Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Menzonie

FINALLY, BUSH ADMITS IT: HE LIED
U.S. Calls Off the Hunt for Weapons in Iraq
NANTES, FRANCE--Once again Bush and his top officials are responsible for
an outrageous scandal whose monumental scale and grotesquely terrifying
implications for our democracy make Watergate look like a fraternity
prank. Yet the miscreants are getting away scot-free. 
As usual.
The Bush Administration, reported The New York Times on January 8, "has
quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to
scour the country for military equipment. The step was described by some
military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered
its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and
biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for
going to war last March."
The Bushies have good reason to think they won't find any weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in Iraq. They knew full well that the flimsy reports
they used to sell their sleazy oil war were more than four years out of
date--ancient history by intelligence standards. And, as The Washington
Post reports, a newly discovered memo to Saddam Hussein indicates that Mr.
Worse Than Hitler got rid of his WMDs in 1991. Unlike the United States,
which unilaterally partitioned Iraq into no-fly zones and created a new
Kurdish state, Saddam appears to have complied with the ceasefire
agreement that ended the Gulf War.
1,400 members of the Iraq Survey Group have been searching for WMDs during
the last seven months. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars.
They've been to every government installation in the country. They've come
up empty-handed.
All we've gotten are numerous false alarms, each trumpeted as vindication
of the Bushies' claim that Saddam would have nuked or gassed or poisoned
us if we hadn't taken him out first. On May 31, Bush said: "You remember
when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got
laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons...we've so far
discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those
who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned
weapons, they're wrong. We found them."
Actually, we didn't find anything. Both "mobile labs" turned out to be
rusted trailers used for filling weather balloons. But Bush's lies got so
much more media coverage than subsequent attempts to set the record
straight that all but the most press-obsessed were misled. By June 18, 35
percent of Americans told a Harris poll that they believed that we had
already found WMDs in Iraq. And 48 percent thought that Bush's fictional
link between Iraq and Al Qaeda had been "proven."
Iraq's WMDs were probably destroyed at least 13 years ago. Fortunately for
Bush, they exist only in the one place he cares about: the deluded minds
of a frighteningly ignorant American electorate.
Which is why our troops in Iraq are no longer bothering to go through the
motions of searching for them. And why Bush yanked the Joint Captured
Matériel Exploitation Group that was supposed to destroy WMDs if and when
they had been discovered. "Its work was essentially done," a Defense
Department official told The Times, because it was tired of "waiting for
something to dispose of."
Nearly 500 American servicemen have been killed in the war against Iraq.
At least 2,400 more have been wounded. We've killed so many Iraqis--tens
of thousands, certainly--that the Pentagon can't keep count. We've
borrowed more than $160 billion to pay for this extravaganza, with many
more hundreds of billions to follow. And what was the point of this waste
of life and treasure? "To disarm Iraq," Bush told us.
But Iraq, as everyone from the CIA to Hans Blix to Saddam told us
beforehand, didn't have any arms to dis.
Calling off the WMD hunt is Bush's tacit admission that he lied about the
reasons for war. It's hard to think of anything worse that a president can
do. It's even harder to imagine the American people, so cynically
accepting of deception, holding him accountable.
(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons
"Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing
interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America's best cartoonists. Ordering
information is available at 
amazon.com
.)
COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL 
RALL 1/14/04
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rusted trailers used for filling weather balloons.
Come no!  Tutti usano laboratori mobili per gonfiare palloni
meteorologici :)
*ROTFL*
-Stefano