Were We Hoodwinked by Iran or by the Bush Administration About WMD?
Steven Aftergood, in the newsletter of the FAS Project on Government Secrecy (Volume 2004, Issue No. 47 May 26, 2004):
The yawning gulf between the Bush Administration's sequential rationales for the war in Iraq and the facts as they have emerged (e.g. regarding weapons of mass destruction, links to al Qaida,
etc.) has left many people grasping for an explanation of what went wrong.
Lately, the suggestion has been raised that the war was propelled by an Iranian effort to spread disinformation about the state of Iraqi WMD programs. Was the Bush Administration the unwitting victim of a foreign covert action?
Historian John Prados doesn't think so. In his new book "Hoodwinked," he argues that officials knowingly manipulated the available information "to win popular support for an unprovoked war."
"This book is an attempt to compile and share with the American public for the first time the actual intelligence available to the Bush administration as it made its case for war. It then aims to show how this information was consistently distorted, manipulated, and ignored, as the president, vice-president, secretaries of defense and state, and others, sought to persuade the country that the facts about Iraq were other than what the intelligence indicated," Prados writes.
Although the author plainly has a point of view, the book stays fairly close to the documentary record, providing copies of key source documents like the October 2002 CIA White Paper on Iraq, and carefully annotating and analyzing them.
Though it is not the last word on the subject, the book provides a solid formulation of the questions about the U.S. war in Iraq that citizens and voters will have to contend with in the months and years to come.
See "Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War" by John Prados of the National Security Archive, just published by the New Press, 2004:
http://www.thenewpress.com/books/hoodwinked.htm