Cartoons of Mass Deception

In the Iraq War portion of this site, I have cited many instances of intelligence either ignored or manipulated to support the march to war in Iraq. The corporate media fed line of “Bush didn’t get it wrong, the CIA did,” is bullshit, and most people who have done any small amount of research not only know this, and became more reassured when the man Bush blamed for those mistakes was given the medal of freedom.

Following this pattern of misrepresenting the intelligence, it was revealed that the cartoons of “mobile biological labs” Colon Powell held up during his UN speech were not only weak evidence at the time, they were actually lied about later.

Here’s a refresher, thanks to the Randi Rhodes show...
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Now, here’s the truth, from the Washington Post:

On May 29, 2003…President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S.
intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."

This is a huge development that isn't going to get a lot of play on the evening news, but it does underscore the absolute sadness of Bush supporters who still cling to the argument that this administration wasn't cherry-picking intelligence (read through some of the comments on this site, and you'll even see a Bush guy who actually thinks we've found WMD's in Iraq...I'm not kidding, this is the level of person you're dealing with here).

But if you stop and think about it - with all the intelligence we have - all the satellites, spies, everything - and all we could come up with were cartoons for evidence?

Shame on us, shame on our press, and shame on Democrats for not asking more questions and getting tougher with this president.

Even our president agrees -
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