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Civilian Officials' Lies

Ex-President George W. Bush's provocative lies leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was highlighted on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC report ("Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War"), tonight.  By time this essay is published, readers (especially, in the Mountain and Pacific Time Zones, Alaska and Hawaii) should still be able to see a re-broadcast of the program from the beginning, later on this evening.  It, basically, shows or implies that officials like Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and George Tenet were all lying about Iraq and using the lies as a pretense to lead America into war.  Building on what already has been conventional knowledge, the program showed that Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.  As David Corn of Mother Jones magazine said, there have been no consequences for the criminal wrongdoings of these officials, such as being hauled off to the Hague en blanc for lying about this gravely serious matter. 

The Obama administration has been protecting these officials through the offices of wisecracking Eric Holder and even pressured European countries not to get involved with investigations and prosecutions.  On the other hand, why would a regime that could conceivably be put on the dock at the Hague itself for various international violations want to set a guidepost for doing anything else but to protect the former regime?  Condoleezza Rice is as worried about European prosecution as she is about Eric Holder, nevertheless, since she has had the audacity to travel there at least once in the last couple of years.  Only high-ranking civilian officials and some generals, by and large, should be blamed for the tragedy of Iraq. Our battle-experienced rank-and-file servicemen and servicewomen who were trusting, for the most part, their civilian leaders' words at the time, were mostly faithfully following orders.

Congressional candidate (Washington, 9th District), Mark Greene, is on record twice, in September, 2002 publications in the Anchorage Daily News (as a candidate for Congress in '02) for being against the resolution for war in Iraq, and once -- after the resolution passed and the '02 general election -- in the Winter of 2003, also in the Daily News. 

The Party of Commons believes that Greene's opposition to the Bush administration, particulary in the regime's early years, had something to do with the theft of the Washington - 9th District Primary in 2004 for the benefit of Paul Lord, although Lord was an unwitting beneficiary.

[Originally posted on Commoner on 2/18/2013; updated and revised on 2/20/2013].

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