How Neocon Favorites Duped U.S.

By Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com

When American voters go to the polls on Nov. 7, one of the foremost questions that should be on their minds is how did the United States get into the Iraq mess, which has claimed the lives of more than 2,800 U.S. soldiers and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. What went wrong with Washington and what can citizens do about it?

Part of the answer to what went wrong is that the normal checks and balances – in Congress, the national news media and the U.S. intelligence community – collapsed in the face of George W. Bush’s determination to invade Iraq. Pro-war neoconservative opinion leaders also acted as intellectual shock troops to bully the few voices of dissent.

Amid this enforced “group think,” a self-interested band of Iraqi exiles found itself with extraordinary freedom to inject pro-war disinformation into the U.S. decision-making process. Despite many reasons to challenge the truthfulness of Iraqi “defectors” handled by the Iraqi National Congress, few in Washington did.

Now, four years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee has issued a long-awaited post-mortem on how the INC influenced this life-and-death debate. The report reveals not only specific cases of coached Iraqi “defectors” lying to intelligence analysts but a stunning failure of the U.S. political/media system to challenge the lies.

(The rest is here.)