"They Knew ..." It's all coming back to us now: Iraq's fearsome nuclear-weapons program. The cozy, conspiratorial trysts between Saddam and Osama. Those scary aluminum tubes. "Significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The secret biological and chemical weapons, deployable in 45 minutes. Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, et al., were all warned repeatedly -- by their own intelligence agencies -- not to make such claims. But they did, publicly and repeatedly, and so we went to war. David Sirota and Christy Harvey present a comprehensive brief on Bushie lies re: Iraq, and In These Times (Aug. 3) has it. www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/they_knew_0802/P40/
"Can't Blair See That This Country Is About To Explode? Can't Bush?" On Western TV, Bush and Tony Blair say things are looking up in Iraq. But watching those news shows from Baghdad -- with its rising Iraqi death toll, its terrorized American soldiers, its "government" with only tenuous control over even parts of Baghdad -- Robert Fisk sees differently. "[J]ust as, before the war, our governments warned us of threats that did not exist, now they hide from us the threats that do exist," he writes in The Independent (Aug. 1). Read Fisk at www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6603.htm.
"Bush Plan Excludes Public from Environmental Review." What you don't know can't hurt you, so Bushies want to make government ever more secretive and impervious to public opinion. The BushGreenwatch Web site (July 28) reports that the White House seeks to grant agencies including the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency "'categorical exemptions' from following federal environmental regulations if they invoke reasons of national security." That could apply to, say, storing hazardous chemicals near your kids' school. New rules would also eliminate now-mandatory public review and public comment. Find out how to tell Homeland Security what you think of all this at www.bushgreenwatch.org/mt_archives/000162.php
"The Real Reason Bush Went To War." The motivation for an oil war might seem clear enough. But former British civil servant John Chapman suggests a possible related cause-and-effect concerning the threatened status of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. In The Guardian (July 28), Chapman tells why Iran and Iraq's switch to pricing their oil in euros -- a move open to imitation by other OPEC nations -- gave the White House a reason to carjack Baghdad besides simply taking the wheel of a nation with tankful of known oil reserves. www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1270414,00.html
