apologize for summary arrest and indefinite detention or torture powers. Stripped of academic, intellectual, or rhetorical niceties, the Right-Wing neo-con agenda is thus some variation between either sectarian or secular dictatorship.)
The election of a Democratic House and Senate majority may have temporarily DELAYED the reactionary-right's consolidation of one-party rule here in America, BUT the administration's _gutting_ of HABEAS CORPUS continues on only marginally or tokenly impeded. Incoming Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy has pledged to hold hearings limiting or overseeing the government's pervasive, unlimited electronic data and telephone surveillance (aka spying on American citizens and compiling extensive data profiles) but Leahy himself has all but announced that he will rubber-stamp Robert Gates' confirmation to replace Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.
Gates (as former DCI, or Director of the CIA), James Baker, and even Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton were all at the nexus of the Democrat's abject FAILURE to effectively prosecute the Iran-Contra scandal in the early 1990s, and just as importantly (as supplying Central American death squads and Iran's military in the 1980s) the other huge SCANDALS of the 1980s era Republican administrations, including BCCI, Iraq-gate, and the Savings & Loan scandal. All of which, to be sure, included Democratic players enmeshed in the scandals, the most famous of whom was Senator John Glenn who, along with Senator John McCain, were two of the "Keating Seven" senators who, in return for contributions from Charles Keating, effectively LOBBIED their fellow senators on behalf of legislation favorable to Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan.... which ultimately collapsed requiring two billion dollars of taxpayer financed bailouts.
See chapter one of Robert Parry's "Secrecy and Privilege", which outlines how the Democrat's failure to prosecute the criminal web of Republican participation in the Iran-Contra/Iraq-gate/BCCI and S&L scandals helped the Republicans CREATE THE MYTH of Republican "moral values" superiority, and thereby paved the way for the Republican super-Trifecta of one-party rule controlling the entire US government from 2002 to 2006.
(www.ConsortiumNews.com)
Senator Leahy has pledged to conduct hearings to oversee the data-mining and spying on American travelers (and, presumably, non-traveling citizens just as easily),
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/12/02/leahy_to_scrutinize_traveler_screening/
but Leahy's passive reluctance to strenuously investigate the Gates nomination, and this article "Killing Habeas Corpus" by the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin,
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061204fa_fact
suggest that Leahy and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership may be unaware about the true extent of the nexus between the electronic surveillance state and the aggressive co-mingling of an aggressive foreign policy and dictatorial police-state powers here in America.
At any rate, here (below) is Wikipedia's brief review, outline and timeline of the premeditated and orchestrated deceptions, prepared from July 2002 to the launch of the US war in Iraq in March 2003, by the WHITE HOUSE INFORMATION GROUP, seeking to justify and bolster support for the US invasion of Iraq. The WHIG (group) was headed by Douglas Feith out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense as an ALTERNATE INTELLIGENCE SERVICE to the existing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department's own intelligence service, the NSA and the president's own National Security Advisor (then Condoleeza Rice). Undoubtedly the Defense Department's own Intelligence Agency (DIA) was subordinated by Rumsfeld to the WHIG group to support the political objective of justifying the launch of the war. The fact that an intel operation based in the Department of Defense, whose main task was to convince the American media and public of the necessity for war in Iraq (i.e. a propaganda function), was named the WHITE HOUSE Information Group, indicates just how central this propaganda function was to the Bush-Cheney White House.
------------------------------------------
(Today on MSNBC at 11:49 am est. MSNBC reporter Andrea Mitchell asked Wayne Downing "What changes will Robert Gates bring to the Department of Defense when he replaces Don Rumsfeld there" - clearly implying that the Gates confirmation is a forgone conclusion. Mitchell, who is married to former Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and thereby one of the penultimate Washington insiders, didn't even waste her breath mentioning the possibility that Gates would not be confirmed.)
=========================================
White House Iraq Group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Iraq_Group
The White House Iraq Group (aka, White House Information Group or WHIG) was the MARKETING ARM of the White House whose purpose was to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the public. The task force was set up in August 2002 by White House Chief of Staff ANDREW CARD and chaired by KARL ROVE to coordinate all the executive branch elements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. One example of the WHIG's functions and influence is the "escalation of rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the U.S., including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud'"[1].
Similar in name and function, was the 1967 White House Information Group under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
----------------------------------------------
- - "Up to the Invasion"
Soon after WHIG was formed, the Bush Administration's CLAIMS ABOUT THE DANGER IRAQ POSED ESCALATED SIGNIFICANTLY:
* July 23, 2002: The Downing Street Memo was written, in which British intelligence said "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
* August, 2002: White House Iraq Group formed
* September 5, 2002: In a WHIG meeting, chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson proposes the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor to sell the American public on the supposed nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. According to Newsweek columnist Michael Isikoff, "The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times [NEW YORK TIMES] reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece [about aluminum tubes], one of them leaked Gerson's phrase — and the administration would soon make maximum use of it." (Hubris, p. 35.)[2]
* September 6, 2002: In an interview with the New York Times, Andrew Card did not mention the WHIG specifically but hinted at its mission: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." On September 17, 2002, Matt Miller stated on NPR that the above quote from Andrew Card was in response to the question: "... why the administration waited until after Labor Day to try to sell the American people on military action against Iraq" [3]
* September 7, 2002: JUDITH MILLER of the NEW YORK TIMES reports Bush administration officials said "In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."[4] In fact, many government officials had concluded the tubes were unsuitable for uranium refinement. [note: the tubes had a chromate or anodized finishes that made them entirely unsuitable for use as high-speed centrifuge separation vessels. ed]
* September 7-8, 2002: President Bush and nearly all his top advisers BLANKETED THE AIRWAVES, talking about the dangers posed by Iraq.[5]
* On NBC's "MEET THE PRESS," Vice President Richard Cheney CITED THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE, and accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons over the past fourteen months to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms.
* On CNN, Condi Rice acknowledged that "there will always be some uncertainty" in determining how close Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon but said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
* On CBS, President Bush said U.N. weapons inspectors, before they were denied access to Iraq in 1998, concluded that Saddam was "six months away from developing a weapon." He also cited satellite photos released by a U.N. agency Friday that show unexplained construction at Iraq sites that weapons inspectors once visited to search for evidence Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms. "I don't know what more evidence we need," Bush said.
* October 14, 2002: President Bush says of Saddam "This is a man that we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army." [6]
* January 21, 2003: Bush says of Saddam "He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies." [7]
* February 5, 2003: Colin Powell addresses the United Nations, asserting that there was "no doubt in my mind" that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons.
* March 19, 2003: The U.S. invades Iraq.
posted by verifi at 3:18 PM
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