The Man Who Sold the War: Meet John Rendon...

[johnfunk]

An important story from Rolling Stone details how John rendon used the lies of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri to build a false case for war, with help and money from Neocons embedded in the CIA and Pentagon

The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie.

This is a MUST read article.

[DURHAM D]

1. I read this earlier and think the real story is about the use

of private spooks vs. official spooks. Private spooks are not under anyone's control (including their employers at the Pentagon). Says more about the battle between the CIA and the Pentagon than we usually get to review. This is really a must read.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

5. Kick. n/t

[stillcool]

2. Excellent article...

Someone else posted it earlier...http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x173725
The 'spooks for hire', dovetail so nicely with the 'journalists for hire'...quite the racket. The last sentence gives one pause.

[pretzel4gore]

3. military strength is measured by budgets

no matter how tough and crafty and determined an army is, if it's equipped with obsolete weaponry and lacks the training programs etc then it cannot compete...iraq's military budget was public knowlege all along, and all this wmd talk (which suggest the iraqis were preparing to use terrorism using cutouts, like the cia and the brits routinely do, and of course terrorism is very limited in any terms saddam hussein could make use of) is just nonsense....to think, that while the iraqis under saddam, who probably never had more then 20 billion for its yearly military, is judged as a seeker after wmd's by the usa, which spends on itself 1/2 of the entire human race's military budget (yet couldn't prevent 911! actually, the massive us military budget may account for how the real culprits were able to pull off 911, and get away with it, geez they could've gone to the moon!)
the trick is, act like the people are stupid, and ignore the noise the people make, call it 'conspiracy theorists & wingnuts! haha' and crush any media outlet (that has a wide exposure) that dares stray from the script...

[UpInArms]

4. propaganda - the choice for the BFEE

http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/examples.osi.html

Propaganda: Remember the Kuwaiti babies?
By: Lou Morano


If you liked the lie about the murder of Kuwaiti babies after Iraq's invasion of the oil-rich emirate in 1990, you'll love the Office of Strategic Information.

That is, if the Pentagon's new office of shadow plays survives in the form it had been envisioned.

Last week The New York Times reported that the Defense Department is paying the Rendon Group, a Washington-based international consulting firm, $100,000 per month to help the OSI with a broad campaign that would include "black" propaganda, or disinformation -- commonly known as lies.

This brought to mind one of the most notorious pieces of disinformation promulgated the last time the government wanted to build public support for a war against Iraq. It was fabricated by Hill and Knowlton, one of the world's largest public relations firms. This is the story that in 1990 invading Iraqi soldiers pulled Kuwaiti premature babies from their incubators and left them to die on the cold floor. The Bush administration has scrambled away from the storm of criticism sparked by the Times' report, and the president promised Monday that his government would not lie about defense policy. On Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on NBC's "Meet the Press": "The person in charge is debating whether it should even exist in its current form, given all the misinformation and adverse publicity it has received."

The OSI was created shortly after Sept. 11 to build public support abroad for the U.S. war on terrorism.

...more...

[Roland99]

6. Shows this was a premeditated invasion. * was invading no matter what.

Or perhaps it was Cheney/Rumsfeld (who didn't 'advocate' the invasion) that prepped the intel and fed it to the Boy-Blunder.

[DoYouEverWonder]

7. It's all starting to make more sense

We've all been collecting bits and pieces of this story and now everything is snapping in place.

The first thing that needs to happen after all these folks are led off in shackles, is to drastically cut the funding for defense and intel services and put that money to taking care of Americans first. It's the fastest and easiest way to put these bastards out of business.