http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/As the Iraq war grinds on, and the death toll climbs daily, and the astronomical financial cost climbs by the minute, I'm noticing a trend towards the obfuscation of the events leading up to the 2004 invasion. People are starting to insist that the "Mission Accomplished" stunt wasn't really about that at all; that WMDs was not really a central reason for going to war; that the looting in Baghdad never really happened; and that Abu Ghraib was just a bunch of college kids having some fun. This is taking the old adage that history is written by the victors to an extreme. This blog, based on an essay by Eliot Weinberger (author of '9/12'), will take you past the media spin, and reveal many of the huge inconsistencies that spew forth from Washington. It will make extensive use of direct quotes. It will let you see a reality behind the smokescreen that is being desperately erected by war-mongers who knew from the start they were in the wrong.hourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/353928I heard that most of the insurgent violence in Iraq was personally directed by a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Rumours of his presence led to the US bombings of Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Samarra, and a village in Kurdistan, but each time he had "narrowly escaped". Apparently, he's been seen...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/352529In the first year after the "transfer of sovereignty" it turned out there had been 484 car bombs, killing at least 2,221 people and wounding at least 5,574. In the same period, 890 US soldiers were killed, and the average number of insurgency attacks had risen to 70 a day. On the anniversary of...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/350475In 2005, a US marine, a guy who was present when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003, said the entire story was fiction. Saddam was caught the day before in a small house, and then placed in an abandoned well, which was invented as the 'spider hole' where he was hiding. In 2004, during the attack...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/347842Let's go back to 2001, briefly. On September 21st of that year, the PDB (President's Daily Brief), prepared by the CIA, reported that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the September 11th attacks. Condoleezza Rice said, "The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/344552Congressman Walter Jones, Republican from North Carolina and the man who renamed French fries 'freedom fries', has now started calling for the withdrawal of US Troops. He said, "The American people are getting to a point here; how much more can we take?" Congressman Mike Pence, republican from...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/342739Last May there were three suicide bombings every day in Iraq. A journalist asked Bush if he thought the insurgents is getting harder to defeat now militarily. He replied, "No, I don't think so. I think they're being defeated. That's why they continue to fight." A human rights worker said, "In...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/340119In April last year there were 67 suicide bombings. Colonel Pat Lang, former chief of Mideast operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said, "It's just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We've been in a civil war for a long time." By the same time, over 1,600 American...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/DamonLeigh1703/335640African-Americans normally form 23% of active-duty troops, but recruitment of African-Americans has fallen by 41% since 2000. A US Military Image Study prepared for the army recommended that, "for the army to achieve its mission goals with Future Force Soldiers, it must overhaul its image as well...