If not justified, invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation is an illegal act of aggression—the supreme international crime as it was called by the military tribunal that conducted the Nuremburg trials after the Holocaust. Is the invasion and continuing U.S. presence in Iraq illegal? A recent survey suggests that more than one million Iraqis have died since the onset of the invasion.
Were "Lies" the Smoking Gun?
Lie -- v. to make a statement with the intention of deceiving
Why Didn't Saddam Hussein admit that Iraq no longer had the WMD's?
Since the assault on Iraq, American corporate television viewers have been asking the question: "Why didn't Saddam Hussein admit that Iraq no longer had the WMD's?" as if to allege that the war was Hussein's fault.
Lies are sometimes shrouded in questions so that the liar can later say: "I didn't say it was so and so, I just asked a question."
This question presupposes that Saddam Hussein didn't admit that he no longer had the WMD's when in fact, before the assault he stated emphatically in no uncertain terms that the WMD's had been destroyed. The U.S. corporate media insisted that he was lying because they had convinced the nation that Hussein still had massive stockpiles of WMD's.
On February 26, 2003, the corporate television program 60 minutes aired an interview with Saddam Hussein and this is an excerpt from that program:
RATHER: Saddam also rejected Bush administration allegations that besides the missile delivery system, he still has weapons of mass destruction.
HUSSEIN: I think America and the world also knows that Iraq no longer has the weapons. And I believe the mobilization that's been done was, in fact, done partly to cover the huge lie that was being waged against Iraq about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. That is why, when you talk about such missiles, these missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations in Iraq. They are no longer there.
The question should be: "Why didn't the U.S. corporate media admit that Iraq no longer had WMD's?
We might also ask if, by repeating this question intended to shift the blame for the war away from the U.S. corporate media, is this another statement made with the intention of deceiving (a lie)? As reported by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:
"Before the invasion, CBS's line was that Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons, and Saddam Hussein was lying about it. Now it maintains that Iraq did not have those weapons...and Saddam Hussein was lying about it."
Iraq was firing on U.S. planes in the No Fly Zone
The claim has been made numerous times that Iraq was firing on U.S. planes in the No-Fly zone and we had a right to defend ourselves. Seldom has it been mentioned that the so-called No-Fly zone was never authorized by the United Nations and was over sovereign Iraqi territory. If another country tried to enforce a No-Fly zone over the United States, how would we react? Didn't Iraq have a right to defend itself?
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud
Helping to drum up support for the war when the Administration was claiming that Iraq was lying about having destroyed the WMD's and that the U.N. weapons inspectors had been duped, Condoleeza Rice announced that we didn't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Of course we didn't want mushroom clouds, so a majority of us accepted the statement at face value, but what was the face value? Did we believe that she was suggesting that Iraq had a nuclear first strike capability? That Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program? Was that deception intended or did she believe we wouldn't take it as a suggestion that Iraq had nuclear weapons?
The U.S. has bulletproof evidence of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida
"An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network." —McClatchy News, 10-March-2008