very little of. this is on t.v. here are your headlines in greece. new government failed to reach agreement after last weekend's election with the bailout conditions imposed by the e.u. and i.m.f. proving too big for the country's political party. membership of the eurozone is now under threat. ongoing demonstrations in support of a mass hunger strike by palestinian prisoners pits youth in the forefront the brutal response from the israeli military clashes have been taking place almost daily since over fifteen hundred detainees started to refuse food detention without

charge and treatment by. the u.s. is partially resuming sales to despite human rights. weapons and shipments from washington had been frozen since the crackdown on popular on the rest in the gulf state began launched. well coming up next here on our special report exploring. used by the u.s. government and media manipulation to start a full scale conflict in iraq you're watching out say. weapons inspection process with little more than they can see all denied to see the return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever to eliminate by inspection is quite frankly a fool's errand on the contrary there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that saddam was somehow back in his box reality is that between the original unscom inspections and the unmovic inspection. you destroyed with those inspections ninety to probably ninety five

percent of the iraqi arsenal the first gulf war destroyed almost nothing and you know post-war u.s. battle damage assessments confirm the weapons inspectors were effective they for saddam to get rid of this stuff. they had that country under control by nine hundred ninety eight at the latest those inspectors had discovered most of the weapons of mass destruction and the iraqi programs at that point were essentially at an end before the war in iraq the united nations inspectors told us. that saddam hussein. did not have nuclear weapons capability ironically the major effect of the invasion of iraq in terms of weapons of mass destruction as to be has been to show that the inspectors were

right all along the inspection regime worked. it was the most intrusive inspection regime in history and it worked and i think on the day that's another reason why we went to war for a number. these maniacs. urging our enemies weakening our troops resolve and confusing the american people you should listen to these protests because they're obviously hoping saddam hussein who would have guessed that you could build a massive international peace movement on the protection of sadam hussein the media is culpable for the misleading of the american public they bought into the bush administration's rhetoric they don't understand that there is moral violence and immoral violence we use moral violence god bless this president he is truly

a great man reducing troop morale confusing the american people and involving our enemies they are absolutely committing sedition treason as far as i'm concerned there's a huge difference between personal opinion and opinion which the grades and the bases are military in a time of war it's a disgrace i don't believe that mainstream media acted responsibly in regards to iraq you know i was be little i was called a traitor i was called crazy palos on the c.n.n. accuse me of drinking saddam hussein's kool-aid for making statements in response to aluminum tubes people out there accusing you of drinking saddam hussein's co i thought of an idealogue that i'm a republican idealogue i'm actually a fairly conservative person who voted for george w. bush but i don't allow my ideology to get in the way of the facts and the reality of my duties and responsibilities as an american citizen and the media is supposed to be the fourth estate but they decided to completely climb in bed with the administration on this in a way the administration constructed

a box were and that was that box had all the information that ministration wanted to or the media and the public and congress to have what they would do is you to have the iraqi national congress. taking bogus defectors the information from him giving him to the pentagon and the iraqi national congress then giving him to the journalists and they said if you don't believe us iraqi national congress call the pentagon so you have the circular reporting and you had the new york times admitting that it was using one source for all of its information and weapons of mass destruction and it was you know self affirming by going to the pentagon which to put this stuff on paper it was. a lot of exaggerations partial information sometimes the whole information but on balance a very one sided view of iraq's w m d program and a lot of these stories the journalist didn't want to look into because the editors told them to run with were going to be supportive of the administration is the

patriotic thing to do i think that there was on the part of the media too much of of in a sense getting into the upcoming war and not enough look at do we really need to go there were some journalists out there raising the alarm bells the seymour hersh is the walter pincus of the world but unfortunately those great investigative reporters there are usually exiled when the he dissolved and it was only after the fact that they end up being praised and given the pats on the back the excitement was to make the case to go to war you know to show that you know that was the controversy that the media barbie's you know it was the titillation of a w m d here eunice not that not the titillation of or the conflict of tacky administration both the washington post the new york times it very conservative editors that support of the white house on this.

elite. elitists the people of the united states and their friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an ally or regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder is a regime has an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons and let there be no doubt about it we know for a fact that there are weapons there. there were a group of people who for many years had advocated going after saddam hussein and they pushed this hard and of course raw intelligence data can be interpreted in a lot of different voices i'm sure experts who talk to it and so there were a group of people i think that there were adamant that this was the right course to pursue the. elite. elite.

elite. elite. elite. league please. the so. please. ily ily. ily. ily ily. ily .

why did the administration so dramatically underestimate the cost of this war we did not have perfect foresight into what we were going to find in iraq. with the cost of the war rising and the search for weapons of mass destruction going nowhere the administration turns to david kay this work is being carried out into the direction of dr david kay a respected scientist and former u.n. inspector who was leading the weapons search in iraq we are determined to take this apart we have a tremendous group of dedicated american men and women involved in this with the best assets of the intelligence community can provide dr kay and his team are making progress we have had found a large body of continuing activities and equipment.

and we are surprised by new advances that we're making network of laboratories and safe houses controlled by iraqi intelligence and security services and unlike pre-war intelligence we don't require someone just to say something we actually need the physical evidence equipment suitable for continuing chemical and biological weapons research. david kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time david kay wants more time and he says it could take another six to nine months to make a definitive finding ministration is asking congress for hundreds of millions more six hundred million dollars to fund a continuing search we have not yet found shiny pointy things that i would call a weapon before we can draw from conclusions we need to let the iraq survey group complete its work. we were all wrong probably in my judgment. and that is most disturbing. it's

inevitable that there will be an outside commission appointed on an issue of this gravity of the caring and we will get to the bottom of this and we will let the chips fall where they make democracy you have an obligation your obligation is to speak truthfully to the public that's the basis of civility in our belief in our system of government it is going to require an outside effort probably through an outside commission to deal with some of these very serious problems is i think explanations are important in a democracy this whole episode has caught the white house completely by surprise they've become so fearful of admitting error that they stand up and defend things that only are face to face are untruthful president bush is being pounded with calls for an independent investigation into how u.s. intelligence so badly misjudged iraq's capabilities before the war having president holding all the cards pointing all the people having everybody accountable to him is a very bad if i would care to try to operationalize some of the common side made about

what was going wrong in iraq and so i said if you among other things that if you're going to do this you have to treat it like an intelligence problem and that is not go looking for hidden weapons but going looking for the people who would be associated with hidden weapons one of the first things that worried me was we had a big army running through iraq in march and april w m d was not used against them . nor was it found. that's sort of remarkable if they had had large stockpiles i really believe in the jungle telegraph put the word out on the street let people know what you're about and what you have to offer and usually you'll get people coming to you around a weapons program of a weapons program exists you're going to find people people engaged in the production of technology engineering design people involved in protecting the weapons people involved in moving them and people involved in preparing to use the weapons we found none of that we were running and fewer and fewer leads but look

profitable and a lot of evidence that stacked up to explain something other than large stockpiles of weapons this committee has a special responsibility to the men and women of our armed forces to look at the prewar intelligence because planning for military operations is baseless and makers take data they interpret threat they assess risk and you talk it out or not usually applied it and how much more now than it was rescued it's left out of the public white paper of the sea any of us feel that the evidence so far leads only to one conclusion. what has happened was more than a failure of intelligence was a result of been if you lation of the intelligence to justify a decision to go to war secret societies have their own rules and. secret societies generally don't feel an obligation to openly and democratically communicate prime minister blair has set up a sit somewhere commission in great britain at his is going to report back in july

right ours are not going to be until march two thousand and five five months after the presidential election should the american people have the benefit of the commission before the election well the reason why if we gave it time is because we didn't want to be hurried this is a this is a strategic look kind of a big picture look about the intelligence gathering capacities of the united states of america. if there are no weapons of mass destruction which there aren't if there are no ties with al-qaeda which they were and which they aren't maybe now there are. then why do we go to war and well all you need do is go on the web and and download project for a new american century day you will find the ideological and the strategic underpinnings for this policy which was rejected by george bush the first which is

ridiculed out of town in those days became the devout policy of this government and was implemented starting with the war i felt in my last year in the pentagon that i felt there was a great deal of contempt for the constraints on government that our constitution lays out. and i also felt that there was a contempt for the constitution and i only absorbed this sense of contempt by association with with some of the so senior appointed civilians who are all neoconservatives who all believe in dominance who believe in preemption who believe in the military option as the first resort rather than the last resort they have had a very fixed indeed almost obsessive idea that in fact iraq is a major actor in the world and a probable threat possibly a deadly threat to the united states this is

a group of people who have essentially believe that might makes right. that the united states at this stage of history has unchallengable power and therefore responsibility to use it to. make the world over. in the manner that we or the other i think it ought to be made over i think behind the basic neoconservative philosophy is a considerable argand's that american interests are the primary. goal of all american foreign policy and they seem to have a really serious habit of not being interested in listening to what other people say about this subject so i don't think it's an accident at all. so much of the justification turned out to be fallacious. misleading and deliberately so they thought they had a place in history they were going to bring down obviously

a very dysfunctional arab peninsula as well as a rant and they were going to change history they believe they won the cold war. and they said i we won the cold war because we were tough with the soviet union we get tough with these people and they're going to become like us it is feared to say that the iraq war was a diversion from from the war on terrorism and certainly meant that people weren't paying as much attention to afghanistan as they should have and the resources that might have gone to afghanistan and did up being focused more on iraq if you if you attack another country with no justification people going to say wait a minute this isn't a war on terrorism this is a war on. this imperialism this is colonialism you know and this is why it's a distraction because you need the help of these people to get this view that the

cia and the f.b.i. are lurking around the bazaars in the souks the middle east and handcuffing people are assassinated just doesn't with world works you've got to have the help of the locals to a den of fire these people and put them in jail or move them from to see only person saddam was a threat to at this point as we saw when the army co-op's was to iraq he didn't have weapons of mass destruction he wasn't scaring anybody certainly wasn't scaring the iranians or the turks for the saudis or anybody else it was a state that was on the verge of failure now it is a failed state failed states because terrorism you know you can name afghanistan lebannon somalia any time you can you create a vacuum it's where people flock to discontented to fight wars who some of bin laden had been saying for years america was doing they'd an arab country occupy an oil rich arab country. he had been saying this is part of his propaganda so what

did we do after nine eleven we invade an oil rich and occupy an oil rich arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us the only real connection is that having invaded iraq. we are very likely to make it a focus of terrorism we're likely to produce what the president has said iraq represents namely the central battlefield in the war on terrorism why because we've sent a lot of americans into a place where they're sitting ducks for people who think the only good american is a dead one. in the. iraq cannot be governed by americans i don't care what the intention is i don't care if. if we truly want to build a democracy there it cannot be ruled by

a foreign power the only tool in the tool box of the bush administration is military force military force is a very blunt instrument it just doesn't work we've created more terrorists in iraq and we haven't even solve the problem in afghanistan one of the more ironic effects of the attack on iraq was. to buttress other countries in the conviction that the famous remark by an indian general after the first gulf war when he said the lesson of this war is that if you if you have to fight the united states you better have nuclear weapons and you don't want your president to be seen as a hot dog and when when your president gets into a job suit gets in the back of a jet and lands on an aircraft carrier and then waddles out with this little straps between his legs and that's not when you want a sign of out of maturity and testosterone blasting through when you're talking about. things so fundamentally important as sending

a nation to war and sending young men and women to their deaths there is a sense in washington now that you can't raise. objections to this because you're not supporting the troops in the field i would i would rapidly point out that unlike almost anybody i know that holds office in this country i've had two sons in uniform both of whom have been in combat and so i don't have to take any nonsense from anybody nor will i mark twain's definition of patriotism his patriotism is supporting your country all the time. and your government when it deserves it no i don't think it's patriotic to stand by and remain silent while your country stumbles into a disaster of patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels and i think these are scoundrels they have no argument now they have no defense for what they did the country is in a. terrible international security situation but i think it's perilous so they're

attacking the patriotism of others. i know that the insiders don't have it all right make mistakes it's more likely to be mistakes and it's more like if the minister if there is no criticism they was jefferson who said that that our kind of government is not based on trust it's based on the in fact suspicion to suggest that if you have a different viewpoint than any given an administration and or if you're not supporting the president and policies that may be highly erroneous i don't see that as patriotism at all in fact i would argue that. any patriot with integrity is going to speak out if he or she feels that that we're on the wrong course it's not unpatriotic to demand that congress uphold its constitutional responsibilities regarding the declaration of war it's not unpatriotic to be very upset vocally upset when congress abrogates this constitutional responsibility by transferring

war powers authority to the president ited states as they did in october of two thousand and two and when you guys were working nasa deck of a dot com i was out in iraq trying to get rid of saddam and almost got killed for it and besides i was going to jail so it doesn't take a whole lot of courage for me to come out against the war and i did at the beginning but i was studiously ignored when we did the first gulf war when i came out of baghdad in one thousand nine hundred one i met with the president and stays i met with the senior leadership of both parties and one thing that sticks with me to this day is the extent to which each one of them. explained to me and very emotional terms the extent to which they had had to plan their consciences. to come to a decision how to vote on the use of force authorization it had been a moral decision on their part it had been one that had kept them. up at night is a thought their way through this we owe our soldiers our sailors our airmen and our

marines nothing less before we send them back sometimes the true patriot takes the unpopular course but helps their country avoid mistakes and even if they can't persuade at least they tried for me america is this amazing land of opportunity of beauty of idealism hope it is a beacon to the world it's a place of fantastic people and what infuriates me more than anything else is that this is ministration has systematically slandered why all the black and the image of america to our friends and allies around the world having the authority and the ability to go and wage war is a very very solemn thing and it needs to be done with care and with deliberation and with genuine forethought and i think that none of that was present in the lead

up to this entire debacle that we now call enduring freedom and when i got perhaps no clothes i have to have the presence of mind and the courage to stand up and say it perhaps not pose. regime is seeking a new killer pop. these attempted to purchase which treatment to use for meat you weapons production. material sufficient thirty eight thousand liters. but she talks.

saddam hussein in an advanced nuclear weapons development program. the british government is one saddam hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from africa. over a decade and. there hasn't been anything yet on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political impact.

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