Official Washington's “Weapons of Mass Deception”

Rossen Vassilev Jr.
rv727716@ohio.edu

In their deceptive campaign to sell the Iraq War to a reluctant American public and a skeptical international community, top officials of President George W. Bush's Administration claimed that Baghdad was actively developing nuclear arms, stockpiling a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and posing an immediate and grave threat to U.S. national security.

They falsely accused the Iraqi regime of being behind the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, even though nearly all of the Al Qaeda suicide bombers directly involved in these attacks were Sunni citizens of Saudi Arabia. The Bush Administration even accused Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein of having ties with Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, even though the jihadist terrorist group (created by the U.S. in the 1980s to battle Soviet troops in Afghanistan) and Baghdad were known to be sworn enemies.

A major obstacle for the White House in early 2003 was that a lot of U.N. weapons inspectors, including active U.S. military personnel like Marine Captain Scott Ritter, had been rummaging around Iraq for months yet had found no trace of any Iraqi nuclear, chemical or biological arms. But President Bush ignored and disparaged the U.N., while his National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice darkly warned the American public on the eve of the U.S. military invasion of Iraq: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Administration officials used fake photographs, photo/video manipulations and outright forgeries, and even deepfake videos (mostly of Saddam Hussein), as well as a mix of official propaganda, fake news and covert disinformation (such as false testimony from Iraqi defectors like the infamous “Curveball”) to convince Americans and a suspicious world public that Washington's only goal was to disarm Iraq of its existing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and save world peace.

Our mainstream news media quickly fell in line and wholeheartedly supported the White House's pitch to sell its latest snake oil (“Iraqi WMD”) to unsuspecting Americans and the rest of the world. Hardly any American journalist ever bothered to ask if the Bush Administration would dare invade Iraq if the latter indeed had WMD in early 2003. (The White House must have been absolutely certain that the Iraqis did not have any WMD by the time American troops invaded Iraq in March-April 2003).

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell even flaunted a vial of supposedly Iraqi-made anthrax, a deadly chemical weapon, in front of the assembled members of the U.N. Security Council in New York City on April 5, 2003. He also presented to the rather skeptical Security Council members doctored or manipulated photos and videos as well as other phony images which purported to represent various Iraqi WMD in use.

Below is a computer-drawn illustration of an alleged Iraqi mobile biological-weapons lab, exactly as it was presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council on April 5, 2003:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)#/media/File:Powell_UN_Iraq_presentation,_alleged_Mobile_Production_Facilities.jpg

Years later General Powell admitted that he had been himself hoodwinked and drawn into a hoax designed to manipulate skeptical Americans and the top U.N. diplomats into endorsing the long planned U.S. attack on Iraq. Absolutely no WMD were ever found anywhere in U.S.-occupied Iraq—not even the purported Iraqi biological-weapons lab trucks shown in Powell's deceitful misrepresentations. Early critics of the Iraq War like former U.S. Marine Captain Scott Ritter began to talk mockingly of official Washington's “weapons of mass deception.”

Still, to this very day the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is located in Dallas, TX, and is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration, continues to display for the visiting public the same old doctored and misleading photographs and counterfeit illustrations, photo/video manipulations and faked-image forgeries as “proof” that Iraq was indeed in possession of WMD in 2003 and thus posed a direct threat to U.S. national security and American lives. Are these fakeries still needed?