Part 1 of Series on Fallacies and Misinformation Behind US Policy in Fallujah

For the next several weeks, the Justice For Fallujah Project will be making a series of posts reexamining the official reasons and arguments given by the US for its policy in Fallujah. By looking at eyewitness testimony, declassified government documents, and alternative media coverage of these events, we hope to expose the fallacies and misinformation that mislead the American public about what their country did to Fallujah.

This is Part 1 of this series. It seems appropriate that before we discuss US policy in Fallujah specifically, we should first look at the reasons and arguments given for the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The National Security Archives, maintained by George Washington University, have published three electronic briefing books that analyze declassified American and British documents from the time leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What these documents reveal is that the intelligence communities of both the US and the UK were highly skeptical of the information that was being presented to the public to justify the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein. They considered the information that claimed Saddam Hussein had WMDs, had connections to Al Qaeda, and posed a threat to the international community to be unreliable; and they acknowledged the existence of information that contradicted these claims.

As the famous Downing Street Memo states, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The Bush and Blair administrations intentionally presented unreliable information as fact, and in doing so they misled the world and committed the supreme crime against humanity: aggression. The invasion of Iraq was without pretext, thus making it a major war crime.

We encourage you to read this material for yourself.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/index.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB328/index.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB330/index.htm