Amy Goodman: "Bush, The Iraq War, and Torture: From Assessment to Accountability & the MSM!"/Hofstra

[KoKo]

Amy Goodman does Great Job Exposing the Mainstream Media/Bush/PNAC that led us into the Iraq Invasion. She covers the killing of journalists during the Invasion and how Journalists were posting Propaganda both Before and After the Invasion. A Good "Walk Back" into the sordid history of our Foreign Policy after "9/11" and why it's important to remember. She thanks Hofstra University for the Opportunity to have a voice in this Retrospective of "Why We Went To War."

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Bush, The Iraq War, and Torture: From Assessment to Accountability& the MSM!/Hofstra University

At the Hofstra Conference on the George W. Bush Presidency, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman says one million died over the last decade in a country that the Bush administration said they were going to save - March 31, 2015

Transcript at This Site for those who can't get High Speed Connection at:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13548


Partial TRANSCRIPT after VIDEO and Link for the Rest of the View:

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!. She is co-author, with her brother David Goodman, of the book Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back. The pair also co-wrote the national best-seller The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them.
Transcript
JAISAL NOOR, PRODUCER, TRNN: At the George W. Bush Presidential Conference at Hofstra University, several former Administration officials defended the legacy of the 43rd President and argued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were legally just and carried out in the best interest of the American people. However, there were a few dissenting voices. Among them was author and journalist Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!

~AMY GOODMAN: 9/11 was clearly a defining moment. A horrific moment, when close to 3,000 people were incinerated in an instant. The question, though, was what did Iraq have to do with 9/11? If you ask yourself, as the last speaker suggested, what would you have done on September 12th -- why would you attack a country that had nothing to do with this horrific attack on the United States?Just today, a report has come out from the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. They've done some calculations. They released a report saying, “This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has directly or indirectly killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan, 80,000 in Pakistan, a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further warzones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately ten times greater than that of which the public experts and decision makers are aware of, and propagated by the media and major NGOs, and this is only a conservative estimate,” they write.


“The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.”One million deaths in Iraq in the last bit more than a decade. In a country the Bush administration said they were going to save. That would -- as they famously said, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- greet U.S. soldiers with flowers and sweets. As Vice President Cheney said, we are going to liberate the people of Iraq.Sadly, the Bush administration exploited 9/11. The blueprint for what happened, and I think it's important to go back even not so far in history, was drawn up years earlier by the Project for the New American Century. I'm reading from my first book, The Exception to the Rulers. That was called PNAC, a think tank formed in 1997 to, quote, “promote American global leadership,” unquote. Its founders are a who's-who of the neoconservative movement, which seamlessly morphed into the top officials all over the Bush II administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's Chief of Staff, L. Scooter Libby. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Defense Policy Board member Richard Pearl. National Security Council staff member Eliott Abrams, among others.The PNAC members had a reputation around Washington, explained Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst with twenty-seven years' experience. As Misters Goff and Negroponte were talking about the Presidential daily brief -- yes, Ray McGovern was one of those CIA analysts. He did it for Vice President George H. W. Bush. But he observed, “When we saw these people,” he's talking about the PNAC members, “coming back in town, all of us said, 'Oh my God, the crazies are back.'”. McGovern said their wild-eyed, geopolitical schemes would typically go right into the circular file.In September 2000, PNAC issued a report that called upon the United States to dominate global resources.

The key to realizing this was, quote, “Some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” And so you have the allegations of weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq itself. The pretext for a larger scheme. According to PNAC, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”And so on the morning of September 12th, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld reacted to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks by declaring to Bush's cabinet that the United States should immediately attack Iraq. It didn't matter then or later that Iraq had no connection to Al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told Senior National Security Council staff, quote, “To think about how do you capitalize on these opportunities.” She compared the situation with 1945 to … 1945 to 1947, the start of the Cold War.

But not all people in the National Security Council felt the way that those administration officials did. Take Richard Clark. He'd advised President Reagan and George H. W. Bush on counter-terrorism. He was carried over to George W. Bush's administration, his counter-terrorism czar, and also was with President Clinton. He was shocked when Rumsfeld, the day after, said we've got to look at Iraq. He was shocked when President Bush told him to look at Iraq.One of the things he told CBS's 60 Minutes: “I think when talking about President Bush, I think he's done a terrible job against … on the war against terrorism.” Because he said months before the 9/11 attacks, he had warned the administration, we've got to look at Al-Qaeda. But to be told the day after the 9/11 attacks you must look at Iraq?And think about it today. One million Iraqis dead.

More of the TRANSCRIPT at:


http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13548

[Jack Rabbit]

1. K/R

[90-percent]

2. Amy speaks truth to power!

I just watched this and have to get more background on this forum. Seems like a lot of the Iraq invasion perpetrators were part of the panel. This is roughly equivalent to Stephen Colbert's 2006? speech at the Washington Press Corps dinner.

This is a milestone and distills most of the evil and hypocrisy and war crimes of the GWB White House.

-90% Jimmy