Wednesday, October 28, 2015

William Rivers Pitt | An Ample Presence of Corpses: The Legacy of George W. Bush

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33338-an-ample-presence-of-corpses-the-legacy-of-george-w-bush
"thanks to Bush and Blair chumming it up a year before the war to decide how they were going to lie to the world about the invasion.
None of this is new news, in the main. The Downing Street Memos, classified British intelligence documents that were leaked, described how in July of 2002 "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invasion, and that Bush had made up his mind to go to war even though "the case was thin." This newly revealed Powell memo, however, reveals the decision to attack Iraq had come together many months before, with Tony Blair as an early willing accomplice.
Besides which, no WMD were ever found in Iraq. No connections to 9/11 or al Qaeda were ever established in Iraq. The "We're bringing democracy" canard fell apart before it began, ink-stained fingers notwithstanding. As I said more than 12 years ago, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a smash-and-grab robbery writ large, an act of theft and first-degree murder that has unleashed an ocean of blood. It will take ten generations to recover from what was done, and only if we're lucky.
So here is a modest proposal, based upon this new Powell-memo documentation as well as the barrels of evidence already in hand: Arrest the perps. Slap Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and every other soul-vacant Bush administration vampire who participated in handcuffs. Put them on trial for war crimes. Make no mistake: This happened because they wanted to gut the Treasury in order to "prove" that government doesn't work; they wanted to give that money to their friends; they wanted to win elections; they wanted to establish a permanent military foothold over the oil sands of Iraq and they wanted to create enough chaos in the Middle East to ensure that the gravy train for the "defense" industry would roll unchecked for years to come.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams ... but if what they did does not constitute a blizzard of crimes, then the word "crime" has no meaning."