I read a hundred pgs. of the Bodansky book. Piece 'o shit. The Secret History of the Iraq War by Yossef Bodansky [buy this book]
The Fall of Baghdad by Jon Lee Anderson (Che and Ahmed Massoud biographer) [buy this book]
The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq by Christian Parenti [buy this book]
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108&s=acockburn
> ...Yossef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on
> Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, has them all: secret shipments of
> Iraqi WMDs to Syria before the war, secret Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian plans to
> invade Israel, secret Iranian and Syrian long-range missiles in Lebanon
> (complete with detailed descriptions of their calibers and range), not
> to mention a secret and especially fiendish Syrian plot to contaminate
> Israel's water resources.
This torrent of drivel flows remorselessly through more than 500 pages. Sinister Arab plots, such as an Egyptian plan to invade Israel, loom as specters, only to disappear from the story as Bodansky scurries on breathlessly to newer and taller tales, usually garnished with attribution to one or another intelligence agency. Hence verbatim quotations from GRU (Russian military intelligence) reports march impressively through his narrative of the actual war. A quick Google check reveals these as lifted
from a notorious wartime website touting GRU connections replete with wholly fictional reports of developments in the fighting. "Iraqwar.ru" was subsequently revealed as the concoction, according to one authoritative Russian military commentator, of "some guys kicked out of the [Russian] secret services for incompetence."
However, while consigning Bodansky's Secret History of the Iraq War to the UFO-abduction shelf, it is worth remembering that, not so long ago, most of the nation's national security intelligentsia were peddling material almost as self-evidently worthless. Brookings Institution experts, for example, endorsed the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam's nuclear weapons program posed a significant threat to the national security of the United States. These weighty conclusions turned out to be based on the word of Khidhir Hamza, self-styled as "Saddam's Bombmaker," the bulk of whose testimony was quite clearly fraudulent long before the war, and definitively exposed once the invasion troops found Saddam's nuclear cupboard to be entirely bare. -- Michael Pugliese