The Lies of War: How the Bush Administration’s Deceptions Fuel Conspiracy Theories

By Ahmed Nassef

As soon as Nicholas Berg’s abhorrent videotaped murder was broadcast around the globe, the conspiracy theories began flying on the Internet. Why had the US detained Berg for days prior to his final disappearance? Was the revelation timed to dilute the impact of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, to the point of being announced to outraged US Senators in the middle of an Armed Services Committee hearing on the subject? And how did Abu Musab Al Zarqawi ever grow his leg back?

Practically every Bush Administration announcement, every news event involving the US government or military, generates countless conspiracy theories. For certain, conspiracy theories, about everything from the allegedly fabricated moon landing to CIA or mob involvement in the Kennedy assassination, predate the reign of George W. Bush.

However, what makes President Bush different is that the facts, as revealed by former members of his own administration, and—increasingly—by mainstream US media have already proven many of these theories true, which only goes to fuel even more conjectures. Another factor that fuels the doubters is that the Bush Administration itself, with its paramount reliance on secrecy and deception, has shaped its “war on terror” on one massive conspiracy theory after another.

For the past three years, President Bush has painted the world in stark black and white tones—you are either with us or with the terrorists, he told the world soon after the September 11th tragedy. Taking him at his word, major international events are the provenance of either “them” or “us,” so people can be excused if they begin drawing conclusions that if facts indicate that certain catastrophic events have not been perpetrated by “the terrorists,” that they then must have been committed by “us.”

The failed Iraq adventure is a tragic case in point for this phenomenon. When the Bush White House began publicly beating the war drums—in the infamous “Axis of Evil” State of the Union speech in January 2002—many observers pointed to the fact that many top Bush Administration members—from Vice President Dick Cheney to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz—had been pushing for an invasion of Iraq for years.

While they were out of power during the Clinton years, these former Reagan and Bush Sr. officials, and soon-to-be Bush administration foreign policy architects, spent their time in a neoconservative think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). As early as 1997, they set an invasion of Iraq as an integral step in their plan to re-establish American political and economic power in the world.

Although information about the PNAC was reported at the time in the international press and alternative new sources in the US, most of the US corporate media remained silent. The nation was still reeling from the September 11th attacks, Bush’s popularity soared behind his tough talk of retaliation, and US TV news broadcasts—from CNN to Fox—were covered with permanent strips of waving American flags. Talk of a pre-planned Iraq invasion was discounted as the work of idle conspiracy theorists.

Today, as the Iraq war effort has unraveled, and Bush’s approval rating is at an all-time low, the notion of a Bush administration cabal intent on taking over Iraq has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

As former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neal has revealed, the invasion of Iraq was the main topic of discussion at Bush’s first cabinet meeting, soon after Bush took office in what amounted to a 5-4 vote of the US Supreme Court.

The plan went full throttle in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. According to CBS News, just five hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld set his sights on Saddam Hussein. That afternoon, Rumsfeld ordered the military to gather the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]… Go massive… Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

Bush’s former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke—who served under several Republican and Democratic presidents—has offered some of the most damning testimony, charging that Bush and his closest aides were so fixated with invading Iraq that they neglected repeated warnings about Al Qaeda. At one point, according to Clarke, the President himself gave him the clear impression that he needed to come up with a connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11th attacks, no matter what he had to do. When he came back with a report denying any connection, disappointed White House officials told him to go back and try again. As Rumsfeld said, Sweep it all up… related or not.

As time has passed, practically every Bush administration claim about Iraq has proven to be an outright lie: Iraq’s connection to September 11th, the massive threat of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the eager Iraqis showering flowers at entering American and British troops, the wave of democracy and freedom sweeping Arab and Muslim countries.

That President Bush and his top advisers lied is now difficult to dispute. But the American corporate media has yet to spell out the obvious ramifications of this deception. People lie to cover something up. Why did President Bush and the highest US government officials knowingly send hundreds of American soldiers to their deaths, kill untold thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians, endanger millions of Americans who are now more likely to become targets of further terrorism than ever before?

The answer—the economic dominance of American corporate interests hoped for in PNAC documents and demonstrated by billion-dollar contracts to Halliburton subsidiaries—is not hard to figure out.

All this is brings us back to conspiracies.

The Bush war cabinet wants the world to think that there is a global conspiracy that requires the “civilized” world to fight a faceless enemy in a war without end. The cost, in human lives and stifled civil liberties, is a heavy yet necessary consequence of this undefined war to, paradoxically, protect human life and individual freedoms.

We know the terrorists have no respect for human life. The world now knows that they share this disrespect with the Bush Administration, their former benefactors.

But if the Bush henchmen are willing to sacrifice American and Iraqi lives to accomplish Neocon objectives, then where are they willing to draw the line?

How many lives are too much?

Would they draw the line at the life of an independent American contractor whose father was actively involved in the anti-war movement?

Would they draw the line at 3,000 people at the World Trade Center towers?

As President Bush says, it’s either the terrorists, or us.

We don’t know the answers to these questions yet. Perhaps, in time, we will, just as we now know about the rampant torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of their American captors, reports of which had been discounted for months as a conspiracy drawn up by Al Jazeera until photographs were finally broadcast on American television.

Thanks to this lying President, the question is no longer whether we should believe in conspiracies; it’s about whose conspiracy theory you choose to believe.

Ahmed Nassef is co-founder and editor-in-chief of MWU! He can be reached at anassef@muslimwakeup.com