One chilling moment in the film comes in an interview with retired General Anthony Zinni, a former commander in chief of US Central Command. In August 2002, the Bush-Cheney administration opened its propaganda campaign for war with a Cheney speech at the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. The veep made a stark declaration: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." No doubt, he proclaimed, Saddam was arming himself with WMD in preparation for attacking the United States.
Zinni was sitting on the stage during the speech, and in the documentary he recalls his reaction:
It was a shock. It was a total shock. I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program. And that's when I began to believe they're getting serious about this. They wanna go into Iraq.
That Zinni quote should almost end the debate on whether the Bush-Cheney administration purposefully guided the nation into war with misinformation and disinformation.
But there's more. So much more.
As I am sure many of you know David Corn, of Mother Jones, wrote the book that this documentary is based on with fellow journalist Michael Isikoff. It is definitely going to be "must see TV" for those of us who were railing against this war from the very beginning, and will hopefully provide an incentive for journalists to revisit this issue and perhaps, fingers crossed here, somebody will actually have to answer for why this country was lied into a war, and why so many thousands of our military members were sent to their deaths under false pretenses.
As you can probably tell I am already amped up to see this and if you are as well feel free to leave your impressions here.
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