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From Findlaw @ http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030606.html quote:
Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction:
Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Jun. 06, 2003
President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation.
Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away - unless, perhaps, they start another war.
That seems unlikely. Until the questions surrounding the Iraqi war are answered, Congress and the public may strongly resist more of President Bush's warmaking.
Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness. A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation.
Frankly, I hope the WMDs are found, for it will end the matter. Clearly, the story of the missing WMDs is far from over. And it is too early, of course, to draw conclusions. But it is not too early to explore the relevant issues.
President Bush's Statements On Iraq's Weapons Of Mass Destruction
Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush said about weapons of mass destruction; I certainly didn't. Thus, I have compiled these statements below. In reviewing them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as explicit and declarative as I had recalled.
Bush's statements, in chronological order, were:
quote:
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
United Nations Address
September 12, 2002
"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons."
"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
Radio Address
October 5, 2002
"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
Cincinnati, Ohio Speech
October 7, 2002
"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003
Should The President Get The Benefit Of The Doubt?
When these statements were made, Bush's let-me-mince-no-words posture was convincing to many Americans. Yet much of the rest of the world, and many other Americans, doubted them.
As Bush's veracity was being debated at the United Nations, it was also being debated on campuses - including those where I happened to be lecturing at the time.
On several occasions, students asked me the following question: Should they believe the President of the United States? My answer was that they should give the President the benefit of the doubt, for several reasons deriving from the usual procedures that have operated in every modern White House and that, I assumed, had to be operating in the Bush White House, too.
First, I assured the students that these statements had all been carefully considered and crafted. Presidential statements are the result of a process, not a moment's thought. White House speechwriters process raw information, and their statements are passed on to senior aides who have both substantive knowledge and political insights. And this all occurs before the statement ever reaches the President for his own review and possible revision.
Second, I explained that - at least in every White House and administration with which I was familiar, from Truman to Clinton - statements with national security implications were the most carefully considered of all. The White House is aware that, in making these statements, the President is speaking not only to the nation, but also to the world.
Third, I pointed out to the students, these statements are typically corrected rapidly if they are later found to be false. And in this case, far from backpedaling from the President's more extreme claims, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer had actually, at times, been even more emphatic than the President had. For example, on January 9, 2003, Fleischer stated, during his press briefing, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
In addition, others in the Administration were similarly quick to back the President up, in some cases with even more unequivocal statements. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed that Saddam had WMDs - and even went so far as to claim he knew "where they are; they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."
Finally, I explained to the students that the political risk was so great that, to me, it was inconceivable that Bush would make these statements if he didn't have damn solid intelligence to back him up. Presidents do not stick their necks out only to have them chopped off by political opponents on an issue as important as this, and if there was any doubt, I suggested, Bush's political advisers would be telling him to hedge. Rather than stating a matter as fact, he would be say: "I have been advised," or "Our intelligence reports strongly suggest," or some such similar hedge. But Bush had not done so.
So what are we now to conclude if Bush's statements are found, indeed, to be as grossly inaccurate as they currently appear to have been?
After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and given Bush's statements, they should not have been very hard to find - for they existed in large quantities, "thousands of tons" of chemical weapons alone. Moreover, according to the statements, telltale facilities, groups of scientists who could testify, and production equipment also existed.
So where is all that? And how can we reconcile the White House's unequivocal statements with the fact that they may not exist?
There are two main possibilities. One that something is seriously wrong within the Bush White House's national security operations. That seems difficult to believe. The other is that the President has deliberately misled the nation, and the world.
A Desperate Search For WMDs Has So Far Yielded Little, If Any, Fruit
Even before formally declaring war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the President had dispatched American military special forces into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, which he knew would provide the primary justification for Operation Freedom. None were found.
Throughout Operation Freedom's penetration of Iraq and drive toward Baghdad, the search for WMDs continued. None were found.
As the coalition forces gained control of Iraqi cities and countryside, special search teams were dispatched to look for WMDs. None were found.
During the past two and a half months, according to reliable news reports, military patrols have visited over 300 suspected WMD sites throughout Iraq. None of the prohibited weapons were found there.
British and American Press Reaction to the Missing WMDs
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also under serious attack in England, which he dragged into the war unwillingly, based on the missing WMDs. In Britain, the missing WMDs are being treated as scandalous; so far, the reaction in the U.S. has been milder.
New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has taken Bush sharply to task, asserting that it is "long past time for this administration to be held accountable." "The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat," Krugman argued. "If that claim was fraudulent," he continued, "the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra." But most media outlets have reserved judgment as the search for WMDs in Iraq continues.
Still, signs do not look good. Last week, the Pentagon announced it was shifting its search from looking for WMD sites, to looking for people who can provide leads as to where the missing WMDs might be.
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, while offering no new evidence, assured Congress that WMDs will indeed be found. And he advised that a new unit called the Iraq Survey Group, composed of some 1400 experts and technicians from around the world, is being deployed to assist in the searching.
But, as Time magazine reported, the leads are running out. According to Time, the Marine general in charge explained that "[w]e've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," and remarked flatly, "They're simply not there."
Perhaps most troubling, the President has failed to provide any explanation of how he could have made his very specific statements, yet now be unable to back them up with supporting evidence. Was there an Iraqi informant thought to be reliable, who turned out not to be? Were satellite photos innocently, if negligently misinterpreted? Or was his evidence not as solid as he led the world to believe?
The absence of any explanation for the gap between the statements and reality only increases the sense that the President's misstatements may actually have been intentional lies.
Investigating The Iraqi War Intelligence Reports
Even now, while the jury is still out as to whether intentional misconduct occurred, the President has a serious credibility problem. Newsweek magazine posed the key questions: "If America has entered a new age of pre-emption --when it must strike first because it cannot afford to find out later if terrorists possess nuclear or biological weapons--exact intelligence is critical. How will the United States take out a mad despot or a nuclear bomb hidden in a cave if the CIA can't say for sure where they are? And how will Bush be able to maintain support at home and abroad?"
In an apparent attempt to bolster the President's credibility, and his own, Secretary Rumsfeld himself has now called for a Defense Department investigation into what went wrong with the pre-war intelligence. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd finds this effort about on par with O. J.'s looking for his wife's killer. But there may be a difference: Unless the members of Administration can find someone else to blame - informants, surveillance technology, lower-level personnel, you name it - they may not escape fault themselves.
Congressional committees are also looking into the pre-war intelligence collection and evaluation. Senator John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee would jointly investigate the situation. And the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence plans an investigation.
These investigations are certainly appropriate, for there is potent evidence of either a colossal intelligence failure or misconduct - and either would be a serious problem. When the best case scenario seems to be mere incompetence, investigations certainly need to be made.
Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee - told CNN's Aaron Brown, that while he still hopes they find WMDs or at least evidence thereof, he has also contemplated three other possible alternative scenarios:
quote:
One is that [the WMDs] were spirited out of Iraq, which maybe is the worst of all possibilities, because now the very thing that we were trying to avoid, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could be in the hands of dozens of groups. Second, that we had bad intelligence. Or third, that the intelligence was satisfactory but that it was manipulated, so as just to present to the American people and to the world those things that made the case for the necessity of war against Iraq.
Senator Graham seems to believe there is a serious chance that it is the final scenario that reflects reality. Indeed, Graham told CNN "there's been a pattern of manipulation by this administration."
Graham has good reason to complain. According to the New York Times, he was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush's decisions. After reviewing it, Senator Graham requested that the Bush Administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the Administration's resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq.
But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet's letter only addressed "findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq," and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion.
Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decisionmaking process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that "[t]he country swims on a sea of oil."
Worse than Watergate? A Potential Huge Scandal If WMDs Are Still Missing
Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.
As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."
It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.
Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.
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And on a lighter note: The Onion - 
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your second post was much easier on the eyes.
ill opt for that one, and assume it covers the points.
the onion is wise.
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If he is lying (they may yet still find some) don't we have to?
I mean we were moving toward impeachment over the Clinton Sex romp.
We can't try to impeach a president for lying about some oral sex then ignore a president who allegedly started lied to win support for going to war.
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quote:
Originally posted by Ultimate Jaburg53:
If he is lying (they may yet still find some) don't we have to?
I mean we were moving toward impeachment over the Clinton Sex romp.
We can't try to impeach a president for lying about some oral sex then ignore a president who allegedly started lied to win support for going to war.
That's my conclusion. I supported the war, because irrespective of its motivation, it means one less utter bastard in power. Hope Burma has huge reserves of oil which will come to light next week, personally. But what we see here in the United States as motivation for the invasion is a New McCarthyism: instead of Reds under the Bed, we have Arabs in Aircraft. Next time someone in the Oval Office wants to invade a country, they should have sufficient incentive to tell the American people the real reason why. Impeachment and disgrace would be sufficient impetus.
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UHG. Looks like it was written by a six year old but I hope I get my point across.
I hate mornings.
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With a Republican controlled Congress and a Republican president the point is actually moot.
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quote:
Originally posted by Ultimate Jaburg53:
If he is lying (they may yet still find some) don't we have to?
I mean we were moving toward impeachment over the Clinton Sex romp.
We can't try to impeach a president for lying about some oral sex then ignore a president who allegedly started lied to win support for going to war.
Clinton was officially impeached for interferring with an investigation. As much as I hate Clinton, that whole ordeal was bullshit. The Repubs were grasping at straws to get him out and couldn't pin Whitewater on him.
The whole question is whether Bush did anything illegal. The first article does seem to only concentrate on one point. It fails to mention that Bush also mentioned the links to terrorists (of which we found training camps in Iraq), the humanitarian need of the Iraqi people, and the fact that Iraq has been stockpiling weapons that it's not supposed to have (and we did find). Personally, I don't see enough here to impeach with. But, like I said before, I didn't see enough evidence for it with Clinton either. Guess it's a good thing for G.W. that the Repubs control the Congress.
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave:
quote:
Originally posted by Ultimate Jaburg53:
If he is lying (they may yet still find some) don't we have to?
I mean we were moving toward impeachment over the Clinton Sex romp.
We can't try to impeach a president for lying about some oral sex then ignore a president who allegedly started lied to win support for going to war.
That's my conclusion. I supported the war, because irrespective of its motivation, it means one less utter bastard in power. Hope Burma has huge reserves of oil which will come to light next week, personally. But what we see here in the United States as motivation for the invasion is a New McCarthyism: instead of Reds under the Bed, we have Arabs in Aircraft. Next time someone in the Oval Office wants to invade a country, they should have sufficient incentive to tell the American people the real reason why. Impeachment and disgrace would be sufficient impetus.
I think it is unfair to single out Bush alone.
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quote:
Originally posted by britneyspearsatemyshorts:
With a Republican controlled Congress and a Republican president the point is actually moot.
Exactly.
The pigs are happily rolling around in their shit.
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quote:
Originally posted by First National Bastard:
quote:
Originally posted by britneyspearsatemyshorts:
With a Republican controlled Congress and a Republican president the point is actually moot.
Exactly.
The pigs are happily rolling around in their shit.
I agree entirely, bsams.
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quote:
I think it is unfair to single out Bush alone. [/QB]
Thursday :: Jun 12, 2003
Condi Gets Caught in a Big Lie - Bush Knew There Was No Factual Basis for His Niger Uranium Story in the 2003 SOTU
Condi Rice lied to Tim Russert over the weekend.
Contrary to what Rice said over the weekend, the White House did in fact know that the Niger uranium story was never proved when George W. Bush repeated it in his 2003 State of the Union speech.
In addition to the WMD stories that are unraveling, now the Niger uranium story that Bush used falsely in his speech to the nation is now unraveling as well. You will remember earlier today that the Washington Post ran with a story that the CIA did not pass along information it had to the White House that the Niger uranium story was false before Bush and Powell ran with it. Well, guess what?
Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder Newspapers reported today that contrary to what Condi Rice said just this weekend, the White House knew at the time of Bush’s 2003 SOTU that the CIA couldn’t prove the allegations that Bush was making. In fact, contrary to the Washington Post’s story today, “senior CIA officials” gave the exact date of when they notified the White House of their findings that the story was crap: March 9, 2002, a full ten months before Bush’s SOTU speech. This same story was given today by the CIA to the Associated Press as well. It appears that George Tenet has the best quick-response team in town, and has no plans to take one for Bush.
Making his case for war with Iraq, President Bush in his State of the Union address this year accused Saddam Hussein of trying to buy uranium from Africa even though the CIA had warned White House and other officials that the story didn't check out.
A senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech - that an agency source who had traveled to Niger couldn't confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.
Despite the CIA's misgivings, Bush said in his State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."
Three senior administration officials said Vice President Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam.
The claim later turned out to be based on crude forgeries that an African diplomat had sold to Italian intelligence officials. The CIA's March 2002 warning about Iraq's alleged uranium-shopping expedition in Niger was sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Department and the FBI the same day it went to the White House, the senior CIA official said.
In the months before Bush's State of the Union speech, the senior CIA official said, agency officials also told the State Department, National Security Council staffers and members of Congress that they doubted that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger.
One senior administration official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity because the intelligence reports remain classified, said the CIA's doubts were well known and widely shared throughout the government before Bush's speech.
Christ, does it appear to you that a lot of senior administration officials are freely talking about these lies?
But just this past Sunday, Condi Rice lied about all this.
On last Sunday's television talk shows, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the White House was unaware of the CIA's doubts.
"Maybe someone knew in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery," she said on NBC.
This is remarkable. The NSA tells a bald-faced lie to Russert on national TV, and less than a week later senior intelligence officials expose her for the lies.
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/cat_bush_administration_lies.html
http://www.robertscheer.com/
I have to stay focused on the fact that lying about a blow-job is far more serious and grave than lying to get an oil war.
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Dave, today's L.A. Times has a Robert Scheer column that comments on your article. it's titled "High Crimes, Misdemeanors". Unfortunately the L.A. Times doesn't seem to have their entire Op-Ed section up today. It's well worth reading. If it somehow goes up, i'll link it or try to post it.
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quote:
Originally posted by whomod:
Dave, today's L.A. Times has a Robert Scheer column that comments on your article. it's titled "High Crimes, Misdemeanors". Unfortunately the L.A. Times doesn't seem to have their entire Op-Ed section up today. It's well worth reading. If it somehow goes up, i'll link it or try to post it.
Oh Please do...... ![[biiiig grin]](images/icons/grin.gif)
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There's a difference between deliberately lying on record and simply going on bad intelligence. How serious is this issue of deception? Is there even deception taking place? Is it possible that there just might be a shred of truth to the WMD allegations? The answer, I suppose, ends up as nothing but party lines - which I see a fair amount of here. ![[yuh huh]](images/icons/rolleyes.gif)
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at worst, if there turns up bein nothin in iraq (which i still sincerely doubt could happen -- remember, blix and co. found nothing for nearly 20 years!), i honestly dont think bush lied about it. granted, thats going on nothing but gut feeling, but i dont see him as a liar.
on the other topic, the clinton impeachment was retarded. chris rock, as he does with many things, summed it up best when he said that they coulda bypassed the supreme court and handled this with judge judy.
it was simply the result of the news channels not having anything better to focus on.
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Rob, I can understand agreeing with his policies, but how can you possibly think he isn't a liar? Or do you just mean on this subject in particular?
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I think of it this way: either he's stupid, or he's a liar. By "stupid", I mean either unquestioningly accepting terribly bad intelligence, or by surrounding himself with people who have put him in an uncompromising position. Incidentally, the Australian Prime Minister is under intense pressure to hold a public inquiry into intelligence over the war: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/National/story_7350.aspI'd guess this will happen, both in Australia and the UK. The US I'm not so sure about.
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he just doesn't strike me as a liar. again, thats based on absolutely nothing. im typically an excellent judge of character, and even better at picking up lies. which... really... means squat, since the only times i've really seen him talk are on tv, with them pretty lights.
arguments have been made, time and time again, that he's either a retarded monkey boy or a comic book super villain. its my belief that he's neither.
im not awarding him sainthood, but id never pin demonic attributes to him.
there's a lot more respect in this forum for colin powell than there is for dubya... are you under the impression that he's a liar as well? or stupid? he proposed most everything dubya did, in just as public a format. should he be fired?
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quote:
Originally posted by PJP:
quote:
Originally posted by whomod:
Dave, today's L.A. Times has a Robert Scheer column that comments on your article. it's titled "High Crimes, Misdemeanors". Unfortunately the L.A. Times doesn't seem to have their entire Op-Ed section up today. It's well worth reading. If it somehow goes up, i'll link it or try to post it.
Oh Please do......
Here you go, just for you. ![[mwah hwah haa]](graemlins/devil.gif)
High Crimes, Misdemeanors
If Bush lied about Iraq he's 'cooked,' Watergate veteran John Dean says.
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quote:
Originally posted by Rob Kamphausen:
he just doesn't strike me as a liar. again, thats based on absolutely nothing. im typically an excellent judge of character, and even better at picking up lies. which... really... means squat, since the only times i've really seen him talk are on tv, with them pretty lights.
arguments have been made, time and time again, that he's either a retarded monkey boy or a comic book super villain. its my belief that he's neither.
im not awarding him sainthood, but id never pin demonic attributes to him.
there's a lot more respect in this forum for colin powell than there is for dubya... are you under the impression that he's a liar as well? or stupid? he proposed most everything dubya did, in just as public a format. should he be fired?
If Powell is in on this, then most definitely.
He's not stupid, but if he misled people over the nature of the evidence, or more likely, exaggerated mere conjecturethen yes.
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quote:
Originally posted by whomod:
quote:
Originally posted by PJP:
quote:
Originally posted by whomod:
Dave, today's L.A. Times has a Robert Scheer column that comments on your article. it's titled "High Crimes, Misdemeanors". Unfortunately the L.A. Times doesn't seem to have their entire Op-Ed section up today. It's well worth reading. If it somehow goes up, i'll link it or try to post it.
Oh Please do......
Here you go, just for you.
High Crimes, Misdemeanors
If Bush lied about Iraq he's 'cooked,' Watergate veteran John Dean says.
Some choice quotes form that link:
quote:
Call it the "Case of the Phantom Uranium." It starts with a document, later exposed by United Nations inspectors as a crude forgery, that was sold by an African diplomat to Italian intelligence, which passed it to the British. It seemed to implicate Saddam Hussein in an attempt to buy uranium from Africa. This apparently proved too juicy a tidbit for the hawks in the Bush administration to resist. They knew that the specter of Iraqi nukes - which U.N. inspectors would establish as baseless - would scare Americans much more than talk of mustard gas, and scaring Americans is this administration's M.O.
Thus in his 2003 State of the Union address, the president intoned that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." Scary stuff. Problem was, the document was signed by an official who had given up his post a decade earlier, and the CIA had told the White House the story did not check out.
On Friday, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain reported that, according to a senior CIA official, on March 9, 2002, a full 10 months before the speech, the White House was duly informed that an investigation, including an agent traveling to Africa to verify the story, had found no basis for the document. Three senior administration officials told the Knight Ridder reporter that Vice President Dick Cheney and officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the allegation should be included in the case against Hussein.
I remember this very well. I didn't know that Cheney and the NSC had ignored CIA concerns about its veracity.
quote:
This is just one example of the administration's manipulation of intelligence in justifying a war that already has killed thousands of people and continues to take the lives of several Americans each week. It is exceedingly odd that the same congressional Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton for dissembling in a sexual scandal find none of this worthy of a full public hearing. To pacify a growing number of critics, they have instead scheduled a secret and limited inquiry.
Perhaps the Republicans think they can stall until fragments of evidence of weapons of mass destruction are found, which would clear Bush's name. However, that won't do the trick. The president persistently claimed that the war was necessitated by the imminent threat of deployed weapons - "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles," as the president put it, capable of dispersing a huge existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including "missions targeting the United States."
Instead, almost three months after we invaded Iraq, the United States and Britain have yet to find anything of the sort.
"Frankly, we expected to find large warehouses full of chemical or biological weapons, or delivery systems," Army Col. John Connell, who heads the hunt for those AWOL weapons in Iraq, said in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. "At this point, we're getting fairly sure we're not going to find a full-up production facility. We're going to find little pieces."
"Little pieces" don't cut it. So far we have two mobile labs that "might" have be for military use, but just as likely might not.
quote:
We now know that the threat of deployed WMD was a blatant falsehood. What has not been established is whether the president was in on the lie. If he was, he should be impeached.
Rob, if you think Bush isn't capable of lying, what do you think did happen?
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave:
Rob, if you think Bush isn't capable of lying, what do you think did happen?
have some "ease up" with your toast, boyo!
again, i dont think the guy is perfect or even anything near it. i just dont happen to believe he was lying.
and i couldn't begin to guess what happened or is happening.
maybe it was faulty intel. maybe it was misleading intel. maybe its just intel that hasn't come to fruition yet.
again, blix and a team of inspectors found absolutely nothing during the late 1970s, entire 1980s, and early 1990s. nothing. not one ounce of anything. and that was when saddam had, literally, enormous factories pumping out the stuff, before he had a reason to hide them well.
powell recently said:
quote:
"We spent days and nights out at the CIA, making sure that whatever I said was supported by our intelligence holdings. Because it wasn't the president's credibility and my credibility on the line; it was the credibility of the United States of America."
and maybe (?!) im crazy, but i simply tend to buy that.
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I read something about the US and UK intelligence asking their goverments to please refrain from saying they gave them information that they didn't in the future, because it hurt their credibility when those things turned out to be wrong.
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Zod thinks the left is jumping to conclusions just to grab the political advantage when 2004 elections come about. Zod thinks this will backfire on them greatly! Zod thinks it's silly to expect finding the WMD in just a few months of searching. One reason is that Saddy had close to a year's or more notice of the US intervention, so plenty of time to hide them or give them away... Another is that the fear of Saddy and the Bathe Party still exists with the Iraqis and are afraid to come forward, the one of the very reasons why Operation Scorpion took place. Years of rape rooms, mass graves, children prisons, and rule under an homicidal dictator can take a while to get over... Now that Zod thinks about it, Zod doesn't care if WMD are ever found.
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quote:
Originally posted by Rob Kamphausen:
he just doesn't strike me as a liar. again, thats based on absolutely nothing. im typically an excellent judge of character, and even better at picking up lies. which... really... means squat, since the only times i've really seen him talk are on tv, with them pretty lights.
arguments have been made, time and time again, that he's either a retarded monkey boy or a comic book super villain. its my belief that he's neither.
im not awarding him sainthood, but id never pin demonic attributes to him.
there's a lot more respect in this forum for colin powell than there is for dubya... are you under the impression that he's a liar as well? or stupid? he proposed most everything dubya did, in just as public a format. should he be fired?
I actually do have something other than bad intentions to base my beleifs on that Bush is a liar.
http://www.bushwatch.com/bushlies.htm
http://pearly-abraham.tripod.com/htmls/bushlies1.html
and sure, these are highly partisan web sites, so let's get that argument out of the way. The content itself is Bush Admin. quotes and rebuttal facts compiled for easy reference. That is indisputable.
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave:
QUOTE]Some choice quotes form that link:
ARRRGGHHH! ![[you sunnuva...]](images/icons/mad.gif) Thanks for referencing it. But that was last weeks column! As with the Times link, it has a nasty habit of dissapearing when you want to access it!
I'm going to post it from my e-mail newsletter temorarily until either the L.A. Times get's it's site together or Sheer does!
quote:
Robert Scheer:
High Crimes, Misdemeanors
If Bush lied about Iraq he's 'cooked,' Watergate veteran John Dean says
What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?[/b]What did the president know and when did he know it?
The answer to that question forced the resignation of Richard Nixon as he was about to be impeached.
Now, with President Bush facing that same question, congressional Republicans have circled the wagons to prevent a public hearing on whether intelligence was distorted by the White House to convince us of the need for war. Why? Because public hearings could lead to public demands for impeachment. Sound far-fetched? Not when you consider the gravity of the charge.
"To put it bluntly," former Nixon White House counsel John Dean wrote on the legal Web site FindLaw (www.find law.com) on June 6, "if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.' "
Of course, intelligence data is often open to interpretation, and some political distortion is probably inevitable. Consider, however, just one of the recent revelations about how Iraq weapons intelligence was handled by the Bush administration and you'll start to see a disturbing pattern of cynical mendacity.
Call it the "Case of the Phantom Uranium." It starts with a document, later exposed by United Nations inspectors as a crude forgery, that was sold by an African diplomat to Italian intelligence, which passed it to the British. It seemed to implicate Saddam Hussein in an attempt to buy uranium from Africa. This apparently proved too juicy a tidbit for the hawks in the Bush administration to resist. They knew that the specter of Iraqi nukes — which U.N. inspectors would establish as baseless — would scare Americans much more than talk of mustard gas, and scaring Americans is this administration's M.O.
Thus in his 2003 State of the Union address, the president intoned that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." Scary stuff. Problem was, the document was signed by an official who had given up his post a decade earlier, and the CIA had told the White House the story did not check out.
On Friday, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain reported that, according to a senior CIA official, on March 9, 2002, a full 10 months before the speech, the White House was duly informed that an investigation, including an agent traveling to Africa to verify the story, had found no basis for the document. Three senior administration officials told the Knight Ridder reporter that Vice President Dick Cheney and officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the allegation should be included in the case against Hussein.
This is just one example of the administration's manipulation of intelligence in justifying a war that already has killed thousands of people and continues to take the lives of several Americans each week. It is exceedingly odd that the same congressional Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton for dissembling in a sexual scandal find none of this worthy of a full public hearing. To pacify a growing number of critics, they have instead scheduled a secret and limited inquiry.
Perhaps the Republicans think they can stall until fragments of evidence of weapons of mass destruction are found, which would clear Bush's name. However, that won't do the trick. The president persistently claimed that the war was necessitated by the imminent threat of deployed weapons — "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles," as the president put it, capable of dispersing a huge existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including "missions targeting the United States."
Instead, almost three months after we invaded Iraq, the United States and Britain have yet to find anything of the sort.
"Frankly, we expected to find large warehouses full of chemical or biological weapons, or delivery systems," Army Col. John Connell, who heads the hunt for those AWOL weapons in Iraq, said in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. "At this point, we're getting fairly sure we're not going to find a full-up production facility. We're going to find little pieces."
We now know that the threat of deployed WMD was a blatant falsehood. What has not been established is whether the president was in on the lie. If he was, he should be impeached.
Copyright © 2003 Robert Scheer
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quote:
Originally posted by ZOD:
Zod thinks the left is jumping to conclusions just to grab the political advantage when 2004 elections come about. Zod thinks this will backfire on them greatly! Zod thinks it's silly to expect finding the WMD in just a few months of searching. One reason is that Saddy had close to a year's or more notice of the US intervention, so plenty of time to hide them or give them away... Another is that the fear of Saddy and the Bathe Party still exists with the Iraqis and are afraid to come forward, the one of the very reasons why Operation Scorpion took place. Years of rape rooms, mass graves, children prisons, and rule under an homicidal dictator can take a while to get over... Now that Zod thinks about it, Zod doesn't care if WMD are ever found.
Sure, and I agree: but that's not the point. That's retrospective justification. What we had was an assurance from the US government that there were WMDs and that they could be easily deployed: the urgency justified an invasion. But now, they're not there. Where was the urgency?
So far 200 US troops have died because of a threat which could never have materialised? If they had said from the beginning, "We're going in to knock out Saddam because he's a vicious prick" then I'd be entirely cool with that. The 200 troops would have died for the liberation of the Iraqi people as a noble and honorable cassus belli. But that isn't what we were told. Instead, 200 troops have died for something which does not exist.
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so...
what if stuff is found in 2 days? 2 weeks? 15 years?
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Why shouldn't the President trust his intelligence? Even if they missed the mark on this one, it's one bad call out of several hundred they've made since September 11. The CIA is one of the best, if not the best, intelligence service in the world, rivaled only by the British and Israelis. They have the most advanced tools imaginable to do their jobs. Even then, they occasionally make a mistake. But I think it's a bit early to say whether they're wrong or not. Iraq is a big country, and Saddam had a whole lot of time to hide WMDs if he indeed had them. They could be buried somewhere in the desert. It's highly likely that they could have been sent into Syria or even Iran. In any case, I don't think it's very fair of people to accuse Dubya of deliberate deception or warmongering or any other entertaining little fragments of Democrap that may be circulating around. (Keep in mind that I'm a moderate and both parties piss me off fairly often, the Democrats just excel at it so much more.) There's still a lot of work to be done over there, and it would be more helpful all around if people would be a bit more supportive. Seriously, would any of you rather have the French handling this?
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Speaking of impeachments, anyone else see how the Governor of the People's Republic of California (hi, whomod!) is facing a recall?
:) His days may be numbered... :)
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quote:
Originally posted by MisterJLA:
Speaking of impeachments, anyone else see how the Governor of the People's Republic of California (hi, whomod!) is facing a recall?
:) His days may be numbered... :)
Hey comrade. The weather here is fine. So much so that people from the Fatherla..um I mean Homeland can't stop moving over here.
As for the Gov. the general consensus here is that this is sour grapes by a bunch of whiny losers. He's in no danger.
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My opinion: I think there WERE WMD's, and just because we haven't found them YET doesn't mean they weren't there. Also, remember that the UN themselves admitted that Saddam wasn't complying with their resolutions. The one area where I think Bush wasn't entirely truthful was when he implied that Iraq was an IMMEDEATE threat. I don't think Saddam was a major SHORT-TERM threat, but I DO think he was a long-term threat, and the longer we waited to deal with him, the worse it would be when we finally did. The UN had already given him 12 years, and would gladly have given him another 12, maybe this time without the sanctions that were interfering with his nuclear program.
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quote:
Originally posted by whomod:
quote:
Originally posted by MisterJLA:
Speaking of impeachments, anyone else see how the Governor of the People's Republic of California (hi, whomod!) is facing a recall?
:) His days may be numbered... :)
Hey comrade. The weather here is fine. So much so that people from the Fatherla..um I mean Homeland can't stop moving over here.
As for the Gov. the general consensus here is that this is sour grapes by a bunch of whiny losers. He's in no danger.
He is in danger....they have over 700,000 of the 900,000 signatures they'll need for a recall. ![[izzat so?]](graemlins/zatso.gif)
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To all posters who think Bush and Powell lied about WMDs and should be punished.......What happens when they do find WMDs?.........Will you apologize for doubting your President.
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No, I'll nod my head and know he did do the right thing after all. Should I applaud someone who should be beyond reproach for acting in accordance with the necessary standard? quote:
Originally posted by Rob Kamphausen:
so...
what if stuff is found in 2 days? 2 weeks? 15 years?
What kind of intelligence is that? "Yes, they have WMDs but we might not find them for 15 years"?
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Bush did give other reasons such as liberation, mass graves, human rights, UN violations, and such things the left used to be concern about for good people... Those very reasons were highlighted in his speech right before the war.
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quote:
Originally posted by ZOD:
Bush did give other reasons such as liberation, mass graves, human rights, UN violations, and such things the left used to be concern about for good people... Those very reasons were highlighted in his speech right before the war.
These are the reasons I supported the war. Same reasons why I supported US intervention in Somalia and Haiti. But these were not the reasons Powell gave the UN, and they were not the reasons Bush relied upon 90% of the time in his justification for war. It was a "doctrine of pre-emption", not a "doctrine of bringing liberty to foreigners who don't vote".
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quote:
Originally posted by PJP:
To all posters who think Bush and Powell lied about WMDs and should be punished.......What happens when they do find WMDs?.........Will you apologize for doubting your President.
Chances are they will claim that the US planted them...
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