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Originally Posted by powerclown
September 11, 2001
I really think it changed everything.
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...any ideas about why Cheney said that we have Saddam "bottled up", on September 16, 2001, or why the director of DIA is saying this "stuff", six months, and loonnnngggger, after September 11, 2001? Doesn't DIA have a bigger budget and operation, than CIA?
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http://davidcorn.com/
September 12, 2006
For Bush, a 9/11 Anniversary Changes Nothing:
I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. <b>The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.
But what is the president's evidence for that?</b> As our book notes, the final report of the Iraq Survey Group - the CIA-Defense Department unit that searched for WMDs in Iraq - concluded that Saddam's WMD capability "was essentially destroyed in 1991" and Saddam had no "plan for the revival of WMD." The book also quotes little-noticed congressional testimony that Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, gave in March 2002. He noted that Iraq was not among the most pressing "near-term concerns" to U.S. interests and that as a military danger Iraq was "smaller and weaker" than during the Persian Gulf War. <h3>Wilson testified that Saddam possessed only "residual" amounts of weapons of mass destruction, not a growing arsenal. In an interview for the book, he told us, "I didn't really think [Saddam and Iraq] were an immediate threat on WMD."</h3>
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http://russia.shaps.hawaii.edu/secur...lson_2002.html
Global Threats and Challenges
Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson
Director, Defense Intelligence Agency
Statement for the Record
Senate Armed Services Committee
19 March 2002
......Iraq
Saddam's goals remain to reassert his rule over the Kurds in northern Iraq, undermine all UN restrictions on his military capabilities, and make Iraq the predominant military and economic power in the Persian Gulf and the Arab world. The on-going UN sanctions and US military presence continue to be the keys to restraining Saddam's ambitions. Indeed, years of UN sanctions, embargoes, and inspections, combined with US and Coalition military actions, have significantly degraded Iraq's military capabilities. <b>Saddam's military forces are much smaller and weaker than those he had in 1991. Manpower and equipment shortages, a problematic logistics system, and fragile military morale remain major shortcomings. Saddam's paranoia and lack of trust - and related oppression and mistreatment - extend to the military, and are a drain on military effectiveness....</b>
.....Iraq retains a residual level of WMD and missile capabilities. The lack of intrusive inspection and disarmament mechanisms permits Baghdad to enhance these programs........
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Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson made the comments in the preceding quote box six months after 9/11. Nine months after that, UN inspectors were back in Iraq, and the Iraqi government responded, about Dec. 13, 2002, to a demand of full WMD and WMD programs disclosure, with a level of detailed compliance that turned out to be much more reliable than the descriptions of Bush admin. officials, that suddenly began after Admiral Wilson's March 19, 2002 assessment of the Iraq threat.
I don't see anything of substance....a breakthrough, "if you will", that justified the dramatic reversal of Cheney and Admiral Wilson's post 9/11 comments of the threat posed by Saddam's Iraq.
That is the problem, as I see it, with your argument powerclown. Nothing changed after 9/11....with regard to any actual threat capability from Saddam. Only the rhetoric changed.
Do you think that the twice postponed <b>briefing</b>, described in the LA Times article, following Bush's newest misleading and unproven claim in last month's "address to the nation", would have been postponed, if not for the constant emphasis and focus on the facts by people as inconsequential as those of us
who do that "work" in places like this.
Do you see, at all, that your blanket;
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Originally Posted by powerclown
September 11, 2001
I really think it changed everything.
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...does the opposite of "supporting the troops", because according to you, they must not question, they must follow all orders...
So, they aren't allowed to question, and you could, but won't, because of "September 11".....so who is there to hold the CIC accountable.....to pressure him to stop short of backing up his bogus SOTU rhetoric with a bullshit, propaganda media "presentation", like the one Powell gave to the UN in Feb., 2003, to "justify" the invasion and occupation of Iraq?
THe LA Times shows that what we do, collectively, is working....it's slowly making these thugs blink...making them hesitate to lie to us as blatantly and superficially as they did about Saddam's WMD.
<b>I support the troops, powerclown, by forcing this adminstration to either tell us and "the troops" the truth, or to STFU until they are prepared to do so.....</b>
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0070110-7.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
January 10, 2007
President's Address to the Nation
The Library
.......Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. <h3>Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran<h3> and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq........
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...home-headlines
U.S. can't prove Iran link to Iraq strife
Despite pledges to show evidence, officials have repeatedly put off presenting their case.
By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer
February 3, 2007
WASHINGTON Bush administration officials acknowledged Friday that they had yet to compile evidence strong enough to back up publicly their claims that Iran is fomenting violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.
Administration officials have long complained that Iran was supplying Shiite Muslim militants with lethal explosives and other materiel used to kill U.S. military personnel. But despite several pledges to make the evidence public, the administration has twice postponed the release most recently, a briefing by military officials scheduled for last Tuesday in Baghdad.
<h3>"The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing overstated, and we sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts," national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley said Friday.</h3>
The acknowledgment comes amid shifting administration messages on Iran. After several weeks of saber rattling that included a stiff warning by President Bush and the dispatch of two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Persian Gulf, near Iran, the administration has insisted in recent days that it does not want to escalate tensions or to invade Iran.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates seemed to concede Friday that U.S. officials can't say for sure whether the Iranian government is involved in assisting the attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq.
"I don't know that we know the answer to that question," Gates said.
Earlier this week, U.S. officials acknowledged that they were uncertain about the strength of their evidence and were reluctant to issue potentially questionable data in the wake of the intelligence failures and erroneous assessments that preceded the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
In particular, officials worried about a repetition of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's February 2003 U.N. appearance to present the U.S. case against Iraq. In that speech, Powell cited evidence that was later discredited.
In rejecting the case compiled against Iran, senior U.S. officials, including Hadley, Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, confirmed Friday that they were concerned about possible inaccuracies.
"I and Secretary Rice and the national security advisor want to make sure that the briefing that is provided is absolutely accurate and is dominated by facts serial numbers, technology and so on," Gates told reporters at the Pentagon.
Another reason for the delay, as is often the case when releasing intelligence, was that officials were concerned about inadvertently helping adversaries identify the agents or sources that provided the intelligence, Hadley said.
Hadley also said that the administration sought to delay the release of evidence until after a key intelligence report on Iraq was unveiled, so that Americans could place the evidence in the context of the broader conflict.....
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Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7902719/site/newsweek/
Consider the Source
The State Department says MEK is a terror group. Human Rights Watch says its a cult. <b>For the White House, MEK is a source of intelligence on Iran.</b>
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 6:51 p.m. ET <b>May 20, 2005`</b>
.....Despite the group's notoriety, Bush himself cited purported intelligence gathered by MEK as evidence of the Iranian regime's rapidly accelerating nuclear ambitions. At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran's hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but "because a dissident group pointed it out to the world." <b>White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.</b>
In an appearance before a House International Relations Subcommittee a year ago, John Bolton, the controversial State Department undersecretary who Bush has nominated to become US ambassador to the United Nations, was questioned by a Congressman sympathetic to MEK about whether it was appropriate for the U.S. government to pay attention to allegations about Iran supplied by the group. Bolton said he believed that MEK "qualifies as a terrorist organization according to our criteria." But he added that he did not think the official label had "prohibited us from getting information from them. And I certainly don't have any inhibition about getting information about what's going on in Iran from whatever source we can find that we deem reliable."
CONTINUED....
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Quote:
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/depar..._id=1003538870
Rupert Murdoch: Big Media Has Less Sway on Internet
By Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter
Published: January 29, 2007 3:10 PM ET
....<b>Asked if his News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: "No, I don't think so. We tried."</b> Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: "We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East ... but we have been very critical of his execution."
The News Corp. CEO also once again signaled that he sees much more change ahead thanks to digital media. "We're in the very early stages of it," he said.......
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