The whole thing was a Soviet-style disinformation operation run out of the Vice President's office. Cheney's man Chalabi would give bogus intelligence to the Defense Department. Then Chalabi would call the Times (and other press organs) and give them a "confidential tip" on the same story. The Times would then call the DOD flacks for confirmation, and they would get confirmation of what was essentially a story told in a circle. The Times got took. Its just the tip of the whole iceberg.


At the same time Chalabi dressed up a bunch of guys who were probably Iranian intelligence operatives, as "Defectors" from the Saddam regime. They would claim to have worked in weapons labs or nuclear programs, and TV outlets, primarialy Fox News, would "interview" them, generating lots of headlines in all the papers, giving false stories the appearance of truth.

Simultaneously, Bush, Cheny and other top officials would give speeches and interviews where they alluded to certain knowledge of these weapons, or spoke of "uranium from Niger" and "mushroom clouds over Manhattan". The point of many of the speeches was that they knew more than they could tell you, when in fact they new ****.

Limbaugh, Drudge and the other national talk show party hacks would take all of these spurious stories and spin them into imminent doom for the US, stories for mass consumption, converting these lies to urban legend truth. Guys like O'reilly, Scarbie et all would report them as truth as well, but to O'reilly's credit he is now admitting he got took too.

Again simultaneously, unsubstantiated stories of Iraqi intelligence meeting with Atta, the 911 hijacker, were also circulated along with claims that al-Queda operatives were given refuge in Bagdad, a story the CIA now admits was false (the Atta stories have now also been traced to Chalabi). Again, this generated headlines based on false planted stories. The end result was, the pressure of a misinformed public on Congress allowed Bushand Cheney to make a false case for war and get the votes it needed to act. Its no accident that when the average American was polled at the time it was the majority thought that there was a proven direct link between 911 and Saddam. Many still do believe this, and it shows in a lot of the posts on this forum. Cheney still implies it is true, to the embarrassment of Bush, who has had to publicly disavow the VP's comments and admit there is no connection between Saddam and Osama or Iraq and 911. This is how we all got suckered into a war of choice in Iraq.

All of these are typical disinformation techniques of the KGB (pioneered by Uri Andropov) when Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the neo-con bunch were cold-war bigwigs. They learned these techniques from the best, and used them on us. We all got played for chumps and are now stuck with the results.

http://www.moveonpac.org/goreremarks052604.html/