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Banned
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Originally Posted by ottopilot
Frankly, I find your premise and agument dishonest.
What does any of this have to do with your OP regarding your step-son? The actions in the middle-east all started long before Bush, and it involves many more players than your political ideologue mentality will accept or purposely characterize.
You seem to be good at research. Try doing some that isn't based out of DNC talking points or the daily KOS... try something that actually reads like you are interested in finding out what truths there may be.
The following links can be a fairly accurate starting point in following the progress toward military action in the middle-east. There's a whole lot of information out there that just doesn't jive with the giant sphere of facts opposed to the information you're trying to cram in to a tiny political square peg. These aren't Republican-only problems and you know it. How can we ever come to any meaningful dialogue and resolution when the tools keep stirring the pot?
I believe the disorder or medical condition is simply myopic partisanship on your partand others like you...repubs, dems, etc. Say anything, win at any cost.
Within the following text link are many more examples of people on the other side of your argument who are FULLY CULPABLE. YOU CONVENIENTLY AVOID ADDING THESE KINDS OF FACTS, THEIR LASTING IMPLICATIONS, OR ANYTHING RESEMBLING BALANCE TO YOUR RANTS ON A REGULAR BASIS.
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Response to Ottopilot's post #43:
The Bush administration was wrong with claims that "congress saw the "same intelligence" the president saw, before the Oct., 2002 votes in congress to authorize the president to use military force in Iraq:
From http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...05&postcount=3
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0051111-1.html
<b>President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror
Tobyhanna Army Depot</b>
Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania
Fact sheetFact Sheet: Honoring America's Veterans
Fact sheetIn Focus: Honoring Our Veterans
11:45 A.M. EST
....While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. (Applause.) Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. <b>Misleading.... see quote box #1</b> These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.<b>Misleading to the point of being untrue..see quote boxes #1, #4</b>
They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. <b>Misleading....inaccurate....see quote box #2</b> And many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." That's why more than <b>a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate -- who had access to the same intelligence</b> -- voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power. (Applause.)<b>Misleading....to the point that he is lying.....see quote boxes #1, #4</b>
The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. (Applause.) These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. <b>Misleading.... see quote box #1</b>As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. (Applause.) Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. (Applause.) And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory. (Applause.) .....
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<b>Bush disgusts me as he often uses our troops as "props" for his misleading and deliberately inaccurate speeches.</b>
Quote:
<b>box #1</b> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111101832.html
Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument
By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 12, 2005; Page A01
President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.
Neither assertion is wholly accurate
The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.
But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.</b>
National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."
But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."
Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."
<b>In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence,</b> voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."
<b>But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.
In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.</b>
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The invasion of Iraq was a "done deal", long before Bush claimed that he was trying to avoid war, in Feb., 2003:
Quote:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200505300013
The war before the war
Michael Smith
Published 30 May 2005
2 comments Print version Listen RSS Britain and the US carried out a secret bombing campaign against Iraq months before the tanks went over the border in March 2003. Michael Smith pieces together the evidence
Page by relentless page, evidence has been stacking up for many months to show that - despite Tony Blair's denials - the British government signed up for war in Iraq almost a year before the invasion. What most people will not have realised until now, however, was that Britain and the US waged a secret war against Iraq for months before the tanks rolled over the border in March 2003....
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Quote:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050613/scahill
posted June 1, 2005 (web only)
The Other Bomb Drops
Jeremy Scahill
Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.
But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.
At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.
Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.
But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.
At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.
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Clinton made mistakes but did not invade and occupy Iraq:
Quote:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/abst...D1494D81&fta=y
QUESTION OF EVIDENCE: A special report.; To Bomb Sudan Plant, or Not: A Year Later, Debates Rankle
NY Times
By JAMES RISEN
Published: October 27, 1999
..But an examination of the decision, based on interviews by The New York Times with key participants, shows that it was far more difficult than the Administration has acknowledged and that the voices of dissent were numerous.
Officials throughout the Government raised doubts up to the eve of the attack about whether the United States had sufficient information linking the factory to either chemical weapons or to Mr. bin Laden, according to participants in the discussions. They said senior diplomatic and intelligence officials argued strenuously over whether any target in Sudan should be attacked. ..
...Current and former American officials agreed to discuss the operation because, more than a year later, they continue to be plagued by doubts about whether it was justified.
They said they are still troubled by the lack of a full airing of what they view as gaps in the evidence linking the plant, called Al Shifa, to Mr. bin Laden. And they complain that the decision-making process was so secretive that Al Shifa was not vetted by many Government experts on chemical weapons sites or terrorism.
The officials brought to light several previously unknown aspects of the strike.
For example, at the pivotal meeting reviewing the targets, the Director of Central Intelligence, George J. Tenet, was said to have cautioned Mr. Clinton's top advisers that while he believed that the evidence connecting Mr. bin Laden to the factory was strong, it was less than iron clad.
He warned that the link between Mr. bin Laden and the factory could be ''drawn only indirectly and by inference,'' according to notes taken by a participant. The plant's involvement with chemical weapons, Mr. Tenet told his colleagues, was more certain, confirmed by a soil sample from near the site that contained an ingredient of nerve gas. ...
....A reconstruction of events shows that Ms. Oakley was hardly the only senior official to question the intelligence tying together Sudan, Mr. bin Laden and chemical weapons.
Before the Attack
Suspicions Dating To the Gulf War
Washington's suspicions about Sudan's links to chemical weapons date back to the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The C.I.A. received reports that Iraqi chemical weapons experts had visited Khartoum, prompting suspicions that Iraq was shifting some of its production of chemical weapons to Sudan.
At about the same time, Mr. bin Laden moved to Sudan after his exile from Saudi Arabia and began to invest heavily in commercial enterprises, often through joint ventures with the Government, while using Sudan as a base for his loosely knit international terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, American intelligence officials said.
The C.I.A. received intelligence reports indicating that in 1995, Mr. bin Laden won tentative approval from Sudanese leaders to begin developing chemical weapons for use against American troops in Saudi Arabia. But in 1996 the Sudanese, responding to pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia, forced Mr. bin Laden to leave, prompting him and many of his supporters to retreat to Afghanistan.
By then the United States had pulled its embassy staff out of Sudan and had closed down the C.I.A.'s Khartoum station, citing terrorist threats. The pull-out left the United States with only a limited capacity to understand events in Sudan.
American suspicions about the Al Shifa plant arose in the summer of 1997 when, intelligence officials said, an informant reported that two sites in Khartoum might be involved in chemical weapons production. The informant also mentioned a third site -- Al Shifa -- on which he had less information, but which was suspicious because it had high fences and stringent security.
In December 1997 an agent working for the C.I.A. collected a soil sample about 60 feet from Al Shifa, directly across an access road from the main entrance, according to American officials. The sample was taken from land that does not appear to have been owned by Al Shifa.
The soil was found to contain about 2.5 times the normal trace amounts of Empta, a chemical used in the production of VX nerve gas, a senior American official said.
This report prompted a heated debate among American analysts about the plant's possible links to weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.
On July 24, 1998, the C.I.A. issued its first intelligence report on Al Shifa, based on the soil sample, spy satellite photographs and other intelligence. The report highlighted apparent links between Al Shifa and Mr. bin Laden, including indirect financial connections through the Military Industrial Corporation, a Government-controlled company.
But the C.I.A. analysts also suggested that additional information would be needed. One key paragraph, titled ''Next Steps,'' called for more soil samples and additional satellite photographs. The report also raised a new question by noting that there were no longer signs of heavy security around Al Shifa.
On Aug. 4, 1998, the C.I.A. weighed in with a more ominous report that assessed the possible connection between Sudan, Osama bin Laden and his efforts to obtain chemical weapons. It mentioned Al Shifa, but the report's highlight was new intelligence indicating that Mr. bin Laden, who had announced a renewed ''holy war'' against the United States, had acquired chemical or nuclear materials and ''might be ready'' to conduct a chemical attack.
At the State Department, intelligence analysts responded with skepticism. In an Aug. 6 memorandum for senior State policy makers, Ms. Oakley's analysts argued that even with the new intelligence, the evidence linking Al Shifa to Mr. bin Laden and chemical weapons was weak.
The next day, the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing more than 200 people, and the United States soon concluded that Mr. bin Laden was behind both attacks.
President Clinton and a small group of his most senior advisors -- including Mr. Berger, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, Dr. Albright, Mr. Pickering and General Shelton -- quickly decided to retaliate.
On Aug. 8, the President's advisers ordered the Pentagon Joint Staff and the C.I.A. to draw up a list of sites connected to Mr. bin Laden and his organization that could be bombed.
Planning the Attack
Urgency Propelled Military Analysis
A group of officials, including the Counterterrorism Center at the C.I.A., prepared a list of about 20 possible targets in three countries -- Afghanistan, Sudan and another nation that officials declined to identify. It spelled out the evidence linking each target to Mr. bin Laden's organization and weighed the risks, including ''collateral damage,'' the military term for accidentally hitting civilians. The plant at Al Shifa was on the list.
On Aug. 11, senior American intelligence officials met to discuss Al Shifa and debate whether additional soil samples were needed from the plant. On Aug. 12, after the list was winnowed down, President Clinton and key national security officials were briefed for the first time on the possible targets by General Shelton.
The next day, the C.I.A. received a report that changed the nature of the debate and the pace of planning for retaliation: New intelligence showed that Mr. bin Laden and his key lieutenants would be meeting on Aug. 20 at Khost, Afghanistan. Reports also indicated that Mr. bin Laden might be planning further attacks, possibly with chemical weapons. The Afghan camps were already among the top priority targets proposed.
Some officials said the White House seemed determined to hit Mr. bin Laden in more than one place. Richard A. Clarke, a senior National Security Council official who played a pivotal role in planning the operation on behalf of the President, later explained to a colleague that Mr. bin Laden had shown ''global reach'' by attacking American embassies simultaneously in two countries. The United States, he said, had to respond by attacking his network beyond its haven in Afghanistan.
In an interview, Mr. Clarke said it was the President and his principal foreign policy advisers who ''obviously decided to attack in more than one place.''
In the White House meeting Aug. 19 where the final recommendations were to be made for the President, officials chose to attack the Afghan camps and two sites in Sudan: Al Shifa and a tannery in Khartoum that intelligence indicated was linked to Mr. bin Laden.
Mr. Berger denies that there was a significant debate about the evidence concerning Al Shifa during the meeting. Rather, he said, there were ''geopolitical'' questions raised about whether it was appropriate to attack Sudan when Mr. bin Laden no longer lived there. ''There were a few people who felt we shouldn't go to a second country, but those questions were not based on any doubts about Al Shifa,'' he said.
Notes taken at the meeting, however, say Mr. Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, alluded to ''gaps'' in the case linking Mr. bin Laden to the factory. His agency, he said, was working to ''close the intelligence gaps on this target.''
Mr. Tenet said he had been careful to delineate ''what we knew and didn't know, what the risks were, and what the downsides were'' about Al Shifa..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/in...0khartoum.html
"Khartoum Journal
Look at the Place! Sudan Says, 'Say Sorry,' but U.S. Won't
By MARC LACEY
NY Times
Published: October 20, 2005"
"....American officials have acknowledged over the years that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980's. But Washington still has not ruled out the possibility that El Shifa did, in fact, have some link to chemical weapons production...."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/wa...3mccarthy.html
Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by the Rules
By DAVID S. CLOUD
NY Times
Published: April 23, 2006
WASHINGTON, April 22 — In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered military strikes against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, Mary O. McCarthy, a senior intelligence officer assigned to the White House, warned the president that the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence, two former government officials say.
Ms. McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack on the factory, which was carried out in retaliation for Al Qaeda's bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. But they illustrated her willingness to challenge intelligence data and methods endorsed by her bosses at the Central Intelligence Agency....
...As a senior National Security Council aide for intelligence from 1996 to 2001, she was responsible for guarding some of the nation's most important secrets.....
...Some former intelligence officials who worked with Ms. McCarthy saw her as a persistent obstacle to aggressive antiterrorism efforts.
"She was always of the view that she would rather not get her hands dirty with covert action," said Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. official, who said he had been in meetings with Ms. McCarthy where she voiced doubts about reports that the factory had ties to Al Qaeda and was secretly producing substances for chemical weapons.
In the case of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, her concerns may have been well-founded. Sudanese officials and the plant's owner denied any connection to Al Qaeda.
In the aftermath of the attack, the internal White House debate over whether the intelligence reports about the plant were accurate spilled into the press. Eventually, Clinton administration officials conceded that the hardest evidence used to justify striking the plant was a single soil sample that seemed to indicate the presence of a chemical used in making VX gas.
Ms. McCarthy was concerned enough about the episode that she wrote a formal letter of dissent to President Clinton, two former officials said....
.....Though she was not among the C.I.A. officials who briefed Mr. Clinton every morning on the latest intelligence, she "worked on some of the most sensitive programs," a former White House aide said, and was responsible for notifying Congress when covert action was being undertaken.
The aide and the other unnamed officials were granted anonymity because they did not want to be identified as discussing her official duties because she may be under criminal investigation.
When President Bush took office in 2001, Ms. McCarthy's career seemed to stall. A former Bush administration official who worked with her said that although Ms. McCarthy was a career C.I.A. employee, as a holdover from the Clinton administration she was regarded with suspicion and was gradually eased out of her job as senior director for intelligence programs. She left several months into Mr. Bush's first term..."
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<img src="http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/whattheysaid.jpg">
http://www.war-times.org/pdf/Iraq%202.pdf
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Jul31.html
Al Qaeda-Iraq Link Recanted
Captured Libyan Reverses Previous Statement to CIA, Officials Say
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page A20
An al Qaeda commander who initially told interrogators that Iraq had provided chemical and biological weapons training to the terrorist organization later told CIA officers his statement was not true, according to intelligence officials.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan captured in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, later "changed his story, and we're still in the process of trying to determine what's right and what's not right" from his information, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. "He told us one thing at one time and another at another time."
Al-Libi's statement formed the basis for the Bush administration's prewar claim that Osama bin Laden collaborated with Iraq, according to several U.S. officials.
In an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, for example, President Bush said: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases." Other senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a speech to the United Nations, made similar assertions. Al-Libi's statements were the foundation of all of them.
His about-face has not been made public by the CIA or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which produced a critical investigation of the intelligence community's prewar information on Iraq. The committee describes the case in pages of its report that the CIA refused to declassify.
Al-Libi was once in bin Laden's inner circle and a senior operative who ran the Khaldan paramilitary camp in Afghanistan. He was captured in the fall of 2001 by Pakistani forces and turned over to the CIA in January 2002, although CIA interrogators had access to him before that, according to intelligence and U.S. law enforcement sources.
His capture was notable because it sparked the first debates within the U.S. government over how rough CIA officers could be in questioning al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That debate, involving the FBI and the Justice Department, led to the formulation of a policy under which CIA officers were given permission to use "enhanced interrogation methods" for some al Qaeda detainees.
Under questioning, al-Libi provided the CIA with intelligence about an alleged plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Yemen with a truck bomb and pointed officials in the direction of Abu Zubaida, a top al Qaeda leader known to have been involved in the Sept. 11 plot.
U.S. officials yesterday declined to say whether al-Libi's initial statement was made while he was being subjected to harsher interrogation measures. Nor would they say what may have prompted him to change his story.
The senior intelligence official cautioned that al-Libi's later contention that Iraq provided no help or training to al Qaeda could not be verified and that the CIA did not know whether he was telling the truth.
Al-Libi's conflicting statements and their ramification on the administration's prewar assertions were reported last month by The Washington Post, but without using his name. On July 5, Newsweek published a fuller version of the story, including his name, as did the New York Times in its Saturday edition.
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Last edited by host; 12-18-2007 at 12:04 PM..
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