Eric Margolis | April 11

Foreign Correspondent - US intelligence was `dead wrong' in its prewar beliefs about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, reported a US presidential commission on 31 March. And just as wrong about nearly other charge leveled at Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

This column also used `dead wrong' over the past decade when attacking all the lies being manufactured about Iraq. Interestingly, the many journalists and pundits who heaped abuse on my head and accused me of treason for daring challenge the pro-war propaganda they so greedily lapped up, have fallen strangely silent as the truth about Iraq emerges.

Speaking of truth, ironically, it was Iraq's President, Saddam Hussein, who told the truth about having destroyed all weapons of mass destruction left over from the Iran-Iraq War, and President George W. Bush who was not telling the truth.

Still, let's recall the prime mission of presidential and parliamentary commissions is not fact-finding but sweeping scandal under the rug, and deflecting blame from politicians.

After mouthing pious verities about needing better intelligence, the commission, appointed by President Bush, amazingly found: a. no one was really guilty of the Iraq intelligence fiasco; and b. there was no White House political pressure on the intelligence community to justify the war.

And so the mighty Niagara of whitewash flows on. The report made no mention of President Bush's claims about Iraqi drones of death, VP Dick Cheney's incessant pressure on CIA to declare Iraq a nuclear menace, or Condoleeza Rice's terrorizing Americans with talk of nuclear mushrooms clouds.

It ignored evidence from senior Bush aides Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke the president obsessively pushed for war with Iraq soon after taking office.

There was no mention of Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans, a covert Pentagon intelligence shop set up to funnel fake claims about Iraq to the White House and US media produced by a cabal of pro-war neoconservatives and a special Israeli disinformation unit.

No mention of patriotic CIA officers fired or demoted for refusing to join this giant fraud. No mention of how national security was gravely corrupted, manipulated and distorted for partisan political gain.

The report called Iraq `...one of the most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history.' But, amazingly, the whitewash committee found no one responsible for this disaster.

There was no mention of the more than 1,549 US soldiers killed, and the 17,184 American casualties caused by the war. Nor Iraqi dead, possibly as high as 100,000, nor the destruction of parts of Iraq, nor the $6 billion a month cost of this imperial war. And certainly no reference to the view advanced by Bush's own Mideast envoy, Marine general Anthony Zinni, that the war was really about oil and benefiting Israel.

Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan.

Continued...