For the Iraq war's five year anniversary...
...Huffpost has conducted an interview with the only news team that got the Iraq reporting right BEFORE the start of the Iraq war. To refresh your memory, I blogged about their reporting and the doubts I had about waging war with Iraq given my knowledge of the Neocons and their desires from the mid 1990's to overthrow Saddam... given that the Neocons cornered a large part of the Bush 2.0 administration, I wasn't surprised by their push for war or their intelligence claims used to get there.
As we approach 4000 soldiers dead from this war, I think it's very important to realize how we were hijacked into this position based on ideology that had no business being a rationale for war combined with fear leveraged by Bush 2.0 in the wake of 9/11/01. As the Knight Ridder reporters say in the interview, the problem with the other news organizations in the run up to the war was that they acted like stenographers instead of reporters. Whatever Bush 2.0 said, they printed. When the Knight Ridder reporters, who had been reporting on these issues for years, questioned Bush 2.0's assertions with their network of intelligence professionals, the statements were quickly batted down. They didn't have new, secret sources, they just conducted journalism 101 with the intelligence network that they had developed over many years with the assertions Bush 2.0 was making... and they got it right.
Sadly, Dick Cheney still hasn't gotten the memo.
As we approach 4000 soldiers dead from this war, I think it's very important to realize how we were hijacked into this position based on ideology that had no business being a rationale for war combined with fear leveraged by Bush 2.0 in the wake of 9/11/01. As the Knight Ridder reporters say in the interview, the problem with the other news organizations in the run up to the war was that they acted like stenographers instead of reporters. Whatever Bush 2.0 said, they printed. When the Knight Ridder reporters, who had been reporting on these issues for years, questioned Bush 2.0's assertions with their network of intelligence professionals, the statements were quickly batted down. They didn't have new, secret sources, they just conducted journalism 101 with the intelligence network that they had developed over many years with the assertions Bush 2.0 was making... and they got it right.
Sadly, Dick Cheney still hasn't gotten the memo.
For those who missed it, the rising cost of fuel is yet another sign of a Bush Cheney Mission Accomplished. What mission was that you ask? Why the mission was to create record profits for Bush's old oil buddies and Cheny's old corporate buddies. Why do they think the Bush administration went all the way to the supreme court and invoked executive privilege to keep Cheney's secret deals a secret? So when someone tells you Bush's legacy is just torture and lying about it you tell them: hogwash. For the first time in history an American president has started a war for the sole purpose of raising corporate and oil profits and it worked! There's your legacy! In my humble opinion.
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