“Out of Iraq”

Out of Iraq, A practical Plan for Withdrawal Now
George McGovern, William Polk

“The evidence suggests that they (falsehoods) were part of a deliberate campaign to alter the findings the intelligence evaluation officers of the CIA, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence & Research, and the Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Not only did senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, attempt to get analysts to alter their judgments to certify what they did not believe to be true, but when those analysts did not do so to the degree demanded, the Department of Defense set up a separate organization, the office of Special Plans, to bypass these seasoned experts and justify the decisions the administration had already made.” p.5

“In his meeting with British prime minister Tony Blair in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003, nearly three months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush acknowledged that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that he was searching for a pretext to justify the attack to the American people. One way, he suggested, would be to fly an American aircraft painted with UN insignia over Iraq; if the Iraqis fired on it, they would be in breach of Un resolutions, thereby justifying an attack;” p.6 *Senior Bush officials accompanying Blair wrote a memo of this talk. It was reported by Don Van Natta, Jr., in The New York Times of March 27, 2006, having been authenticated by two senior Foreign Office officials. (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70A1FFA3F540C748EDDAA0894DE404482)

P.12-13,  Al Jazeera shut down by US.  See Christian Parenti, “Al Jazeera goes to jail,” Nation, March 29, 2004

“Understanding Iraq,” William R. Polk, 2005, 2006

p. 34, Footnote. In 2002, just before the American invasion, only one of the world’s ten most profitable corporations was in the oil and gas field; in 2005 four of the ten were. They were Exxon-Mobil and Chevron Texaco (American) and Shell and BP (British). The Iraq war doubled the price of crude; it would go up another 50% during the first months of 2006.

Focus: Part One, The Human Cost – “Does Tony Have Any Idea What the Flies Are Like That Feed Off The Dead?” Independent, January 26, 2003

Regarding Fallujah…”The weight of ordinance fired was extraordinary. Against what was apparently just sniper fire, a single Marine contingent fired thirty-five or more heavy artillery shells plus an estimated thirty thousand rounds from rifles and machine guns. Far more devastating than heavy shells and “light” ammunition were the internationally banned chemical weapons that the American forces used in what Iraq called “a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds in 1988.” “Willy Pete” as the soldiers called white phosphorus, incinerates everyone within a radius of 150 meters, actually caramelizing the skin of the victims. White phosphorus is an internationally banned weapon. Although they first denied it, military spokesman admitted that it was used, but, they said, only for illumination during the night. Documentary photos filmed by an Italian camera crew show a very different and hideous reality; some victims are still in their beds, with their bodies completely burned. * ….casualties are believed to be in thousands. Attacking troops were told that the city was a “free fire zone” and that anyone, of any age or sex, was a target and should be shot.  *Documentary photographs can be seen at www.informationclearinghouse.info/article 10907.htm.

p. 69 Radiation from depleted uranium in antiarmor shells in both Gulf War and Iraq War. Thousands of Iraq children exposed. Gulf War Syndrome. 169,000 of the 580,400 soldiers who took part in 1991 Gulf War were on permanent medical disability a decade later.
Cancer. Future implications.

p. 71 Costs of war, see National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12054, at www.nber.org/papers/w12054.