Dead Wrong, Then and Now

As the Bush administration, at its highest levels (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others), ramps up its campaign to convince the world that Bolivia’s social upheavals are the handiwork of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, it is worth taking a moment to remember that these are the same people who took the US to War in Iraq on bogus claims of “weapons of mass destruction”.

CNN will air a special on Sunday night entitled, Dead Wrong: Inside an Intelligence Meltdown, which documents the administration’s failure starkly. You can watch two excellent excerpts here.

Today more than 1,800 US servicemen and more than 25,000 Iraqis are dead because the nation’s leaders were foolish enough to accept Bush administration propaganda at face value. Can anyone really fathom the full weight of human suffering launched on the basis of the administration’s fabrication and lies?

I can tell you all – living here, not in the US second guessing at things from afar – that the political uprisings of the past five years in Bolivia are the product of genuine Bolivian movements about taking back control of the nation’s future. Agree or disagree with those movements, as you like. But anyone who falls for the wave of fabrication coming from the Bush administration today that these uprisings are manipulations from abroad – you are falling for the same lethal tales once again.

“Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.”