Clinton's First Bombing

``There is no published evidence known to me of any effort by the Times to verify independently the Administration's specific claims against Iraq. No reporter, for example, has written of getting in touch with any of the many independent experts in electrical engineering and bomb forensics to ask what they thought of the photographs released by the White House.

When I asked seven such experts about those photographs last summer, they all told me essentially the same thing: the remote-control devices shown in the White House photographs were mass-produced items, commonly used for walkie-talkies and model airplanes and cars, and had not been modified in any significant way. The experts, who included former police and government contract employees and also professors of electrical engineering, agreed, too, that the two devices had no "signatures."´´

The date is not 2003. It's 1993. As an addledum to the analysis of the National Security Democrats, at long last, I just found Seymour Hersch's 1993 article on Saddam's alleged assassination attempt on Papa Bush (he "tried to kill my dad!"...).

Hersch not only dismantles the allegations, but exposes the bureaucratic forces in the background (and the punditocracy in the foreground) pushing for a retaliation, which Clinton finally ordered on 26 June 1993 - lobbing a couple of Tomahawks at Iraq, eight civilians killed for nothing.

If Clinton's 1998 Desert Fox attack was the prototype of Bush's 2003 Iraq war, this attack was the prototype of Desert Fox - preceded by claims from an enemy of Saddam taken at face value, a jury-rigged intel process, a media campaign of lies and spin, and domestic political calculation; executed in violation of US and international law (even had the allegations been true), followed by a complete lack of critical evaluation by the press; and hurting mostly Iraqi civilians.

It's a long article, but worth to read in full.