When I was in college, one of the movies which was in heavy rotation in my house was JFK. Though I was not alive for that assassination or Pearl Harbor, I consider 9/11 to be a tragedy of equal proportion. I mentioned the film JFK as it made me more skeptical of blindly believing every line that comes from government leaders immediately following these types of events. I was about a mile from the Pentagon when it got hit. Seeing the smoke rising up on that cloudless, sunny day and hearing the jets scramble to provide air cover is a memory which I will never lose. So starting on 9/12 I started collecting newspapers everyday and took lunch every day based around the announced press conferences of Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Powell, etc. I distinctly remember the story being built to support an attack of Iraq. It smelled fishy and deliberate from day 1. It made no sense as every paper touted OBL as the mastermind behind the attack. Why were we going back to finish what we should have finished years before when the Iraqi army rolled over in record time? Every press conference was promoting the same story. Here are satellite pics of bunkers.. they could be housing weapons. Here are pics of aluminum tubes.. the same type used to enrich uranium. Here's an unfounded rumor about uranium shopping in Niger.. the WH only promoted stories that supported the story they were manufacturing and buried any evidence they got which contradicted it. In Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, he calls Powell out directly saying he "decided to add his personal interpretation of Iraqi intercepts to the rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light.. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of 'forbidden ammo' Powell took the interpretation further: 'Clean out all of the areas.. Make sure nothing is there' " Sounds threatening, but it was not part of the actual intercept (translation: made up). Powell took evidence of Iraqis doing what they were told to do (searching for huge ammunition dumps to confirm they were not holding on to banned chemical weapons) and doctored the translation to make it appear they were indeed hiding them. Omitting other evidence that Iraqis were complying with orders only strengthened the argument for attacking. What really made me angry years later, was Powell was the only one I marginally believed at the time. I didn't trust anything Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Cheney said. The nation was afraid. They were angry. And they were having their focus deliberately led away from Afghanistan and into Iraq.

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