Monday is the 20th anniversary of the start of the 2003 Iraq war, and naturally noted war critic Joy Reid discussed the matter on Monday’s episode of her MSNBC show.
And Reid didn’t mince words, and at one point while discussing the fraudulent justifications deployed to win support for the war, she declared it to be one of “the biggest political crimes” ever committed by a United States presidential administration.
“I mean, gitmo,” Reid said, referring to the prison the U.S. government created at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in order to evade constitutional protections for accused criminals, “this was this global war on terror where we were allowed to open this gulag.”
“They were torturing people there to try to make them say that Iraq was involved,” Reid continuing, by which she meant involved in the 9/11 attacks. “And they weren’t. We went to the point of torturing people to try to make them lie to say that somehow Saddam Hussein, who was a terrible human being, but he wasn’t involved in that.”
“And the way that they manipulated people’s rage and fear over 9/11, to get into Iraq, I still think is one of the biggest, sort of, political crimes, and crimes of immorality, coming from a presidential administration,” Reid added.
One note: Prior to and after the start of the war in Iraq, numerous officials in the Bush administration claimed for years after 9/11 that there were links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda — these claims were of course false. Bush himself finally admitted as much in 2006.
The primary justification for the invasion was the claim that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction; those claims were not true.
Watch the whole video above.