The War in Iraq

War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know

by: William Rivers Pitt, Scott Ritter

Amazon Price: (as of 12/18/2009)

This book, written BEFORE the Iraq war, exposes the lie that "everyone" thought Iraq had WMD's. In fact, the most credible and knowledgable person who had first-hand experience in dealing with Iraq's WMD programs, UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, didn't believe they had any.

Ritter had an exemplary career in the Marine Corps during the first Gulf War, and later became a UNESCO inspector. He was in charge of finding and destroying Iraq's chemical weapons capabilities and stockpiles after the war ended. He debunks Bush administration deliberate misinformation to legitimize the 2003 invasion, namely that Iraq had nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capability and could give it to al-Queda. There were no new nukes or ballistic missiles because we would have detected the testing of them. There were no biological or chemical weapons because the factories were destroyed in the first war, and the capability could not have been rebuilt because UNESCO was monitoring the country. Any hidden chemical/biological stockpiles were destroyed by the 5-7 year shelf life of the weapons. What else is Bush lying about?

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What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception

by: Scott McClellan

Amazon Price: $21.24 (as of 12/18/2009)

Scott McClellan was given information to relay to the press about the Valerie Plame incident. Two years later he came across information that convinced him he'd been lied to, maybe not directly by Bush, but certainly by Rove and Cheney. That was his apparent tipping point. After being convinced that he'd been set up to lie to the press without his knowledge, McClellan rethought the whole tenure of his association with the Bush Administration in Washington and began to have epiphanies and form new opinions. He doesn't tell us much we didn't already know or suspect, but boy does he tell it. This time around it's coming from a trusted insider who followed Bush to Washington from Texas.

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq

by: Patrick Cockburn

Amazon Price: $4.77 (as of 12/18/2009)

In March 2003, Patrick Cockburn traveled secretly to Iraq just before the invasion, and has covered the war from Baghdad ever since. In The Occupation, Cockburn describes the fighting on the ground as Saddam's armies collapsed, the looting of Baghdad, the failure of the US occupation, the springs of the resistance and how it turned into a full scale uprising. Explaining how the three main Iraqi communities, the Kurds, the Shia and the Sunni, responded to the growing conflict, he gives us a nuanced portrait of daily life in Baghdad, of how Iraqis themselves reacted to the invasion and the long war and occupation that followed.

So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq

by: Greg Mitchell

Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 12/18/2009)

"Greg Mitchell has given us a razor-sharp critique of how the media and the government connived in one of the great blunders of American foreign policy. Every aspiring journalist, every veteran, every pundit -- and every citizen who cares about the difference between illusion and reality, propaganda and the truth, and looked to the press to help keep them separate -- should read this book. Twice."

-- Bill Moyers

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