The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq is the comprehensive source on the administration's campaign of disinformation before, during, and after the second Gulf War. From the careful linking of Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda, to the WMD canard, to the September 2003 damage-control sideshow, AlterNet.org's Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry team up with renowned journalist Robert Scheer to take the full measure of official deception.
They not only lied, the authors conclude; the pattern of obfuscation, misstatement, and half-retraction amounted to a devious entrapment of the American people. The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq offers the first analysis of this pattern, underscoring that the lying was highly managed. The public did not commit troops, and dollars, to the invasion acting on the best information its government could provide. Instead, we fell victim to a marketing campaign conducted by a small group of influential radicals inside the Bush administration, who were pursuing their own narrow, hubristic agenda.
With U.S. soldiers still losing their lives, Bush's ongoing doublespeak is outrageous. In the authors' words, "The Bush administration continues to stand firm on the bodies of its own soldiers, who are paying a high price for its lack of reason. . . . The soldiers themselves are simply exhausted, homesick, and disillusioned with both their generals who sold them the shining lie of a quick war of liberation and the nation that seems unwilling to be rescued.”
Celebrating 40 Years of Project Censored
Did you know that the U.S. military is deployed in 70% of the world's nations? Or that leaked State Deptartment cables show that the U.S. planned to instigate civil strife in Syria as early in 2006? What about the chronic problem of medical neglect in private, for-profit, U.S. immigrant-only jails?
No? Neither did the rest of the world. That's because these and countless other news items are suppressed or ignored by our nation's "free press" every day. For the past forty years, Project Censored has been unearthing the buried stories that corporate media deem unfit to print. They also just hosted a jam-packed Media Freedom Summit and co-founded the Global Critical Media Literacy Project in partnership with the Action Coalition for Media Education and the graduate program in Media Literacy and Digital Culture at Sacred Heart University.
To celebrate, we're showcasing Censored 2017 at a 25% off online discount and offering 50% off Censored backlist titles (from Censored 1996 to Censored 2006), along with select Seven Stoires books on media literacy, including titles by Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky.
Check out our discounted Project Censored and media literacy collection!
Christopher Scheer is the managing editor of AlterNet.org, the popular news and commentary website. Scheer has written screenplays for Oliver Stone and previously worked for the San Francisco Examiner.
LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY is a senior editor at AlterNet.org and co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq.
Robert Scheer is the author of six books, a nationally syndicated columnist based at the Los Angeles Times, the host of NPR affiliate KCRW's Left, Right, and Center, and the editor of Truthdig.com.