The Man Who Sold the War

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war Exhilarating 7000+ word piece written by James Bamford for Rolling Stone on how a man named John Rendon and his company, The Rendon Group supplied the neocons with the propaganda needed to dupe the American public into believing we needed to invade Iraq. When the CIA caught on to his lies he merely went to Judy Miller of NY Times and to the Pentagon, where he found his eager and more than willing accomplices that led us to war. And by the way, I heard James Bamford in a radio interview say that Rendon has already commented on the piece and he 'only had two problems' with it; 1) he wakes up at 4AM each morning, not 3AM, and 2) the wine Bamford says Rendon drank when they met wasn't correct... If you can handle the truth, read the article-if you can't handle the truth, go back to watching Fox News.

"The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand. On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm. Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad. It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. There was only one problem: It was all a lie".