NEWSWEEK: Majority of Americans now believe Bush misled on Iraq; Hans, Rangwala and others made that case BEFORE the war

Newsweek reports that “for the first time in the NEWSWEEK poll, a majority of Americans now believe the Bush administration knowingly misled the American people in building its case for war against Saddam Hussein: 58 percent vs. 36 percent who believe it didn’t.”

Just a reminder, in the weeks and months BEFORE the March 20, 2003 invasion, I explained in great detail just what Bush, Powell and company were up to and how the mainstream media — aside from a few honorable exceptions — were helping them get away with it, as you can see from the chronologically listed links below. See in particular the overlapping essays “Lying Us Into War” and “The Disinformation Age,” where I document at length what I dubbed the Bush team’s “techniques of deceit.”

Grifter-in-Chief Bush Aided by Media’s Wusses of Mass Credulity (Oct 19, 2002)

Bush Is Racking Up “Frequent Liar Miles” (Jan 18, 2003)

Rumsfeld Offers Media Good Advice on How to Protect Viewers From Leaders’ Lies (Jan 25, 2003)

The Evidence Bush is Withholding Weakens, Not Strengthens the Case for War (Jan 28, 2003)

The White Hawk Club (who gets to talk on public-affairs TV) (Jan 30, 2003)

An Open Letter to the U.N. About Colin Powell (Feb 4, 2003 — pre-U.N. presentation)

Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His “Techniques of Deceit” (Feb 10, 2003)

I’m Calling You Out: Marching Orders for Journalists, Officials and Celebrities Who Believe in “Informed Consent of the Governed” (Feb 19, 2003)

With “Liberals” Like These, Who Needs Conservatives: How Powell wowed Mary McGrory and Richard Cohen, the crème of the Washington Post’s credulous crop (Feb 23, 2003)

Public’s Pro-Inspections Posture Mostly M.I.A. on Talking-Heads TV (Feb 28, 2003)

The Disinformation Age: How George W. Bush and Saint Colin of Powell are lying America into an unnecessary war — and what honest journalists can do about it (March 4, 2003)

How to Deter Bush’s Fibbing and Hoopsters’ Flopping (March 14, 2003)

Far and away the most thorough, relentless and accurate analyst of the shaky pre-war claims of the Bush and Blair administrations was Glen Rangwala, a young professor of politics at Cambridge University in England, His pre- and post-war writings are collected here.

Don’t miss his devastating critique of Powell, posted Feb. 14, 2003 — that is, well before the start of the war — dissecting each of the 44 claims he made at the UN.

Rangwala was on the case long before I was, working with the anti-war wing of Britain’s Labour Party but receiving scant attention from the overrated Brit media, which trumpeted the claims in Blair’s now-discredited Sept 2002 dossier but not Rangwals’s critique. It wasn’t till January 2003 that I stumbled across his mammoth analysis of U.S. and U.K. claims about Iraqi WMD, first posted Sept. 27, 2002. That’s two weeks before the U.S. Congress granted Bush the authority to got to war against Iraq should the need arise (it never did, of course, but he went anyway). Here’s an updated version of Glen’s mammoth analysis.

If the US and UK media had served their citizenries rather than their governments, the rush to war would have ground to a halt.