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Bush Lies, People Die

Truth and Consequences

by Bob Wing

"The first casualty when war comes is truth," observed Senator Hiram Johnson in 1918.

Unemployed Iraqi women workers confront a U.S. soldier during a protest demanding back pay near the presidential palace in Baghdad.

Johnson's point was that leaders often exaggerate or lie to convince the public that war is so just, noble and urgent that ordinary people should send their sons and daughters off to fight, kill and even die in some distant land.

George W. Bush now stands exposed as the latest perpetrator of such fraud. He has fouled the air with half truths, exaggerations and dirty lies on countless issues--from the Sept. 11 intelligence failures, to his rationale for war against Iraq, to the rich Iraq contracts being reaped by Bush campaign contributors, to the record budget deficit.

As Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently observed: "An immoral war was thus waged and the world is a great deal less safe than before." The South African also called on George Bush and Tony Blair to admit their lethal mistakes.

SCANDALOUS INTELLIGENCE

The president said the Sept. 11 attacks were a complete surprise. But it slowly leaked out that Bush, the FBI and the CIA botched dozens of leads, including some that indicated that Al Qaeda was planning to use hijacked airplanes as weapons. The Republican chairman of the independent review commission has concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were "preventable" had the president and his intelligence services done their jobs.

Bush said he had "no choice" but to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein threatened the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties to Al Qaeda. One year and a $300 million U.S. search later, neither has been found. "It wasn't intelligence--it was propaganda," says Lt. Col. Katen Kwiatkowski, who told Mother Jones magazine that she observed firsthand the Pentagon's propaganda factory.

Now the president has been forced to create another commission to investigate why U.S. intelligence was wrong. But he doesn't want the commission to investigate his own distortions of the intelligence and will not allow it to report its findings until after the election. The New York Times opined on Feb. 7 that this "looks more like an effort to deflect attention until after the election than a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of the Iraq fiasco."

The president promised that the Iraqi people would welcome the U.S. troops and would also immediately benefit from the invasion. Instead Iraqi life is miserable and the death, agony and destruction mount each day.