stevo, considering this:
Quote:
https://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affai...r07112003.html
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
11 July 2003
STATEMENT BY GEORGE J. TENET
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Legitimate questions have arisen about how remarks on alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa made it into the President’s State of the Union speech. Let me be clear about several things right up front. First, CIA approved the President’s State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency. And third, the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President. ..........
.....The background above makes it even more troubling that the 16 words eventually made it into the State of the Union speech. This was a mistake..........
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followed by this, 13 days later....
Quote:
Dan Balz and Walter Pincus
Publication title: The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Jul 24, 2003. pg. A.10
.......How did the White House stumble so badly? There are a host of explanations, from White House officials, their allies outside the government and their opponents in the broader debate about whether the administration sought to manipulate evidence while building its case to go to war against Iraq.
But the dominant forces appear to have been the determination by White House officials to protect the president for using 16 questionable words about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium in Africa and a fierce effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect its reputation through bureaucratic infighting that has forced the president's advisers to repeatedly alter their initial version of events.
At several turns, when Bush might have taken responsibility for the language in his Jan. 28 address to the country, he and his top advisers resisted, claiming others -- particularly those in the intelligence community -- were responsible.
Asked again yesterday whether Bush should ultimately be held accountable for what he says, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters, "Let's talk about what's most important. That's the war on terrorism, winning the war on terrorism. And the best way you do that is to go after the threats where they gather, not to let them come to our shore before it's too late."
White House finger-pointing in turn prompted the CIA's allies to fire back by offering evidence that ran counter to official White House explanations of events and by helping to reveal a chronology of events that forced the White House to change its story.
The latest turn came Tuesday, when deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and White House communications director Dan Bartlett revealed the existence of two previously unknown memos showing that Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet had repeatedly urged the administration last October to remove a similar claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.
White House officials and their Republican allies in Congress hope the Hadley-Bartlett briefing will help the administration turn a corner on the controversy, and they plan a counteroffensive to try to put Bush's critics on the defensive. But the administration faces new risks as Congress begins its own investigations, which could bring the bureaucratic infighting into open conflict..........
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....followed, a year later by George Tenet's resignation, and five months after that, in December, 2004, by Mr. Bush awarding Tenet the highest honor bestowed on a civilian by the POTUS....the medal of freedom.
The record shows that the POTUS has no credibility and never takes responsibility. When the record is deliberately muddied, as Patrick Fitzgerald said, "the umpire cannot see the play". These leaders have lost all credibility, stevo, so....why do you persist in defending them?
....if the "press" was "'liberal", and they actually did their job of acting as the
"fourth estate", and questioned and spoke truth to "power", they might ask Mr. Bush this, and what do you think that he would answer?
Quote:
Mr. President, during your speech commemorating the fifth anniversary of 9/11, you defended the war in Iraq by saying that Saddam Hussein had been a "clear threat." We now know--thanks to the final report of the Iraq Survey Group, led by Charles Duelfer--that Iraq had no WMDs and its WMD capacity was "essentially destroyed" after 1991. We also know--thanks to the recent report of the Republican-controlled Senate intelligence committee--that there was no significant connection between Saddam's brutal regime and al Qaeda. So no WMDs, no relationship with al Qaeda. So then what made Saddam Hussein, as brutal as he was, a "clear threat" to the United States? Can you please cite specific facts to support that assertion?
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