RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events "It's not about oil or Iraq..."

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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
We'll if getting rid of a man who kills and tortures thousands of people isnbt justifiable to you then I really feel sorry for you. I'd hate to think I would ever be that cold.

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whomod said:
I dunno why I'm the one who has an agenda when your own agenda is to defend Bush at all costs as well.

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Rob Kamphausen said:

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whomod said:
I dunno why I'm the one who has an agenda when your own agenda is to defend Bush at all costs as well.

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is this where i accuse you of generalising? or attempting to censor bsams' free speech?

it'd be a whole different world, whomod, if you spent as much time offering praise or even suggestions as you did criticisms. you'll knock bush or republicans in general for darn near any reason, and defend any democratic mishap with something like "well, bush did it worse."

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examples?

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in reality, these points don't have to be so partisan.

depending upon your viewpoint, bush is just as much a scumbag as clinton, and vice versa. they're politicians, afterall. you happen to favor one, i happen to favor another. thats about it.

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I agree wholeheartedly there. I think part of my problem, especially with G-Man, is that if one criticizes Bush then all sorts of assumptions are immediately pasted onto you and your alleigances. Clinton did some good things, was a likeable enough guy but yes, was also a scumbag of the highest caliber. So was Gray Davis.

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but everyone, from dubya to colin powell, from clinton to chriac, from typhoid dave to dave the wonderboy, felt saddam had wmds. not all of that was based on american, or dubya's intelligence. it was out there, everywhere. even blix had reported suspicions of his own. and, lets not forget, there could still be stuff out there. we've only been in the country for half a year. it took us months to find saddam and you knew he existed.

and lets keep in mind, none of this is blanket defense of george bush. none of this is blind loyalty to the red white and blue. none of this is right wing politics distributed by posters who, within minutes, were frequenting the "ZOD Demands the Boobies Back on TOP!!" thread in the womens forum.

it doesn't have to be such a paranoid view of our own society.

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Well, i've given my reasons of why I completely distrust Bush. That isn't to say it's because he represents the Republican Party. It's because he represents (to me at least) the neocon's or what used to be called the Military/Industrial Complex. And nothing they've done has convinced me I'm wrong on this. I see them through this paradigm, You guys don't. So perhaps I'm quicker to distrust than you guys are.

Not because i'm some "liberal" and no Republican can do anything right, but because I see the very people Bush chose for his Administration as the same guys,or representing the same interests, of those who brought us (and have lied to us about) Iran/Contra, the Watergate break in, the interference with Latin American governments and so on.

Now that wouldn't be the case with say John McCain or any other 'progressive-conservative' (or "traitors" and RINO's as some on the extreme far right that now constitute the dominant faction of the GOP call them) being in the White House. I don't have a single minded hatred of Republicans in general just because i happen to vote Democratic as some of you seem to assume.

I did mention that i happened to be a Regan Republican. Back then my friends and I would sit around talking about the "liberals" and the minorities, and immorality, biblical prophecy of the Hal Linsey variey, and welfare and the homos and what not just like G-man and the rest of you do. I was in my own self-righteous ignorance of the world beyond my own neighborhood, back then. As I grew up I realized that the world wasn't colored in those extreme shades of black and white. The world is more complex than that. As are people who I was wrong to prejudge without knowing anything about. That kind of 'progressive-conservative' POV that would accomadte any moderate Republican seems to be the exception and is openly attacked by the extreme neocon supporters and their talk radio fire-stokers nowadays. So what it means to be Republican has narrowed incredibally that i'm surprised Colin Powell, the Log Cabin Republicans and The Republicans for Choice are even tolerated at all nowadays.

You guys have noticed that EXCEPT for politics, i'm pretty much the same in interests and opinions about other things. That's no accident. Before 1990, i'd have been 100% in agreement withyou guys about everything INCLUDING politics.

My friends back then as I said, all shared this this extreme version of republicanism with me that is now the norm. That as well as our love of comics, sci-fi and pentecostal christianity drew us together. Those friends were much like the very people I get into heated debates on this forum over interestingly enough. Meeting and befriending and finding out about actual gay people, Meeting actual poor people and welfare recepients, being one among the working poor as well as meeting all sorts of different minorities that I knew nothing about, experimenting with drugs (here come the cheap shots) that I was told are evil and lead to addiction, meeting people with different worldviews, religions, beleifs and ideas, having sex before marriage, having to deal with the abortion issue 1st hand. All that changed me and my assumptions and self-righteous conclusions about all those subjects. For the better I think. It's always easier to talk out of your ass from a safe distance.

I suspect judging from the Dems in '04 thread and all of right wing media in general, that attacking a Democrat is the same no matter who that Democrat is. Hell, today I was listening to Drudge on the radio attacking Dean's wife for 1st not showing up at his events and when she finally did, he comes out with this retarded question of " I thought she was too busy with patients to join her husband". As if he couldn't imagine the idea of her making the time in her schedule as the Iowa caucases came up. Or it was just another ridiculous example of 'fishing for shit to bitch about (front runner) Dean'. Somehow that kind of hostility is OK because it supports Bush and supports some peoples political biases. But i bet if Dean fired back it would be seen as more erratic hostility from Dean.

Frankly, it's bullshit and it's bullshit that some are so incapable of seeing that kind of double standard. It' s bullshit that people stil think the whole 4 year, $40 million Whitewater investigation which weaved and winded erratically to Filegate, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Paula Jones and finally Monica, in investigating every anti-Clinton allegation regarless of their connection to the land deal, was reasonable, sober not hateful, and non-partisan. But asking questions about dodgy evidence that links Sadaam to Al Queda, a SOTU adress rife with previously discredited allegations about uranium that led to a war where 500 troops and thousands of Iraqi's have died is seen as Anti-Bush hatred.

It's gotten boring already.

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MisterJLA said:
Jesus Christ could come down from Heaven, and tell everyone He too thought that Hussein had WMD, and whomod would still try to spin the blame on Bush.

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God himself has already come down and declared Bush the victor in the coming election.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/2004-01-02-god-bush_x.htm

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JQ said:
Sure, Hussein's had weapons of Mass Destruction...

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JQ said:
Hussein's had weapons of Mass Destruction, but read some books, we're the only country to ever use them.

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MisterJLA said:
Jesus Christ could come down from Heaven, and tell everyone He too thought that Hussein had WMD, and whomod would still try to spin the blame on Bush.

Pathetic.

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The Bush Doctrine At Risk

.......To govern is to choose, almost always on the basis of very imperfect information. But preemption presupposes the ability to know things -- to know about threats with a degree of certainty not requisite for decisions less momentous than those for waging war.

Some say the war was justified even if WMD are not found nor their destruction explained, because the world is "better off" without Saddam Hussein. Of course it is better off. But unless one is prepared to postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily dismantle any tyranny -- on to Burma? -- it is unacceptable to argue that Hussein's mass graves and torture chambers suffice as retrospective justifications for preemptive war. Americans seem sanguine about the failure -- so far -- to validate the war's premise about the threat posed by Hussein's WMD, but a long-term failure would unravel much of this president's policy and rhetoric.

Hussein, forced by the defection of his son-in-law, acknowledged in the mid-1990s his possession of chemical and biological weapons. President Clinton, British, French and German intelligence agencies, and even Hans Blix (who tells the British newspaper the Guardian, "We know for sure that they did exist") have expressed certainty about Iraq's having WMD at some point.

A vast multinational conspiracy of bad faith, using fictitious WMD as a pretext for war, is a wildly implausible explanation of the failure to find WMD. What is plausible? James Woolsey, Clinton's first CIA director, suggests the following:

As war approached, Hussein, a killer but not a fighter, was a parochial figure who had not left Iraq since 1979. He was surrounded by terrified sycophants and several Russian advisers who assured him that if Russia could not subdue Grozny in Chechnya, casualty-averse Americans would not conquer Baghdad.

Based on his experience in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Hussein assumed there would be a ground offensive only after prolonged bombing. U.S. forces would conquer the desert, then stop. He could manufacture civilian casualties -- perhaps by blowing up some of his own hospitals -- to inflame world opinion and could count on his European friends to force a halt in the war, based on his promise to open Iraq to inspections, having destroyed his WMD on the eve of war.

Or shortly after the war began. Hussein, suggests Woolsey, was stunned when Gen. Tommy Franks began the air and ground offenses simultaneously and then "pulled a Patton," saying, in effect, never mind my flanks, I'll move so fast they can't find my flanks. Hussein, Woolsey suggests, may have moved fast to destroy the material that was the justification for a war he intended to survive, and may have survived.

Such destruction need not have been a huge task.

In Britain, where political discourse is far fiercer than in America, Prime Minister Tony Blair is being roasted about the missing WMD by, among many others, Robin Cook, formerly his foreign secretary. Cook says: "Such weapons require substantial industrial plant and a large workforce. It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq."

Rubbish, says Woolsey: Chemical or biological weapons could have been manufactured with minor modifications of a fertilizer plant, or in a plant as small as a microbrewery attached to a restaurant. The 8,500 liters of anthrax that Hussein once admitted to having would weigh about 8.5 tons and would fill about half of a tractor-trailer truck. The 25,000 liters that Colin Powell cited in his U.N. speech could be concealed in two trucks -- or in much less space if the anthrax were powdered.

For the president, the missing weapons are not a political problem. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, says Americans are happily focused on Iraqis liberated rather than WMD not found, so we "feel good about ourselves."

But unless America's foreign policy is New Age therapy to make the public feel mellow, feeling good about the consequences of an action does not obviate the need to assess the original rationale for the action.

Until WMD are found, or their absence accounted for, there is urgent explaining to be done.

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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
poor whomod.

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whomod said:
You guys keep sidestepping the issue of Bush declaring that Sadaams WMD's were an imminent threat to America

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It's not a side-stip at all, given your premise.

Your premise has been, all along, that Saddam never had these weapons, that Bush knew this, but lied, and that Bush's lies (and the lies of his "neocon" [ie, "Jewish"?] stooges were the sole source of America's willingness to support the war.

People here have been attempting to point out that pretty much EVERYONE thought he had these weapons. The reason for doing so is not a sidestep, but simply an effort at making the obvious point that, if everyone believed it, it is less likely that Bush was lying, and more likely that he simply believed the same thing that Clinton, etc., believed. A mistaken belief is not a lie, no matter what party the President is in.

Furthermore, there's the fact that this demonstrates your own anti-Bush bias. Everyone, including Bush, said "Saddam has these weapons" and, yet, the only person you think was actually lying when he made this statement is Bush.

Why don't you think the others were lying? The only reason anyone has seen so far is that you just don't like the President.

You might argue that your intense personal distate for the President is irrelevant to the issue. However, when evaluating the argument of anyone, it is natural--if not prudent--to consider that person's bias and how it might color their argument. (G-d knows you spend enough time arguing my perceived bias. )

As such, it's not really fair for you to claim this is a side-step. It's simply an argument you're having trouble disputing.

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When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.
Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.


But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story.

The White House is now making its case. to Congress and the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech to the United Nations next week.

But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action.

"My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence,"
........"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis – offering to hold the story if proven wrong.

The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.

In war, some facts less factual

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Rob Kamphausen said:
but not only did bill lob a buncha missiles into iraq (on multiple occasions), i think clinton has also "been proven to be (a) liar(s) and (a) manipulator(s) in the past" -- so how do we know he didn't fabricate things?

po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

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this whole thread is pretty kooky

whomod, i don't knock you for asking the questions or taking things with the grains of delicious, delicious salt. those're good things. necessary things.

the crazy point is, to me, it seems like you're just "out to get" dubya -- even to the point where, in the past, if anyone has disagreed with your thoughts, they were viewed as blind, loyalist supporters.

so, while you may believe the bush admin is skewing info... maybe we're believing you and your articles are skewing your info on the bush admin. its an endless loop of questions impossible to answer.

the facts are... that no one knows the facts. at least, clearly, none of us. you can list 1,000 links to 1,000 articles that show the country of iraq doesn't even exist. i can retaliate with 1,500 articles that show america didn't exist, first.

just because you say stuff, doesn't make it so. if that were the case, i'd be saying many things, on a daily basis -- most consisting of the phrase "pamela." ... and later "please stop laughing."

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bottom lining it, you're inclined to distrust (this specific admin). i'm inclined to believe (this specific admin). and thats pretty much all we're sure of.

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January 23, 2004


THE WORLD
Cheney Is Adamant on Iraq 'Evidence'

Vice president revives assertions on banned weaponry and links to Al Qaeda that other administration officials have backed away from.

By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney revived two controversial assertions about the war in Iraq on Thursday, declaring there was "overwhelming evidence" that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al Qaeda and that two trailers discovered after the war were proof of Iraq's biological weapons programs.

The vice president stood by positions that others in the Bush administration have largely abandoned in recent months, as preliminary analysis of the trailers has been called into question and new evidence — including a document found with Hussein when he was captured — cast doubt on theories that Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated.

Cheney's comments were seen as stoking the controversy over Iraq as the vice president was embarking on a trip to an economic summit in Switzerland and meetings with European officials, some of them fierce opponents of the war who have been dismissive of U.S. claims about the threat posed by Iraq.

Cheney has consistently espoused the most hawkish views among senior administration officials. His statements Thursday suggest he intends to maintain that tone as he takes a more high-profile role in President Bush's reelection campaign.

"There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government," Cheney said in an interview on National Public Radio. "I am very confident that there was an established relationship there."

That assertion appeared at odds with the recent words of other senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who said in an interview this month that he had "not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence" of connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Danielle Pletka, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, defended Cheney's comments, saying he referred only to a "relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"Nobody has ever said Saddam directed Al Qaeda in attacks," Pletka said. "But it is clear that had he decided to do so at any point it would have been easy."

Members of Congress and some in the intelligence community said Thursday that Cheney's comments could lead the public to believe there was collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that that was not supported by the evidence.

U.S. intelligence officials agree that there was contact between Hussein's agents and Al Qaeda members as far back as a decade ago and that operatives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq. But no intelligence has surfaced to suggest a deeper relationship, and other information turned up recently has suggested that significant ties were unlikely.

Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is in custody, has told American interrogators that Al Qaeda rejected the idea of any working relationship with Iraq, which was seen by the terrorist network as a corrupt, secular regime. When Hussein was captured last month, he was found with a document warning his supporters to be wary of working with foreign fighters.

"There's nothing I have seen or read that backs [Cheney] up," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who called Cheney's remarks Thursday "perplexing."

Cheney also argued that the main thrust of the administration's case for war — the claim that Iraq was assembling weapons of mass destruction — had been validated by the discovery of two flatbed trailers outfitted with tanks and other equipment.

"We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program," Cheney said. "I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

That view is at odds with the judgment of the government's lead weapons inspector, David Kay, who said in an interim report in October that "we have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile [biological weapons] production effort."

In a BBC interview that aired Thursday night on public television in the United States, Kay said that is still the case. He said it was "premature and embarrassing" for the CIA to conclude shortly after the vehicles were discovered last year that they were weapons labs. "I wish that news hadn't come out," Kay said, calling the release of the information a "fiasco."

Experts are still in disagreement over the purpose of the vehicles, with some saying they may have been meant for biological weapons production and others saying it was more likely they were meant for making hydrogen.

Cheney is considered the administration official who has the most influence with Bush. His role in assembling the case for war has been controversial.

His numerous trips to CIA headquarters before the war were interpreted by some critics as an effort to pressure agency analysts to adopt hard-line views. In his public appearances, he often cast the alleged threat from Iraq in a harsh light, warning that United Nations inspectors could not be effective and that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program. Kay has since said there was no active nuclear program.

Since the war, as the administration has sought to deflect charges that it exaggerated the Iraqi threat, Cheney has appeared reluctant to give ground. On occasion, this has created public relations problems for the White House.

After Cheney implied in a television interview in September that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush was forced to acknowledge days later that the administration "had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved" in Sept. 11.

The White House had no comment Thursday on Cheney's remarks.

Citing Cheney's latest comments, Democrats on Capitol Hill renewed their calls for an examination of the administration's use of intelligence.

"This is the same problem that existed before the war. Leaders are going beyond what the intelligence community said," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

The intelligence committees in the House and Senate are nearing completion of reports on intelligence failures in Iraq, but Republican leaders have resisted calls for examinations of claims made by officials in the executive branch.

Cheney insisted the "jury is still out" on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded last year. He said the search for banned arms should continue there.

"It's going to take some additional, considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that," Cheney said.

Bush has staunchly defended his decision to go to war, but has had to adopt somewhat strained language to characterize the threat he says was posed.

With no weapons of mass destruction yet discovered, Bush in his State of the Union address Tuesday said the United States had evidence of "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities."

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"I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=S1AKQC3ZI24JKCRBAEKSFFA?type=topNews&storyID=4197408

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January 23, 2004


THE WORLD
Court to Let Iranian Ex-Spy Give Evidence at 9/11 Trial

By Dirk Laabs and Sebastian Rotella, Special to The Times


HAMBURG, Germany — A judge in the trial of an accused Sept. 11 plotter agreed Thursday to hear last-minute testimony from a former Iranian spy claiming to have inside evidence about the plot and about an alliance of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence.

The ex-spy also told German federal police he was a longtime double agent for the CIA and had contacted U.S. and French intelligence before the Sept. 11 attacks to warn about an impending Al Qaeda strike, according to testimony Thursday.

The description by two German investigators of the Iranian's wide-ranging story drew questions from the judge and defense lawyers, who cast doubt on his trustworthiness. A prosecutor testified that the Iranian had aided German authorities in a separate case involving Iranian spies but admitted that police were still assessing his credibility as a witness against Abdelghani Mzoudi, a Moroccan suspected of being an associate of the hijackers based in Hamburg.

Judge Klaus Ruehle urged prosecutors to have the new witness testify next Thursday. The former spy is between 30 and 35, goes by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri and has given several interviews to journalists since fleeing Iran in July 2001, according to testimony.

But it was not clear whether Zakeri would actually take the stand in the five-month trial. In addition to doubts about his credibility, prosecutors said they want to ensure that they can protect his anonymity.

The cloak-and-dagger story was superimposed on the trial on the day originally set for announcement of the verdict. Mzoudi, who is charged as an accessory to murder, allegedly trained at an Al Qaeda camp and later paid bills and helped provide apartments for the Hamburg hijackers, prosecutors charge.

Zakeri told police that a top Iranian intelligence official last month identified Mzoudi as a communications specialist for the Hamburg plotters, according to testimony. Defense lawyers scoffed at the accusation.

"An acquittal for my client is not in danger," lawyer Guel Pinar said. The defense cited a U.S. magazine article that quoted an American intelligence official describing Zakeri as "a fabricator of monumental proportions."

The world of espionage and counter-terrorism often produces figures who blur the lines between fact, fiction and manipulation.

Nonetheless, German prosecutors consider him a strong enough witness to publicly pin their hopes for a conviction on him. While Western counter-terrorism officials have accused Iran of harboring Al Qaeda figures after the Sept. 11 attacks, Zakeri alleges that an alliance teaming Al Qaeda with the Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors intensified before the attacks, according to testimony.

Zakeri told police that Iranian agents met in January and May of 2001 with Al Qaeda leaders including Ayman Zawahiri and Saad bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden. After the meetings, Iranian agents and a unit led by Imad Mughniyah, a Hezbollah chieftain present at the meetings, said a major attack was in the works, according to Zakeri's account. Zakeri claimed that his boss told him the date would be Sept. 10 or 11, according to police.

Zakeri also told police he went to a CIA agent in Baku, Azerbaijan, to warn of an impending Al Qaeda attack — and to demand $1.2 million he said he was owed for serving as a double agent for the U.S. since 1992.

That brought a lighthearted comment from the judge, who said: "So he came to collect his double-agent fees."

Pressed by the judge, investigators declined to evaluate Zakeri's credibility. Officer Andy Neuman testified that he felt the witness "looked serious."

Asked about the Iranian's motives, Prosecutor Bruno Just said Zakeri had asked for help finding an apartment in Berlin and dealing with immigration when he contacted prosecutors about a separate case. Zakeri told interrogators that he "has to make a living somehow" and could give more information "if an agreement is reached," according to testimony.

But when asked whether money was his main motive, according to testimony, he said: "No. I want to serve my country."

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Powell: It's 'Open Question' Whether Iraq Had WMD

TBILISI (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said on Saturday it was an "open question" whether stocks of weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq (news - web sites) and conceded it was possible Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had none.


Powell made the comments one day after David Kay, the leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq, stepped down and said he did not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in the country.


"The open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go. And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?" Powell said to reporters as he flew to Tbilisi to attend Sunday's inauguration of Georgian President-elect Mikhail Saakashvili.


The Bush administration's central argument for going to war against Iraq last year was that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the United States and its allies.


No banned arms have been found in Iraq since the United States invaded and toppled Saddam.


Kay told Reuters on Friday he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons produced after the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites). Its nuclear activities had not resumed in any significant way, he said.


The comments dented the credibility of the administration's case for the war, which was presented most extensively by Powell at the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003.


Asked which was right -- Kay's statements or Powell's argument then that Iraq had failed to account for vast quantities of chemical weapons -- Powell replied: "I think the answer to the question is, I don't know yet.


"Last year when I made my presentation it was based on the best intelligence that we had at the time," Powell added.


"It was consistent with the views of other intelligence agencies and other governments and it was consistent with a body of reporting over the years... that there were large, unanswered questions about what they had or did not have."

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.......To govern is to choose, almost always on the basis of very imperfect information. But preemption presupposes the ability to know things -- to know about threats with a degree of certainty not requisite for decisions less momentous than those for waging war.

Some say the war was justified even if WMD are not found nor their destruction explained, because the world is "better off" without Saddam Hussein. Of course it is better off. But unless one is prepared to postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily dismantle any tyranny -- on to Burma? -- it is unacceptable to argue that Hussein's mass graves and torture chambers suffice as retrospective justifications for preemptive war. Americans seem sanguine about the failure -- so far -- to validate the war's premise about the threat posed by Hussein's WMD, but a long-term failure would unravel much of this president's policy and rhetoric. .....

.....For the president, the missing weapons are not a political problem. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, says Americans are happily focused on Iraqis liberated rather than WMD not found, so we "feel good about ourselves."

But unless America's foreign policy is New Age therapy to make the public feel mellow, feeling good about the consequences of an action does not obviate the need to assess the original rationale for the action.

Until WMD are found, or their absence accounted for, there is urgent explaining to be done. - George Will

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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
You look sillier all the time. He didn't lie, there were large unanswered questions about his stockpiles. I got to admot I get a good laugh everytime I read your posts you quote every article and no matter if it vlidates your point you say see! see! I'm beginning to think your just putting us on just to get DTWB and G-Man to make long ass posts.

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whomod said:

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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
You look sillier all the time. He didn't lie, there were large unanswered questions about his stockpiles. I got to admot I get a good laugh everytime I read your posts you quote every article and no matter if it vlidates your point you say see! see! I'm beginning to think your just putting us on just to get DTWB and G-Man to make long ass posts.

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1st off. Stop talking with your mouth full.

2nd. WHAT?

3rd. Can you please admit, after Hans Blix, after Joe Wilson, and after David Kay all say there are no WMD's, you support Bush because of an unflailing, unwavering, partisanship and not because you actually still beleive Iraq was a threat to the U.S.?

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1st: looks like i hit a sore spot

2nd: I know its hard for you to understand facual statements so I understand your confusion.

3rd: I say there is looks as if there is a 100% chance they arent gunna find anything. I have no trouble with the facts. You have thee trouble. The facts are the worlds intelligence community believed that he had them. We acted on that belief.

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"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," - Paul Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair

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whomod said:
I think that is part of the reason it's become a question of partisanship rather than a question of intelligence and fact.

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whomod said:
you support Bush because of an unflailing, unwavering, partisanship and not because ...yadda yadda.

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whomod said:
I'd feel better about that if I were given reasons of why Bush earns your trust.

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whomod said:
Now I know Sadaam was bad and everyone feels rather good about him being deposed. Again, I'm not discussing that. I'm discussing assertions made exactly one year ago today that Iraq couldn't wait because we were in immimnent danger from him.

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whomod said:
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,"- Paul Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair

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