Heard in 2005

This is just fantastic.

I wonder if it bothers anyone that we may never know if some of these things are true, because the government doesn't want us to know.

I heard that the primary source of information about the tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons buried under Saddam’s private villas and under Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad and throughout Iraq was a Kurdish exile called Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. He was sponsored by the Rendon Group, a Washington public relations firm that had been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon to promote the war. (Rendon, among other things, had organised a group of Iraqi exiles in London, called them the Iraqi National Congress, and installed Ahmad Chalabi as their leader.) I heard that after al-Haideri failed a lie-detector test, administered by the CIA in Thailand, his stories were nevertheless leaked to journalists, most prominently Judith Miller of the New York Times, which published them on the front page.

Funny, some of us knew this (or suspected it) before the invasion

On the effectiveness of the 'War on Terror'

I heard that the State Department refused to release its annual report on terrorism, which would have shown that the number of ‘significant’ attacks outside Iraq had grown from 175 in 2003 to 655 in 2004. I heard Karen Aguilar, acting co-ordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, explain that ‘statistics are not relevant’ to ‘trends in global terrorism’.

This might be the best

I heard about despair. I heard Colonel Joseph DiSalvo, commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, say: ‘What we’re seeing is the terrorists are in desperation.’ I heard him say: ‘By the end of the summer, the terrorists will be captured, dead or, in the least, severely disrupted.’

I heard Dick Cheney say: ‘The level of activity that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.’

I heard Porter J. Goss, director of the CIA, say that the insurgents were ‘not quite in the last throes, but I think they are very close to it.’

I heard Dick Cheney later explain: ‘If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period. When you look back at World War Two, the toughest battle, both in Europe and in the Pacific, occurred just a few months before the end. And I see this as a similar situation, where they’re going to go all out.’

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Last throes could be a violent last throe, or a placid and calm last throe. Look it up in the dictionary.’

And the most frightening, but again, something I said long before the first shot was fired

I heard Condoleezza Rice speak about a ‘generational commitment’ in Iraq.

Read all of them.

Via Lew Rockwell