Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War

John Prados calls HOODWINKED "a case study in government dishonesty" (p. xii). Based on his meticulous research, he concludes that "deception was systematic and carried out purposefully" (p. xii). The topic, of course, is the propaganda campaign that culminated in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Prados is now a Research Fellow with the National Security Archive, based at George Washington University. He has been researching U.S. national security issues since the early 1980s. One of his more well-known books is "The Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from WWII Through the Persian Gulf." The Archive was created in 1985, and is the single largest user in the U.S. of the FOIA, Freedom of Information Act. The NSA makes available declassified documentation of U.S. foreign policy and national security policy (www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/). You might think that a book on the topic of the intelligence used to go to war with Iraq would be outdated now that the Senate Intelligence Committee report has been issued (www.intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf). But if you recall, the Republicans prevented the Committee from releasing any findings about Executive Branch manipulation of the intelligence. The report, therefore, indicted the CIA for its faulty intelligence about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," but did not make any charges about the Bush Administration. That is where HOODWINKED is still VERY relevant. Because what the book consists of is a careful, line by line analysis of the key pieces of intelligence available to the Administration and a comparison of those documents to the public statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell. Prados reaches the following conclusion: "What the intelligence record shows, however, is that contrary to the reports it put out, what the Bush Administration knew indicated that Iraqi weapons programs were either nascent, moribund, or non-existent -- exactly the opposite of the President's repeated message to Americans. 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 facts about Iraq were other than what the intelligence indicated" (p. xi). In other words, they were lying through their teeth! There was no imminent threat -- the war was an offensive war, a preventive war against a threat that did not exist. HOODWINKED includes the entire text of several crucial declassified documents, including the October 2002 CIA White Paper, the October 2002 letter from DCI George Tenet to Senate Intelligence Committe Chair Bob Graham, the December 2002 State Department/CIA Fact Sheet, the May 2003 CIA/DIA paper on biological w