A cordial thanks for the publication of this precious book on the tragic recent history of Iraq...so important and so necessary.
Get Neo-Conned! News
Latest News
- The second wave against Mearsheimer and Walt: A well-tempered smother-out as a new war looms
The Last Ditch, May 25, 2006 - Bush, Blair admit mistakes in Iraq
Washington Post, May 25, 2006 - Iran color-coded religious badges story 'untrue'
Csmonitor.com, May 25, 2006 - Joe Galloway, Nearing Retirement, Hits Rumsfeld in E-mails
Editor & Publisher, May 24, 2006 - Fairy Tales
Harper's, May 18, 2006
Recent Articles
False Pretenses
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith ( The six retired generals who stepped forward last spring to publicly attack Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war had to overcome a culture of reticence based on civilian control of the military.... more Neo-CONNED News recently conducted an interview with Ibrahim Ebeid, an Editor with the Arab website, Al-Moharer.net. The interesting site has frequently been the primary source of statements from leading Iraqi government... more This Thursday,... more In a short but important introduction to Chapter 25 of Neo-CONNED! Again, the editors... moreNight of the Generals
An Interview with Ibrahim Ebeid
The People (via McGovern) v. Rumsfeld
The sad, lawless saga continues: GTMO detainees remain in legal black hole.
Better late than never?
An article discussing the essay in Foreign Affairs by Paul R. Pillar noted the comment -- on a recent "Meet the Press" -- of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, (R-Mich.): "Where was he before we went to war?"
That's not a bad question, to which a somewhat unsatisfying answer might be, "Better late than never." That said, 2300 Americans and untold thousands of Iraqis are dead because the men who were in positions of power -- who could have done something about it -- didn't. God knows what their burdens and limitations were, but the after-the-fact confessions don't serve nearly as well as they could have, had they been made before the start of the war.
The recent highlight in whistleblowing terms is the revelation in the current New Yorker of a memo written by Alberto J. Mora as part of the Church investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. That memo details Mora's noble if fruitless crusade against the sometimes blatant disregard of our nation's highest officials for both domestic and international law in their assessment of the kind of treatment that military and intelligence personnel could legitimately mete out to detainees. Mora's "expose" is a mind-blowing confirmation of what Neo-CONNED! authors have said about the torture scandal (see especially Col. Smith's chapter 31 in Neo-CONNED! Again), though one cannot help but wonder how bad things would have had to have been for Mora to have taken a public stand against what he clearly saw as unlawful conduct, rather than waiting until his retirement to speak out.
In which light, the purpose that these after-the-fact whistleblowers do serve -- such as Pillar, Wilkerson, Mora, and others -- is that they confirm definitively that the individuals who were speaking out before the war on matters of intelligence, detainees, the war on terror, and the war in general, were absolutely correct. It was not, therefore, simply the opinion of the Neo-CONNED! authors, and others, that war with Iraq was unlawful and illegitimate; that position was, rather, a clear fact.