Bitchfest....unfortunately - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

politicophile · 11-17-2005, 09:39 AM

Did Bush lie about the intelligence he used to make the case for war against Iraq? Were the Democratic Senators duped into voting to authorize the use of force... many of them in both 2002 and 1998? This is a pretty commonly held position, on TFP and elsewhere. It also doesn't make any sense.

The number of intelligence agencies reporting the same information as the CIA is staggering, thus rendering the national intelligence conspiracy into an even more moonbat global conspiracy in which even France and Germany were helping to confuse the Senate into authorizing the war. In addition to being historical revisionism at its most sinister, the "Bush lied" argument is also so implausable as to be impossible.

I happened upon this Christopher Hitchens (hardly a Republican) article in which the "Bush lied" theory is thoroughly debunked. It is difficult, after having read it, to understand why so many otherwise credible liberals have been duped into supporting an argument that is so obviously untrue.

A selection:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Christopher Hitchens

We can now certify Iraq as disarmed, even if the materials once declared by the Saddam regime and never accounted for have still not been found. Why does this certified disarmament upset people so much? Would they rather have given Saddam the benefit of the doubt? Much more infuriating about the current anti-Chalabi hysteria is this: He turns up in Washington with a large delegation of Iraqi democrats, including a female Shiite ex-Communist, several Sunni dignitaries from the "hot" provinces, and the legendary Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, who led a genuine insurgency among the Marsh Arabs for 18 years. And the American left mounts a gargoyle picket line outside and asks silly and insulting questions inside, about a question that has already been decided. What a travesty this is. Not only do the liberal Democrats apparently want their own congressional votes from 1998 and 2002 back. It sometimes seems that they are actually nostalgic for the same period, when Saddam Hussein was running Iraq, and there were no coalition soldiers to challenge his rule, and when therefore by definition there was peace, and thus things were more or less OK. Their current claim to have been fooled or deceived makes them out, on their own account, to be highly dumb and gullible. But as dumb and gullible as that?

Link

raveneye · 11-17-2005, 10:00 AM

Quote:

Did Bush lie about the intelligence he used to make the case for war against Iraq?

Probably not, because "lie" assumes that the liar actually is aware that what he is saying is untrue. It's unclear what bush is aware of at any given time. His handlers could probably convince him that Santa Ana's forces are back at the Texan border lobbing cannonballs at the Alamo again.

Quote:

Were the Democratic Senators duped into voting to authorize the use of force...many of them in both 2002 and 1998?

I think you'll find that the force used was different in 1998 from 2002. There is a difference between a surgical strike and a protracted, full scale invasion. The intelligence that is necessary to justify one is considerably more substantial and convincing than the intelligence necessary to justify the other.

Quote:

The number of intelligence agencies reporting the same information as the CIA is staggering, thus rendering the national intelligence conspiracy into an even more moonbat global conspiracy in which even France and Germany were helping to confuse the Senate into authorizing the war.

I don't recall anybody proposing a worldwide intelligence conspiracy. That would be crazy. What people are saying is that the intelligence that was presented to Congress was chosen selectively and selectively redacted in order to bolster the case for a long-term, full-scale invasion of the country. That charge is certainly very plausible given the way things work in Washington. In fact it would be naive to think that wasn't done, given the way the Administration works in general.

flstf · 11-17-2005, 10:13 AM

Quote:

Is it true, as the president claimed in his Veterans Day speech, that Congress saw the same intelligence sources before the war, and is it true that independent commissions have concluded that there was no willful misrepresentation?

I believe that the above statements are probably true and that those claiming that they were duped are just playing politics. In no way do I think that they are idiots, just hypocrites, like most polititians.

samcol · 11-17-2005, 10:19 AM

I think they're both. Regardless of whether the Right, the Left, France and Germany said it was the right thing is kind of irrelevant to me. The bottom line is that there were no WMDs and the people who are responsible for sending us to Iraq either need to make heads spin at the intelligence agencies and/or need to be voted out due to their incompetence or lieing.

Yes they are all liars and hypocrites, but this shouldn't be used to vindicate the bad decisions of Iraq.

albania · 11-17-2005, 10:27 AM

I don't think that Bush lied because as was said above that would imply some sort of awareness of what is actually true. I also think that this isn't going as far as you believe people are taking it. However, there is one criticism from the left with which i would agree, the fact that he acted on wrong information shows clear lack of good judgment. I say this even though i believe that he was probably mislead by intelligence, no matter what intelligence you have, unless you have a clear and immediate threat, you shouldn't go to war. It is not good judgment to act on supposition no matter from how many people you hear it from. Perhaps, a counter argument is that they truly believed it to be fact, maybe, but i am reminded of a phrase, "The buck stops here", so whether or not it was Bush’s fault he will have to take the blame because ultimately it is his decision and his responsibility.

shakran · 11-17-2005, 10:32 AM

I think that in our desperation to distract attention from the fact that republicans have screwed this country we're forgetting what that vote actually was.

The vote was to give Bush the authority to invade IF (this is the important part) if Saddam Hussein refuses to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions

Well Mr. Hussein couldn't very well refuse to give up weapons he didn't have now could he? In fact, he finally even said fine, come in and look, you won't find any here. And he was right. So the conditions for war were not met, yet we went to war anyway.

Sorry, but the blame lies squarely on the war's architects. The only thing the democrats did wrong was to trust the white house not to put us into a war we shouldn't be in. And I'll hand you that one - that should have been a no-brainer not to trust in that.

alansmithee · 11-17-2005, 10:32 AM

It's simple why so many Dems now claim to have been "duped": it's politically beneficial. The war and police action are largely unpopular now (due largely to the efforts of liberals, and the horrendous mishandling of the police action portion), so political capital is to be gained by being against it. Now, saying "In retrospect, it was a bad idea" might work when dealing with logical people, but that's not the case here. You have to make it look like it wasn't your fault that you supported an unpopular military action. And the best way of doing that is to claim you were misled. And bonus points are to be had by making the opposition look bad by being the ones who were misleading the poor, naive democratic senators.

Rekna · 11-17-2005, 10:54 AM

The title of this thread is just asking for a flame war.....

stevo · 11-17-2005, 11:14 AM

Now we know what the true democrat objective is...Surrender

Quote:

Top Democrat urges Iraq pullout

Mr Murtha is a leading Democratic spokesman on defence issues
An influential Democratic congressman - who voted for the Iraq invasion in 2003 - has called for the immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
John Murtha - a decorated Vietnam War veteran - said US troops had become "a catalyst for violence" in Iraq.

His comments followed attacks from the Bush administration on critics of its Iraq war policy and its handling of intelligence to invade Iraq.

Vice-President Dick Cheney said critics were spreading "cynical falsehoods".

"Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency, they are united against US forces, and we have become a catalyst for violence," Mr Murtha said at an emotional news conference in Washington.

"US troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, the Saddamists, and the foreign jihadists... I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis," he said.

Mr Murtha - who is a member of a key House of Representatives panel that oversees defence spending - urged the White House to "immediately redeploy US troops consistent with the safety of US forces".

The congressman from Pennsylvania also said a "quick reaction force" should be created in the Middle East.

Mr Murtha's remarks have dealt a further blow to the Bush administration's attempt to rally support for the war in Iraq, the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says.

Until now comments the Troops Out movement in America has received support only on the political fringes, but that has changed in a dramatic fashion, our correspondent says.

Cheney's attack

Mr Murtha's comments came just hours after Mr Cheney called opposition Democrats "opportunists" who were peddling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" to gain political advantage while US soldiers died in Iraq.

"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory or their backbone - but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," Mr Cheney said.

A claim that the administration had misled Americans before the war was one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in Washington, the vice-president continued.

The democrats would rather the US lose in Iraq so that bush loses than to have victory in iraq. We make progress everyday. Everyday we are another step closer. but democrats want us to pull out now. At least they are comming clean with their true agenda. Finally.

Willravel · 11-17-2005, 11:28 AM

You know it's funny. I was born in 1983, but I know that a great deal of the 60s happened because of not only hatered towards the republicans, but dissapointment and anger towards the democrats for playing republican's games. I know at least some of the people in the TFP comunity were actually involved in the civil rights movement of the 60s. I invite them to share their opinions about the democrats during the civil rights movement.

raveneye · 11-17-2005, 11:35 AM

Quote:

A claim that the administration had misled Americans before the war was one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in Washington, the vice-president continued.

Well, it's not as reprehensible as the act of misleading is in the first place. SO if it turns out to be true, then I expect Cheney to lead the charge for impeachment.

host · 11-17-2005, 11:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

Did Bush lie about the intelligence he used to make the case for war against Iraq? Were the Democratic Senators duped into voting to authorize the use of force... many of them in both 2002 and 1998? This is a pretty commonly held position, on TFP and elsewhere. It also doesn't make any sense.

The number of intelligence agencies reporting the same information as the CIA is staggering, thus rendering the national intelligence conspiracy into an even more moonbat global conspiracy in which even France and Germany were helping to confuse the Senate into authorizing the war. In addition to being historical revisionism at its most sinister, the "Bush lied" argument is also so implausable as to be impossible.

I happened upon this Christopher Hitchens (hardly a Republican) article in which the "Bush lied" theory is thoroughly debunked. It is difficult, after having read it, to understand why so many otherwise credible liberals have been duped into supporting an argument that is so obviously untrue.

A selection:
Link

politicophile, I appreciated your candid/personal comments in response to my post concerning your thoughts about military service as a priority of those who voted for another four years of Bush-Cheney.

My point, which you did not specifically respond to, (and the theme of the majority of my posts on this forum) is that they would not still be doing what is described, (lie to, and mislead the American people in critical, national security matters, and much, much, more, unfortunately) in the following compilation of excerpts from Cheney's statements, if not for your vote, and the votes of other, likeminded folks.

My father served in the USMC and was of the opinion, in the late '60's that Vietnam was a "great training exercise" for our troops. I've never had a concern, in matters of war, anyway, whether I am too much, "my father's son". My gut feeling about the legitimacy and the outcome of the Vietnam war was dead on, and it was the same when it came to my early sense of Nixon's integrity and fate. I've had the same sense of Bush-Cheney and their policy of pre-emption.

My political, social, and moral leanings are decidedly my own. The best advice that I can offer anyone is to make sure that theirs are, too.

Your motivation for starting this thread is an indication that you still don't "get" it. Bush-Cheney reflect badly on you, politicophile, on your judgment, your sense of right and wrong. By your endorsement, you acted, and appear to still be acting, against your own best interests, and against mine....and those of all other Americans, and countless others in the world.

What is it that you think that you are doing? How do your justify your vote and your continuing, vocal support? If you are behind these guys and what they are doing, why have you not posted on the "Can You Tell Me Some Bush Positives?" thread?

Consider the possibility that your parents' and other's opinions you hold in high regard, are faulty, insofar as their support of Bush-Cheney. Try to sort out how you come by your politics and principles. Have you truly questioned everything that you have embraced as doctrine? Is it not a concern that, in political and social issues, your personal views might mesh too neatly with those who have had the greatest influence on you, up until now?

Consider that, being of optimum age for the physical rigors and pliability of will that military service demands, you have an obligation, because you voted for more of Bush-Cheney's version of "war-time leadership", and their version of "integrity", to join and to serve in America's armed forces ASAP.
Don't make the mistake of postponing your decision to serve proudly, only to regret it for the rest of your life, as ustwo related to us.
If not you.....who? If not now....when?

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20011209.html
December 9, 2001

The Vice President Appears on NBC's Meet the Press (Scroll down to middle of page)

RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq. When you were last on this program, September 16, five days after the attack on our country, I asked you whether there was any evidence that Iraq was involved in the attack and you said no.

Since that time, a couple of articles have appeared which I want to get you to react to. The first: The Czech interior minister said today that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 terrorists attacks on the United States, just five months before the synchronized hijackings and mass killings were carried out.

And this from James Woolsey, former CIA director: ``We know that at Salman Pak, in the southern edge of Baghdad, five different eye witnesses--three Iraqi defectors and two American U.N. inspectors--have said, and now there are aerial photographs to show it, a Boeing 707 that was used for training of hijackers, including non-Iraqi hijackers, trained very secretly to take over airplanes with knives.''

And we have photographs. As you can see that little white speck, and there it is.

RUSSERT: The plane on the ground in Iraq used to train non-Iraqi hijackers.

Do you still believe there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?

CHENEY: Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's <h2>been pretty well confirmed,</h2> that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.

Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point. But that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.

Quote:

With Tim Russert, on September 8th, 2002:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the al-Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn't he there, again, it's the intelligence business.

Mr. RUSSERT: What does the CIA say about that? Is it credible?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: It's credible. But, you know, I think a way to put it would be it's unconfirmed at this point. We've got...

Quote:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...mountain&hl=en
On the separate issue, on the 9/11 question, we've never had confirmation one way or another. We did have reporting that was public, that came out shortly after the 9/11 attack, provided by the Czech government, suggesting there had been a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and a man named al-Ani (Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani), who was an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, at the embassy there, in April of '01, prior to the 9/11 attacks. It has never been -- we've never been able to collect any more information on that. That was the one that possibly tied the two together to 9/11.

Quote:

http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/...404_flash3.htm
CHENEY: CLEAR LINKS BETWEEN SADDAM, AL-QAEDA; CALLS NY TIMES ARTICLE 'OUTRAGEOUS'
Thu Jun 17 2004 19:00:33 ET

In an EXCLUSIVE interview with CNBC's 'Capital Report':

....BORGER: Well, let's get to Mohammad Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."

<h2>Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, I never said that.</h2>

BORGER: OK.

<h2>Vice Pres. CHENEY: Never said that.</h2>

BORGER: I think that is...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down.

BORGER: Well, now this report says it didn't happen.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No. This report says they haven't found any evidence.

BORGER: That it happened.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Right.

BORGER: But you haven't found the evidence that it happened either, have you?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No. All we have is that one report from the Czechs. We just don't know.

BORGER: So does this put it to rest for you or not on Atta?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: It doesn't add anything from my perspective. I mean, I still am a skeptic. I can't refute the Czech plan. I can't prove the Czech plan. It's ...(unintelligible) the nature of the intelligence (unintelligible).

BORGER: OK, but let's...

The evidence is overwhelming that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice made intentionally misleading statements in the "run-up" to the invasion of Iraq. The record above, of Cheney's own statements, strongly indicated that he made a false denial, regarding the critical matter of a statement that he had made earlier; that is still displayed on the white house website, that affirmed a link between an Iraqi under Saddam's control and the man accused by our government of leading the 9/11 suicide airliner attacks.

Cheney disgraces himself every day that he continues to "serve". Cheney and Bush hold power by the simple technique of repeating the same lies, "often enough". If you believe that it is permissible for them to lie about the reassons for invading Iraq, how do you discern when they've stopped lying.
politicophile, your premise and the content of your thread starter speak for themselves. You cannot see that they've lied and betrayed our trust. Now they attempt to impugn the testimony, and by inference, the reputations of good men who challenge them. You champion their betrayal on this page.

Cheney's "speech" last night, preceded by the exchange above with news reporter, Gloria Borger, the recent indictment of his COS and NS advisor, Libby, and Bush's shameful and unprecedented use of troops at two military bases as "prop" audiences for his partisan, political attacks, disguised as "speeches", ought to be enough to at least give you pause, politicophile....
but they haven't!

ratbastid · 11-17-2005, 11:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by albania

...but i am reminded of a phrase, "The buck stops here", so whether or not it was Bush’s fault he will have to take the blame because ultimately it is his decision and his responsibility.

Oh, not if he has anything to do with it, he won't! The new talking point is: Everything that's going wrong is the fault of Democrats in Congress. Looks like politicophile has swallowed the bait whole, too. Look out, p'phile! Bush is reeling you in!

Yessir, those eeevil Senate Democrats, rewriting history like that! Not like the administration ever did that!

Sorry, no: the administration didn't rewrite history. They rewrote the present over and over and over again. Their justification for the war shifted every month, and it was like, "WMDs? What WMDs. We never said we were there because of WMDs. WM what, now?"

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

Now we know what the true democrat objective is...Surrender

A) Classic right-wing argumentation tactics. You're putting words in their mouth. Nobody said "surrender". You said that. And notice that Cheney pulls out the Cheney-style Cheneyisms and jumps straight to ad hominem about these no good wimpy, weak jerks who disagree with him. He doesn't actually discuss the points they raise at all, he just goes to name-calling. In case you're not familiar with it, ad hominem is what's known as a "logical fallacy". Look it up. If that article you quoted were a high school debate, he'd lose.

B) At this point, it looks like our options are to leave or to lose. Which do you prefer? Did you read the article you quoted? If so, are you advising keeping our troops in Iraq even though their presence is actually a destabilizing influence? We don't need a "surrender" or a humiliating loss in Iraq to make it look bad for Bush. News flash: IT ALREADY LOOKS BAD FOR BUSH. Now the more sensible members of congress are trying to keep it from becoming a bigger disaster than it already is. They're actually trying hard to save his ass. Where's the gratitude, I ask you?

roachboy · 11-17-2005, 12:28 PM

jesus--so now every thread posted by a conservative here has to work from deep within the vacuum created by conservative talking points on a given issue?

feel your politics crumbling, support leaking away, the sense of coherence imploding, the quasi-divien status of the Leader tarnished?
had a bad year at the political office?

well, pretend it isnt happening----try to control damage in the tiny spaces where you imagine it possible by working to frame problems away at the level of terms of debate. maybe if you repeat conservative talking points often enough you might even be able to convince yourself that there is some degree of legitimacy--intellectual, political, ethical--in them.
but, of course, you'd be wrong.

the explanations for this kind of thing are more obviously psychological than anything else.

the new move, trotted out over the weekend by both cowboy george and his vp. is so thoroughly bankrupt, even by the low standards one would normally apply to rightwing ideology, as to almost defy belief. the administration "shapes" or "structures" intel in a directions wholly consistent with neocon political aspirations articulated repeatedly since the first gulf war and not in a direction consistent with actual facts---they give this information to a wholly spineless congress (our "representatives" in this farce of a pseudo-democracy) which, as a body, chooses to not interrogate the material but rather to go along with the bush agenda. this in direct contradiction of the clinton administrations general view of the situation in iraq--that sanctions were working--and despite the unsc rejection of the pile of falsehoods that colin powell had to elaborate before them---there is plenty of blame to go around in this one--the iraq war could engdanger the entire political class, both rightwing parties, etc.

but whatever, at this point, there is no doubt about how this happened. the distortions of information that was assumed to provide an adequate view of the situation in iraq by a bizarrely credulous congress--these distortions were generated within the administration, by the administration--congress fell for it in a context that even in 2001 provided that body with no excuse to do so--now the administration is trying to argue that the fault lay not with the information but with congress and that critics of this entire charade are simply trying to undermine troop morale. this line is so wholly based in denial that it is hard to know where to even start taking it apart--that is is seen as compelling by anyone, anywhere is a sad sad commentary on the ways in which the folk who swim about in conservativeland deal with the conflict between reality and their preferred fantasies about reality.

if the american system were anything like a democracy, the bush administration would undoubtedly already have fallen to a vote of no confidence. but this is amurica and so all of us are stuck with these people for another 3 years. i am not sure how they are going to manage to undo the damage that their actions have inflicted upon themselves, upon the american state, upon the country. i am not sure how they plan to actually govern from such a position. i frankly do not see how it is possible. which is not good.

but let's assume that somehow, through the various layers of denial, that some kind of problems are actually registering in bushworld--what could be the function of attacking the legislature? what is being defended--the integrity of executive as over against representative power? the positing of a "strong Leader" that has no need for the messiness of actual democratic process? how else to even begin to make sense, from the tactical viewpoint, of the administration's new line on the war in iraq?

since this tack cannot be understood as rational on its own terms, maybe the way to think about it is as a tactic. what are the bushpeople doing?

losthellhound · 11-17-2005, 01:03 PM

I dont know why we even allow threads like this. Even the title is nothing more then flamebait

This thread, your article, is nothing more then an attept to polarize the board once again into partisan bickering. Don't we have enough threads with the implied title "democrats and replublicans fight here"?

Might I suggest that they can be neither hypocrites NOR idiots?

A senator can approach the facts presented and say yes.. If those facts are true, then we must act. A senator should not have to second guess the govenment and have those facts proved. (And I dont care what the rest of the world thought, and neither did the senators, they wanted proof from thier govenment). Once the facts were proved false, and the methods for getting those facts were questioned, it is a senator's job to question the actions after those facts.

Therefore they are not hypocrites, nor idiots.. They are serving thier people, and thier country

pan6467 · 11-17-2005, 01:13 PM

You know, if I were a country wanting to weaken the US economy, the credibility of the country not just around the world but at home and I wanted to weaken them militarily....... I'd just use counter espionage and show them anything they wanted to cause them to war with a country.

In otherwords..... say country "A" knows that we are watching Iraq for WMD's. They plant all kinds of evidence that says the WMD's are there. The first president just bombs and doesn't do much, the second president, who is looking for reasons, is more compliant and accepting to the false information I am giving out.

So seemingly to Congress, the President and everyone the evidence and cause is there on the surface. The President just chose not to dig deep enough to see what the truth was.

The US goes to war, the deficit skyrockets and I am sitting on a pile of US dollars waiting for the right minute to dump them onto the market and demand payment of their trade debts to me.

Not to mention I have created all kinds of domestic unrest and finger pointing. Of course, I had my good friends who cared far more about power than the people and the truth blindly going down the maze I loaded.

Sound absurd? As I have been studying the deficit (both national and trade) I am running across all kinds of info about the Chinese, Japanese, European Central Bank, Gates, Buffett and so on already leaving the Dollar for the Euro.

The debt is coming due and IMHO, the scenario I just gave you as paranoid as it sounds.... maybe more realistic than you care or want to believe......

Time will tell. I pray I am wrong.

Willravel · 11-17-2005, 01:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pan6467

The US goes to war, the deficit skyrockets and I am sitting on a pile of US dollars waiting for the right minute to dump them onto the market and demand payment of their trade debts to me.

I'm switching some of my savings over to Euro. I'm tired of seeing my hard earned money lose value.

We know that very few high ranking US politicains are innocent in all of this mess. Trying to imply that the democrats need to be put under a microscope over this is a waste of time. Let's put our priorities straight. Where did this misinformation come from? Well, Host was kind enough to share links that proved that Cheny lied about Iraq having connections to 9/11. That is solid proof. Cheny said yes, then Cheny said no. Bush continues to use "9/11" in his speaches about Iraq. Did Democrats make them say those things? Are John Kerry and severl democratic members of congress standing just out of camera range with guns and teleprompters?

politicophile · 11-17-2005, 01:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by losthellhound

I dont know why we even allow threads like this. Even the title is nothing more then flamebait

This thread, your article, is nothing more then an attept to polarize the board once again into partisan bickering. Don't we have enough threads with the implied title "democrats and replublicans fight here"?

Might I suggest that they can be neither hypocrites NOR idiots?

A senator can approach the facts presented and say yes.. If those facts are true, then we must act. A senator should not have to second guess the govenment and have those facts proved. (And I dont care what the rest of the world thought, and neither did the senators, they wanted proof from thier govenment). Once the facts were proved false, and the methods for getting those facts were questioned, it is a senator's job to question the actions after those facts.

Therefore they are not hypocrites, nor idiots.. They are serving thier people, and thier country

No, this thread is not flamebait, nor is it intended as such.

The dichotomy is clear: either Bush intentionally lied or he didn't.

Possibility 1: If Bush didn't know that the intelligence was false, then the Democrats are hypocritically faulting Bush for being misled for intelligence that also misled (at the very least) the vast majority of Senate Democrats, not to mention France, Germany, and the United Nations. It wouldn't make any sense to hold the President accountable in this situation because EVERYONE was misled.

Possibility 2: The President did know the intelligence was false. He intentionally misled the Senate into believing that Saddam had WMD's even though Bush knew that there were no WMD's. If this is the case, the Democrats, along with every employee of the intelligence agencies in a half dozen countries, are idiots because they were duped by Bush into believing that their intelligence showed something that it did not. Are we really willing to allege that Bush fabricated the NSA intelligence, the CIA intelligence, the French intelligence, the German intelligence, etc. etc?

It is obvious at this juncture that Bush didn't know that the intelligence was flawed. There simply is no conceivable was in which he could have fooled all those agencies. For this reason, one must conclude that Bush didn't know, couldn't have known, that the intelligence was flawed. Thus, the Democrats' recent complaints about being misled by the intelligence cannot in any way be used to fault Bush, who clearly was equally misled.

pan6467 · 11-17-2005, 01:45 PM

I just think both sides need to let it go. The war was fucked up, the reason we went was wrong, and it is becoming a money pit and a serious albatross hanging around the neck of the country choking us all.

There would be no loss of "face" asking other countries and the U.N. to help us stabilize the country and get out of there.

In fact that would be the wisest of choices.

What we need to ask is how our intelligence got so fucked up that we believed false information given to us.

The finger pointing continues, the debts mount and China, Japan, Euro and everyone else holding our debt are waiting...... biding their time, making sure that other markets are open ........

The debt and who owns it and what they are going to do with it should be our biggest concern.

Ustwo · 11-17-2005, 01:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

Now we know what the true democrat objective is...Surrender

The democrats would rather the US lose in Iraq so that bush loses than to have victory in iraq. We make progress everyday. Everyday we are another step closer. but democrats want us to pull out now. At least they are comming clean with their true agenda. Finally.

Sad but true. Its about party, not country.

Elphaba · 11-17-2005, 02:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo
Now we know what the true democrat objective is...Surrender

The democrats would rather the US lose in Iraq so that bush loses than to have victory in iraq. We make progress everyday. Everyday we are another step closer. but democrats want us to pull out now. At least they are comming clean with their true agenda. Finally.

Quote:

Originally posted by UstwoSad but true. Its about party, not country.

Obviously, neither one of you bothered to actually read Murtha's speech. It is so much simpler to condemn the man based only on his party identification.

For those that would wish to form their own opinion, the following is a transcript of his speech. Stevo, please point out where he recommends surrender. Ustwo, where do you find that this man puts party before our soldiers.

Quote:

War in Iraq
By Congressman John Murtha

Thursday 17 November 2005

The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We can not continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.

General Casey said in a September 2005 Hearing, "the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency." General Abizaid said on the same date, "Reducing the size and visibility of the coalition forces in Iraq is a part of our counterinsurgency strategy."

For 2 1/2 years I have been concerned about the US policy and the plan in Iraq. I have addressed my concerns with the Administration and the Pentagon and have spoken out in public about my concerns. The main reason for going to war has been discredited. A few days before the start of the war I was in Kuwait - the military drew a red line around Baghdad and said when US forces cross that line they will be attacked by the Iraqis with Weapons of Mass Destruction - but the US forces said they were prepared. They had well trained forces with the appropriate protective gear.

We spend more money on Intelligence than all the countries in the world together, and more on Intelligence than most countries GDP. But the intelligence concerning Iraq was wrong. It is not a world intelligence failure. It is a US intelligence failure and the way that intelligence was misused.

I have been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals almost every week since the beginning of the War. And what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace; the devastation caused by IEDs; being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes; being on their second or third deployment and leaving their families behind without a network of support.

The threat posed by terrorism is real, but we have other threats that cannot be ignored. We must be prepared to face all threats. The future of our military is at risk. Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say that the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down, even as our military has lowered its standards. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made. We can not allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of their health care, to be negotiated away. Procurement programs that ensure our military dominance cannot be negotiated away. We must be prepared. The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls at our bases in the US

Much of our ground equipment is worn out and in need of either serious overhaul or replacement. George Washington said, "To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace." We must rebuild our Army. Our deficit is growing out of control. The Director of the Congressional Budget Office recently admitted to being "terrified" about the budget deficit in the coming decades. This is the first prolonged war we have fought with three years of tax cuts, without full mobilization of American industry and without a draft. The burden of this war has not been shared equally; the military and their families are shouldering this burden.

Our military has been fighting a war in Iraq for over two and a half years. Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty. Our military captured Saddam Hussein, and captured or killed his closest associates. But the war continues to intensify. Deaths and injuries are growing, with over 2,079 confirmed American deaths. Over 15,500 have been seriously injured and it is estimated that over 50,000 will suffer from battle fatigue. There have been reports of at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths.

I just recently visited Anbar Province Iraq in order to assess the conditions on the ground. Last May 2005, as part of the Emergency Supplemental Spending Bill, the House included the Moran Amendment, which was accepted in Conference, and which required the Secretary of Defense to submit quarterly reports to Congress in order to more accurately measure stability and security in Iraq. We have now received two reports. I am disturbed by the findings in key indicator areas. Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce. Only $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects has been spent. And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over time and with the addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. An annual State Department report in 2004 indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism.

I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won "militarily." I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is to Iraqitize, Internationalize and Energize. I believe the same today. But I have concluded that the presence of US troops in Iraq is impeding this progress.

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against US forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. US troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a US troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.

I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice that the United States will immediately redeploy. All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free. Free from United States occupation. I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process for the good of a "free" Iraq.

My plan calls:

To immediately redeploy US troops consistent with the safety of US forces.
To create a quick reaction force in the region.
To create an over- the- horizon presence of Marines.
To diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq.

This war needs to be personalized. As I said before I have visited with the severely wounded of this war. They are suffering.

Because we in Congress are charged with sending our sons and daughters into battle, it is our responsibility, our OBLIGATION to speak out for them. That's why I am speaking out.

Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the US can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.

losthellhound · 11-17-2005, 02:50 PM

Progress every day

Same amount of US soldiers killed in attacks.. No less resistance from insurgents.. oh, and now we're finding that the new Iraqi govenment is torturing prisoners themselves! Great. At least they're not beheading them (as if thats a valid excuse).

Leaving a quagmire is one of the only valid options. Its like quicksand.. Or vietnam.. you get out before it turns even worse.

host · 11-17-2005, 02:51 PM

ustwo.....I am not asking that you post anything earthshattering...such as Cheney vehemently denying to a reporter....his own prior quote related to a key intelligence matter....related to his rationale for going to war....his denial of his own words....a declaration that is attributed to him on the white house website.....buy I so feel that it is not unreasonable to request that you raise the bar as to the substance...the level of quality of your posts on politics threads.

Rekna · 11-17-2005, 03:15 PM

this thread is a complete troll and i hate feeding the trolls but I have to say something.

The 2nd premise that dems are idiots if their were duped and it is their fault that they didn't check the evidences validity is very similar to saying well that girl deserved to get raped because she was wearing skimpy clothes and got drunk at a frat party.

We should be very careful about making arguments/points that blame victims for someone else taking advantage of them.

djtestudo · 11-17-2005, 03:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rekna

this thread is a complete troll and i hate feeding the trolls but I have to say something.

The 2nd premise that dems are idiots if their were duped and it is their fault that they didn't check the evidences validity is very similar to saying well that girl deserved to get raped because she was wearing skimpy clothes and got drunk at a frat party.

We should be very careful about making arguments/points that blame victims for someone else taking advantage of them.

I think a more fitting analogy is a girl who falls for a man's lines, sleeps with him willingly, and afterwards cries rape when she realizes what she did.

The man might be scum, but the woman is culpable as well.

Locobot · 11-17-2005, 03:37 PM

thanks for the subject edit Tecoyah - I've editted accordingly

Rekna · 11-17-2005, 03:38 PM

i don't think that analgy fits quiet right either. Maybe a better one would be something along the lines of a car salesman pitches a sale with false advertising and makes claims about how good the car is and someone buys it and then finds out it is a lemon. They complain and the salesman says it's your fault that you took everything I said at face value to bad for you. The salesman is scum and many states have laws against such practice (lemon laws).

roachboy · 11-17-2005, 03:42 PM

on no. 18: this dichtomoy is ridiculous. the fact of the matter is quite simple: the administration cooked intel about the situation in iraq. period. as the head of the administration, george w. bush is responsible for the actions of his administration. and don't think for a minute that any other administration would have undertaken the war in iraq--it had nothing to do with 9/11/2001, was and remains a tragic nonsequitor---and because this administration chose to follow this policy, launch and pursue this war, then its chief
must take the fall for it.

the right's new tack--presenting bush as some kind of victim in this--is passive voice taken to a surreal conclusion ("mistakes were made"--remember reagan's heroic use of this phrasing?)--you would think that the political organization that spends so much time blathering about personal responsibility when it suits their purposes would not be falling for this nonsense.

just goes to show an old point: the contemporary far right talks about personal responsibility only when it applies to other people. for themselves--as self-appointed representatives of god, presumably----anything goes.

no-one can possibly take the argument that opened this thread, the title of the thread, of politicophile's attempt to recapitulate the same thing in no. 18 seriously.
there is nothing to take seriously.

the concerns raised by this, however--another 3 years of this horrifying administration--the question of how they intend to govern given the blowback from their previous choices--for which no-one and nothing is responsible but this administration---are real. and i genuinely wonder about the motivation behind the administration's line that it began to trot out over the weekend.

Willravel · 11-17-2005, 03:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rekna

... a car salesman pitches a sale with false advertising and makes claims about how good the car is and someone buys it and then finds out it is a lemon. They complain and the salesman says it's your fault that you took everything I said at face value to bad for you. The salesman is scum and many states have laws against such practice (lemon laws).

That's the best anaolgy I've seen yet for this situation. The 'car salesperson', a.k.a. those who lied, are ultimatally responsible. It's a shame that the dems were dooped, but let's remember what devious disputant was doing the dooping. Doobie doobie.

Elphaba · 11-17-2005, 03:51 PM

Quote:

Quote: Politicophile
Is it true, as the president claimed in his Veterans Day speech, that Congress saw the same intelligence sources before the war, and is it true that independent commissions have concluded that there was no willful misrepresentation?

Quote: Flstf
I believe that the above statements are probably true and that those claiming that they were duped are just playing politics. In no way do I think that they are idiots, just hypocrites, like most polititians.

Neither statement is true and Bush certainly knows it. Let's begin with "Congress saw the same intelligence sources before the war." If you don't wish to read the following article in full, I have highlighted the important points.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111705L.shtml

Quote:

The Big Lie Technique
By Robert Scheer
The Nation

Wednesday 16 November 2005

At a time when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the President's recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique-which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mess in the first place.

The basic claim of the President's desperate and strident attack on the war's critics this past week is that he was acting as a consensus President when intelligence information left him no choice but to invade Iraq as a preventive action to deter a terrorist attack on America. This is flatly wrong.

His rationalization for attacking Iraq, once accepted uncritically by most in Congress and the media easily intimidated by jingoism, now is known to be false. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission selected by Bush concluded unanimously that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship, Al Qaeda's sworn enemy. And a recently declassified 2002 document proves that Bush's "evidence" for this, available to top Administration officials, was based on a single discredited witness.

Clearly on the defensive, Bush now sounds increasingly Nixonian as he basically calls the majority of the country traitors for noticing he tricked us.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," the President said at an Air Force base in Alaska. "Leaders in my Administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat."

This is a manipulative distortion; saying Hussein was a threat-to somebody, somewhere, in some context-is not the same as endorsing a pre-emptive occupation of his country in a fantastically expensive and blatantly risky nation-building exercise. And the idea that individual senators and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the President of the United States is just a lie on its face-it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally.

It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq-the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee-shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican President. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short "summary" of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.

The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush Administration's key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance-said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction-was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers."

Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon's intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight months later, on the eve of the Senate's vote to authorize the war, that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."

The false Al Qaeda-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush's argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons inspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands but that they would not be found at all.

Boxed in by international sanctions, weapons inspectors, US fighter jets patrolling two huge no-fly zones and powerful rivals on all his borders, Hussein in 2003 was decidedly not a threat to America. But the Bush White House wanted a war with Iraq, and it pulled out all the stops-references to "a mushroom cloud" and calling Hussein an "ally" of Al Qaeda-to convince the rest of us it was necessary.

The White House believed the ends (occupying Iraq) justified the means (exaggerating the threat). We know now those ends have proved disastrous.

Oblivious to the grim irony, Bush proclaims his war without end in Iraq the central front in a new cold war, never acknowledging that he has handed Al Qaeda terrorists a new home base. Iran, his "Axis of Evil" member, now has its disciples in power in Iraq. Last week, top Bush Administration officials welcomed to Washington Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, who previously was denounced for having allegedly passed US secrets to his old supporters in Tehran and was elected to a top post in Iraq by campaigning on anti-US slogans.

Under Bush's watch, we not only suffered the September 11 terrorist attacks while he snoozed, but he has failed to capture the perpetrator of those attacks and has given Al Qaeda a powerful base in Iraq from which to terrorize. And this is the guy who dares tell his critics they are weakening our country.

Just to make certain we are all on the same page, let me repeat the most important point of this article: "It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq-the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee-shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican President. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short "summary" of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.

Clearly, Bush is lying or, at the very least, intentionally misleading the public. That is "willful misrepresentation" today, but I will first need to dig through my "trash" to address this lie: "Independent commissions have concluded that there was no willful misrepresentation."

politicophile · 11-17-2005, 04:50 PM

Elphaba, can you please go here and tell me how those same Senators voted on the same bill in the full Senate? Also, I can't find an actual record of the vote within the committee.

All I've found is that the current committee, which obviously has slightly different membership than the one back then, approved the bill by a vote of 10-4, with three Democrats voting in favor of it.

If it turns out that the Intelligence Committee members voted against the use of force, I would be inclined to change my mind about my original post.

Elphaba · 11-17-2005, 05:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

Elphaba, can you please go here and tell me how those same Senators voted on the same bill in the full Senate? Also, I can't find an actual record of the vote within the committee.

All I've found is that the current committee, which obviously has slightly different membership than the one back then, approved the bill by a vote of 10-4, with three Democrats voting in favor of it.

If it turns out that the Intelligence Committee members voted against the use of force, I would be inclined to change my mind about my original post.

Politico, that is a great link and all I can give you at the moment is a guess on my part. The president's request for authority was revisited and the admin produced more, but still slanted, data, after the intelligence committee balked. You do realize that the intelligence committee could not share what intelligence they knew with their fellow senate colleagues?

My net research skills are pathetic. Is there anyone else here that can chase this pup, or at least determine whether intelligence committee votes/opinions are public record?

politicophile · 11-17-2005, 05:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elphaba

My net research skills are pathetic. Is there anyone else here that can chase this pup, or at least determine whether intelligence committee votes/opinions are public record?

If possible, I'd like to see both the committee vote AND how those committee members voted on the floor of the Senate. My link above goes to the floor vote, but I don't know who the members of the Intelligence Committee were back then...

I appreciate everyone's help with this, as Elphaba's article was (disturbing) news to me.

Marvelous Marv · 11-17-2005, 05:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

I'm switching some of my savings over to Euro. I'm tired of seeing my hard earned money lose value.

You might want to check what the Euro's done lately.

Marvelous Marv · 11-17-2005, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rekna

i don't think that analgy fits quiet right either. Maybe a better one would be something along the lines of a car salesman pitches a sale with false advertising and makes claims about how good the car is and someone buys it and then finds out it is a lemon. They complain and the salesman says it's your fault that you took everything I said at face value to bad for you. The salesman is scum and many states have laws against such practice (lemon laws).

That analogy only works if every car lot that competes with yours tells you that the car is a good one.

Then lies about doing so after you buy it.

Elphaba · 11-17-2005, 06:32 PM

Ok, Politico...I'm back to address the second statement: "Independent commissions have concluded that there was no willful misrepresentation."

To my knowledge, there has only been one commission, the 9/11 bipartisan report that didn't find willful misrepresentation. Phase II of the senate intelligence investigative committee to determine if there was willful misrepresentation was put on hold until after the 2004 election and needed a kick-start recently. Roberts' has tried another delaying tactic by requesting the Pentagon to investigate, which should take us beyond the 2006 mid-term elections.

The following article speaks to that issue as well as other misrepresentations:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111505G.shtml

Quote:

Bush Rewrites History to Criticize His Anti-War Critics
By David Corn
The Nation

Monday 14 November 2005

In a Veterans Day speech on Friday, delivered to troops and others at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, George W. Bush veered from the usual commemoration of sacrifice to strike at critics who have questioned whether he steered the country into war by using false information. This has become a tough and troubling issue for his presidency. A poll taken before his speech found that 57 percent of the respondents now believe that Bush "deliberately misled" the nation into war. That is astounding and, I assume, without precedent in history. Has there been another wartime period during which a majority of Americans believed the president had purposefully bamboozled them about the reasons for that war? Addressing this charge is tough for Bush because it calls more attention to it, and the on-ground-realities in Iraq only cause more popular unease with the war. But Bush and his aides calculated that it was better to punch back than ignore the criticism, and that's a sign that they're worried that Bush is coming to be defined as a president who conned the nation into an ugly war. So Bush tried. Let's break down his effort:

"Our debate at home must also be fair-minded. One of the hallmarks of a free society and what makes our country strong is that our political leaders can discuss their differences openly, even in times of war."

Conservatives who claim raising questions about the war does a disservice to the troops and is anti-American might want to keep these words in mind.

"When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

Actually, Congress did not approve Bush's decision to remove Saddam. In October 2002, the House and Senate approved a resolution that gave Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq if he deemed that appropriate. At the time, Bush and his aides were claiming it was their goal to force Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction and his WMD programs (which, we know now, did not exist). When the resolution passed - and in the weeks after - the White House insisted that Bush was not bent on "regime change" and that he was willing to work within the UN to force Saddam to accept UN inspectors (which Saddam did) in pursuit of the goal of disarming Iraq. Is Bush now saying that he had already resolved to invade Iraq at this point and all his talk about achieving disarmament through the UN process was bunk? Is he rewriting history-or telling us the real truth? In any event, when Bush did order the invasion of Iraq months later in March 2003, he did not ask Congress to vote on his decision to remove Saddam.

"I also recognize that some of our fellow citizens and elected officials didn't support the liberation of Iraq. And that is their right, and I respect it. As President and Commander-in-Chief, I accept the responsibilities, and the criticisms, and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision."

Bush might accept "the responsibilities and criticisms," but has yet to acknowledge the mistakes he and his aides made before and after the invasion about planning for a post-invasion Iraq. He also has not insisted on any accountability for these mistakes. For instance, he gave a spiffy medal to former CIA chief George Tenet, who was responsible for the prewar intelligence failure.

"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."

When was the last time Bush talked about how the war began-that is, when did he mention that his primary reason for war (protecting the American public from the supposed WMD threat posed by Saddam Hussein) was discredited by reality? Is ignoring history the same as rewriting it?

"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. 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."

This is not the full and accurate explanation of the controversy at hand. The issue of whether the Bush administration misled the nation in the run-up to the war has two components. The first is the production of the intelligence related to WMDs and the supposed al Qaeda-Sadam connection. The second is how the Bush crowd represented the intelligence to the public when trying to make the case for war. As for the first, the Senate intelligence committee report did say the committee had found no evidence of political pressure. But Democratic members of the committee and others challenged this finding. Several committee Democrats pointed to a CIA independent review on the prewar intelligence, conducted by a panel led by Richard Kerr, former deputy director of the CIA, which said,

Requests for reporting and analysis of [Iraq's links to al Qaeda] were steady and heavy in the period leading up to the war, creating significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection.

More to the point, Kerr told Vanity Fair that intelligence analysts did feel pressured by the go-to-war gang. The magazine in May 2004 reported,

"There was a lot of pressure, no question," says Kerr. "The White House, State, Defense were raising questions, heavily on W.M.D. and the issue of terrorism. Why did you select this information rather than that? Why have you downplayed this particular thing?...Sure, I heard that some of the analysts felt pressure. We heard about it from friends. There are always some people in the agency who will say, 'We've been pushed to hard.' Analysts will say, 'You're trying to politicize it.' There were people who felt there was too much pressure. Not that they were being asked to change their judgments, but there were being asked again and again to restate their judgments-do another paper on this, repetitive pressures. Do it again."

Was it a case, then, of officials repeatedly asking for another paper until they got the answer they wanted? "There may have been some of that," Kerr concedes. The requests came from "primarily people outside asking for the same paper again and again. There was a lot of repetitive tasking. Some of the analysts felt this was unnecessary pressure. The repetitive requests, Kerr made clear, came from the C.I.A.'s "senior customers," including "the White House, the vice president, State, Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Despite Bush's assertion, the question remains whether undue pressure was applied by the White House. And in his Veterans Day speech, Bush ducked the second issue: how he and his aides depicted the intelligence. This is the source of the dispute over the so-called Phase II investigation of the Senate intelligence committee. The allegation is that Bush and administration officials overstated and hyped the flawed intelligence and claimed it was definitive when they had reason to know it was not.

For example, in his final speech to the nation before launching the war, Bush claimed that US intelligence left "no doubt" about Iraq's supposed WMDs. But there was plenty of doubt on critical issues. Intelligence analysts at the Energy Department and State Department disagreed with those at the CIA about the evidence that purportedly showed Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program: its importation of aluminum tubes and the allegation that Iraq had been uranium-shopping in Niger. (In 2002, Dick Cheney said the tubes were "irrefutable evidence," and Condoleezza Rice said they were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." But a year earlier, as The New York Times reported in 2004, "Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear expert seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons.") The CIA believed Iraq had chemical weapons. But the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that there was no evidence such stockpiles existed. Some intelligence analysts concluded that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles that could deliver chemical or biological weapons. The experts on UAVs at the Air Force thought this was not so. Was Bush speaking accurately when he told the public-and the world-there was "no doubt"?

Also, did Bush make specific claims unsupported by the intelligence? The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced in October 2002, maintained that Iraq had an active biological research and development program. Bush publicly said Iraq had "stockpiles" of biological weapons. There is a difference between an R&D program (which Iraq did not have) and warehouses loaded with ready-to-go weapons (which Bush implied existed). How did an R&D program become stockpiles? This is as intriguing a question as how those sixteen words about Iraq's alleged pursuit of uranium in Africa became embedded in the State of the Union speech Bush delivered in early 2003.

On the key issue of Saddam Hussein's alleged connection to al Qaeda, Bush also made statements that went beyond the intelligence. This link was crucial to the case for war, for Bush and other hawks were arguing that Saddam Hussein could slip his WMDs to his pal Osama bin Laden. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein was "dealing with" al Qaeda. But his intelligence agencies had not reached that conclusion. (And the 9/11 Commission later said there was no evidence of collusion between al Qaeda and Saddam.) So how did Bush come to make such a statement? Recently, Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, released formerly classified material showing that before the war when Bush, Cheney, Colin Powell and other administration officials cited evidence that Iraq had been training al Qaeda operatives in the use of bombs and other weapons, Bush and these officials were relying on the statements of a captured al Qaeda member whose claims had been discounted by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Once more, how had Bush and his senior aides come to disseminate specific and provocative information deemed unreliable by the intelligence community?

Bush's Veterans Days comments addressed none of this.

"They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."

The people with the most hands-on information regarding WMDs in Iraq did not. The International Atomic Energy Agency, led by recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, concluded weeks before the war (after their inspectors had returned to Iraq) that Saddam Hussein had not revived the nuclear weapons program that the IAEA had dismantled in the mid-1990s. And Hans Blix, head of the UN inspectors in Iraq, repeatedly said that his team was not finding evidence of chemical or biological weapons stockpiles.

"...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 a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate-who had access to the same intelligence-voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

As noted above, the Democrats voted to give Bush the authority to use force when he thought he should-but only after Bush had promised to go to the United Nations in an effort to disarm Saddam Hussein, who, it turned out, was telling the truth when he denied his government possessed WMDs. Even the John Kerry quote that Bush cites contains the to-disarm condition. And several Democratic members of Congress have claimed that they did not see all the intelligence that was available to the White House.

"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."

It's hard to argue with that.

"These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. 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. Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough."

Who said that "it's perfectly legitimate to criticize" the "decision [to go to war in Iraq] or the conduct of the war"? That was Bush, moments earlier, in the same speech. So which is it? Is it okay to criticize the conduct of the war or not?

By the way, while accusing his critics of falsifying history, Bush never conceded that he launched the war on a false premise-that Saddam Hussein was up to his neck in WMDs-and, thus, as he paid tribute to veterans of this war and others, he did not accept responsibility for sending American troops into battle for a cause that did not exist.

host · 11-17-2005, 10:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

Elphaba, can you please go here and tell me how those same Senators voted on the same bill in the full Senate? Also, I can't find an actual record of the vote within the committee.

All I've found is that the current committee, which obviously has slightly different membership than the one back then, approved the bill by a vote of 10-4, with three Democrats voting in favor of it.

If it turns out that the Intelligence Committee members voted against the use of force, I would be inclined to change my mind about my original post.

I doubt that any information that I am able to post will change your "mind". I've spent more than a year here trying to raise awareness that members here that are far less right leaning than you show yourself to be.....
do not, in fact, "know" what they are adament about assuming that they "know". You have been programmed, as another poster or two to this thread has already pointed out, to you.

But.....here goes:
(In October, 2002, democrats comprised the senate majortity and chaired senate committees, owing to Sen. Jefford's defection from republican party ranks, to an independent party status. The chairman of the senate intelligence committee, Bob Graham of Florida, voted "nay" on resolution H.J. Res. 114, on October 11, 2002, in the 77 to 23, full senate vote, along with four other democrats on that committee........)

Quote:

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-...625.pdf#page=2

SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS

BOB GRAHAM, Florida, Chairman NAY> On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114 ) October 11, 2002
RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama, Vice Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan NAY> On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114 ) October 11, 2002
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West Virginia
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
RON WYDEN, Oregon NAY> On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114 ) October 11, 2002
RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois NAY> On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114 ) October 11, 2002
EVAN BAYH, Indiana
JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina
BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland NAY> On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114 ) October 11, 2002
JON KYL, Arizona
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma
ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah
PAT ROBERTS, Kansas
MIKE DeWINE, Ohio
FRED THOMPSON, Tennessee
RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana

THOMAS A. DASCHLE, South Dakota, Ex Officio
TRENT LOTT, Mississippi, Ex Officio

Quote:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2004_cr/s020304b.html
Congressional Record: February 3, 2004 (Senate)
Page S389-S391
U.S. INTELLIGENCE
Mr. DURBIN (speaking)

.......I come to the floor and want to be careful of the words I say. I do
not want to disclose anything I have been told in the Senate
Intelligence Committee. That is certainly the policy which should be
followed by every member of that committee. We are given a rare
opportunity to see the intelligence community and its work from inside.
Because we are given that opportunity, we are warned not to share that
information. So the points I am about to make relate exclusively to
that information which has been made public and declassified. It raises
an important issue.........

......So I asked Dr. Kay--and others have as well--after you had completed
your investigation, after you had looked at those sites, what did you
find? And the answer was: Nothing, nothing whatever.

We accumulated this information; we said, through our intelligence
sources, we have 550 known locations; and we were wrong in every
instance.

How can that be? How can the intelligence community have missed it?

The second element, the unmanned aerial vehicles, flying over
locations, mapping different things, viewing different locations,
prepared, if necessary, to fire on hostile situations--these unmanned
aerial vehicles were identified by the intelligence community and the
administration as a threat not only to the Middle East but to the
United States of America. We were told these unmanned aerial vehicles
would be used to deliver chemical and biological weapons against the
United States of America.

I can state now in published reports we know that the UAVs were not
designed for this purpose. We missed it completely. Sadly, I can say
there is additional information which has not been disclosed which also
casts doubt on that conclusion.

Why is it important? Because Members of the Senate were called to the
White House, asked to vote for the use-of-force resolution, and told
that the reason for the necessity of an invasion was the unmanned
aerial vehicles and their threat to the United States of America. They
were given partial information--in fact, misleading information--about
the danger associated with the unmanned aerial vehicles.

All of this raises serious questions, questions Senator Daschle and
others have addressed. This is what it comes down to: This should not
be a matter of either the Democrats in the Senate or the Republicans in
the Senate protecting their President. I will say this: If an open,
honest, independent investigation finds anything was done wrong under
the Clinton administration leading up to this intelligence failure, so
be it. If they find anything wrong in this intelligence operation under
President George W. Bush was responsible for this breakdown, so be it.

The American people deserve an honest answer.

Quote:

http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEB...er.pdf#page=10

(pages 294 - 295)
C. White Paper Conclusion

(U) Conclusion 85. The Intelligence Community's elimination of the caveats from the
unclassified White Paper misrepresented their judgments to the public which did not have
access to the classified National Intelligence Estimate containing the more carefully worded
assessment.

(U) Conclusion 86. The names of the agencies which had dissenting opinions in the classified
National Intelligence Estimate were not included in the unclassified white paper and in the
case of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the dissenting opinion was excluded completely.
In both cases in which there were dissenting opinions, the dissenting agencies were widely
regarded as the primary subject matter experts on the issue in question.
Excluding the names of the agencies provided readers with an incomplete picture of the
nature and extent of the debate within the Intelligence Community regarding the issues.

host · 11-17-2005, 11:30 PM

Patriots Graham and Levin tried to stop what was essentially a similar, Rovesque, propaganda "Op", to the one
that you appear to have succumbed to, now, politicophile...the "democrats are attempting to re-write history
BS, an "Op" which is a successor to the "Wilson's wife sent him to Niger", "Op", which is a successor of the "Iraqi WMDs/stop Saddam before he can produce a "mushroom cloud" in U.S. skies", "Op".

The difference today is that in October, 2002, Bush was not limited to speaking only to "prop" audiences of troops at secure locations, such as on military bases, where legitimate and vocal protests of outraged citizens can be kept out of the background of the view of TV cameras. Read about the pressure of polling data on democrats in the federal legislature who might have contemplated the mounting of a counter argument to the Bush-Cheney war "Op".
Read about the effort that Senators Graham and Levin expended in the attmept, blunted by the white house, to insure
that all in the house and the senate could read the classified NIE that they had read........

Quote:

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security...630selling.htm
The Selling of the Iraq War: The First Casualty
By John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman*
New Republic
June 30, 2003

........The Battle In Congress
Fall 2002

The administration used the anniversary of September 11, 2001, to launch its public campaign for a congressional resolution endorsing war, with or without U.N. support, against Saddam. The opening salvo came on the Sunday before the anniversary in the form of a leak to Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times regarding the aluminum tubes. Miller and Gordon reported that, according to administration officials, Iraq had been trying to buy tubes specifically designed as "components of centrifuges to enrich uranium" for nuclear weapons. That same day, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on the political talk shows to trumpet the discovery of the tubes and the Iraqi nuclear threat. Explained Rice, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Rumsfeld added, "Imagine a September eleventh with weapons of mass destruction. It's not three thousand--it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children."

Many of the intelligence analysts who had participated in the aluminum-tubes debate were appalled. One described the feeling to TNR: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie." Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, recalled, "I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet." As Thielmann puts it, "There was a lot of evidence about the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons programs to be concerned about. Why couldn't we just be honest about that without hyping the nuclear account? Making the case for active pursuit of nuclear weapons makes it look like the administration was trying to scare the American people about how dangerous Iraq was and how it posed an imminent security threat to the United States."

In speeches and interviews, administration officials also warned of the connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. On September 25, 2002, Rice insisted, "There clearly are contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq. ... There clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship there." On the same day, President Bush warned of the danger that "Al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness." Rice, like Rumsfeld--who the next day would call evidence of a Saddam-bin Laden link "bulletproof"--said she could not share the administration's evidence with the public without endangering intelligence sources. But Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, disagreed. On September 27, Paul Anderson, a spokesman for Graham, told USA Today that the senator had seen nothing in the CIA's classified reports that established a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, in fact, was the greatest congressional obstacle to the administration's push for war. Under the lead of Graham and Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, the committee enjoyed respect and deference in the Senate and the House, and its members could speak authoritatively, based on their access to classified information, about whether Iraq was developing nuclear weapons or had ties to Al Qaeda. And, in this case, the classified information available to the committee did not support the public pronouncements being made by the CIA.

In the late summer of 2002, Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes. According to one congressional staffer who read the document, it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and nuclear programs and links to terrorism" but then included a footnote that read, "This information comes from a source known to fabricate in the past." The staffer concluded that "they didn't do analysis. What they did was they just amassed everything they could that said anything bad about Iraq and put it into a document."

Graham and Durbin had been demanding for more than a month that the CIA produce an NIE on the Iraqi threat--a summary of the available intelligence, reflecting the judgment of the entire intelligence community--and toward the end of September, it was delivered. Like Tenet's earlier letter, the classified NIE was balanced in its assessments. Graham called on Tenet to produce a declassified version of the report that could guide members in voting on the resolution. Graham and Durbin both hoped the declassified report would rebut the kinds of overheated claims they were hearing from administration spokespeople. As Durbin tells TNR, "The most frustrating thing I find is when you have credible evidence on the intelligence committee that is directly contradictory to statements made by the administration."

On October 1, 2002, Tenet produced a declassified NIE. But Graham and Durbin were outraged to find that it omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war. For instance, the intelligence report cited the much-disputed aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam "remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons. And it claimed, "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program"--a blatant mischaracterization. Subsequently, the NIE allowed that "some" experts might disagree but insisted that "most" did not, never mentioning that the DOE's expert analysts had determined the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear weapons program. The NIE also said that Iraq had "begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents"--which the DIA report had left pointedly in doubt. Graham demanded that the CIA declassify dissenting portions.

In response, Tenet produced a single-page letter. It satisfied one of Graham's requests: It included a statement that there was a "low" likelihood of Iraq launching an unprovoked attack on the United States. But it also contained a sop to the administration, stating without qualification that the CIA had "solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." Graham demanded that Tenet declassify more of the report, and Tenet promised to fax over additional material. But, later that evening, Graham received a call from the CIA, informing him that the White House had ordered Tenet not to release anything more.

That same evening, October 7, 2002, Bush gave a major speech in Cincinnati defending the resolution now before Congress and laying out the case for war. Bush's speech brought together all the misinformation and exaggeration that the White House had been disseminating that fall. "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the president declared. "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." Bush also argued that, through its ties to Al Qaeda, Iraq would be able to use biological and chemical weapons against the United States. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," he warned. If Iraq had to deliver these weapons on its own, Bush said, Iraq could use the new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that it was developing. "We have 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," he said. "We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." This claim represented the height of absurdity. Iraq's UAVs had ranges of, at most, 300 miles. They could not make the flight from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, let alone to New York.

After the speech, when reporters pointed out that Bush's warning of an imminent threat was contradicted by Tenet's statement the same day that there was little likelihood of an Iraqi attack, Tenet dutifully offered a clarification, explaining that there was "no inconsistency" between the president's statement and his own and that he had personally fact-checked the president's speech. He also issued a public statement that read, "There is no question that the likelihood of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or our allies ... grows as his arsenal continues to build."

Five of the nine Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Graham and Durbin, ultimately voted against the resolution, but they were unable to convince other committee members or a majority in the Senate itself. This was at least in part because they were not allowed to divulge what they knew: While Graham and Durbin could complain that the administration's and Tenet's own statements contradicted the classified reports they had read, they could not say what was actually in those reports.

Bush, meanwhile, had no compunction about claiming that the "evidence indicates Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." In the words of one former Intelligence Committee staffer, "He is the president of the United States. And, when the president of the United States says, 'My advisers and I have sat down, and we've read the intelligence, and we believe there is a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda,' ... you take it seriously. It carries a huge amount of weight." Public opinion bears the former staffer out. By November 2002, a Gallup poll showed 59 percent in favor of an invasion and only 35 percent against. In a December Los Angeles Times poll, Americans thought, by a 90 percent to 7 percent margin, that Saddam was "currently developing weapons of mass destruction." And, in an ABC/Washington Post poll, 81 percent thought Iraq posed a threat to the United States. The Bush administration had won the domestic debate over Iraq--and it had done so by withholding from the public details that would have undermined its case for war.

Quote:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2002/10/dci100702.html
Source:
Congressional Record
October 9, 2002
Page S10154

Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, DC

October 7, 2002

The Honorable Bob Graham
Chairman
Select Committee on Intelligence
United States Senate
Washington, DC. 20510

Dear Mr. Chairman:

In response to your letter of 4 October 2002, we have made unclassified material available to further the Senate's forthcoming open debate on a Joint Resolution concerning Iraq.

As always, our declassification efforts seek a balance between your need for unfettered debate and our need to protect sources and methods. We have also been mindful of a shared interest in not providing to Saddam a blueprint of our intelligence capabilities and shortcoming, or with insight into our expectation of how he will and will not act. The salience of such concerns is only heightened by the possibility for hostilities between the U.S. and Iraq.

These are some of the reasons why we did not include our classified judgments on Saddam's decisionmaking regarding the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in our recent unclassified paper on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Viewing your request with those concerns in mind, however, we can declassify the following from the paragraphs you requested:

Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States.

Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or CBW.

Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

Regarding the 2 October closed hearing, we can declassify the following dialogue:

Senator Levin: . . . If (Saddam) didn't feel threatened, did not feel threatened, is it likely that he would initiate an attack using a weapon of mass destruction?

Senior Intelligence Witness: . . . My judgment would be that the probability of him initiating an attack--let me put a time frame on it--in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low.

Senator Levin: Now if he did initiate an attack you've . . . indicated he would probably attempt clandestine attacks against us . . . But what about his use of weapons of mass destruction? If we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis or otherwise, what's the likelihood in response to our attack that he would use chemical or biological weapons?

Senior Intelligence Witness: Pretty high, in my view.

In the above dialogue, the witness's qualifications--"in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now"--were intended to underscore that the likelihood of Saddam using WMD for blackmail, deterrence, or otherwise grows as his arsenal builds. Moreover, if Saddam used WMD, it would disprove his repeated denials that he has such weapons.

Regarding Senator Bayh's question of Iraqi links to al- Qa'ida, Senators could draw from the following points for unclassified discussions:

* Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al- Qa'ida is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.

* We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade.

* Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.

* Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

* We have credible reporting that al-Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

* Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al- Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military action.

Sincerely,

[signed:] John McLaughlin (For)

George J. Tenet
Director of Central Intelligence

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...04Jul11_2.html
Report Says CIA Distorted Iraq Data
Senate Panel Cites Exaggerations in Paper Made Public in 2002

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A0

....... When the public White Paper version was released in October, it sparked strong protests from Democrats on the Senate intelligence panel who had the classified version. They believed the public document slanted the case toward the administration's view of the Iraqi threat. In particular, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the panel's chairman at the time, pushed the CIA to declassify more information.

Four days later, Tenet, in a letter to the committee, released more information. Among the new items: The CIA believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be unlikely to initiate a chemical or biological attack against the United States unless provoked by U.S. military actions.

"Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred," he might launch a chemical-biological counterattack, Tenet's letter said.

Hussein also might "decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

The CIA also declassified other elements of analysis that seem to back up the president's assertion that Iraq has active ties to al Qaeda -- a growing feature of the administration's case for considering military action. Among the intelligence assessments linking Iraq to al Qaeda is "credible reporting" that the group's "leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities," according to the letter. The Senate's request and Tenet's letter came when an increasing number of intelligence officials, including former and current intelligence agency employees, were concerned the agency was tailoring its public stance to fit the administration's views.

Yesterday, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," the Senate committee's chairman, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), said that had Congress known before the vote to go to war what his committee has since discovered about the intelligence on Iraq, "I doubt if the votes would have been there."

Roberts characterized some of the redacted parts of the Senate report as "specific details that would make your eyebrows even raise higher."

You fell for the propaganda "Op" that snared votes for Bush_Cheney a year ago, politicophile, and you've fallen for this new one.....hook, line, and sinker, it seems from your creation, titling, and the content that you've posted on this thread. You've ignored the hard news reports that I've posted on this same matter, on other threads. (edited out comments related to the objectionable nature of the thread title) Be of your own mind and question everything that they tell you. Learn to think and to act in your own best interest.

tecoyah · 11-18-2005, 04:05 AM

I have changed the thread title....as it was most definately designed to create a flame war. If Host and Politicophile truly want to get this out of their collective systems....I recommend you two beat each other up in a thread designed specifically for that purpose. Its all good and fine to debate issue, that is what this forum is for, bit when I note things getting personal it becomes difficult to let things go without intervention.

We have two options:

Ignore function
Adult interaction

You dont want to see the third option

*Note:If it would help....I will make a Moderated thread just for you two to Duke it out

Charlatan · 11-18-2005, 05:29 AM

The Congress did not have access to the same information that the President did. His daily briefings are *way* more detailed and Congress does not have access to them.

11-17-2005, 12:28 PM	#14 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	jesus--so now every thread posted by a conservative here has to work from deep within the vacuum created by conservative talking points on a given issue? feel your politics crumbling, support leaking away, the sense of coherence imploding, the quasi-divien status of the Leader tarnished? had a bad year at the political office? well, pretend it isnt happening----try to control damage in the tiny spaces where you imagine it possible by working to frame problems away at the level of terms of debate. maybe if you repeat conservative talking points often enough you might even be able to convince yourself that there is some degree of legitimacy--intellectual, political, ethical--in them. but, of course, you'd be wrong. the explanations for this kind of thing are more obviously psychological than anything else. the new move, trotted out over the weekend by both cowboy george and his vp. is so thoroughly bankrupt, even by the low standards one would normally apply to rightwing ideology, as to almost defy belief. the administration "shapes" or "structures" intel in a directions wholly consistent with neocon political aspirations articulated repeatedly since the first gulf war and not in a direction consistent with actual facts---they give this information to a wholly spineless congress (our "representatives" in this farce of a pseudo-democracy) which, as a body, chooses to not interrogate the material but rather to go along with the bush agenda. this in direct contradiction of the clinton administrations general view of the situation in iraq--that sanctions were working--and despite the unsc rejection of the pile of falsehoods that colin powell had to elaborate before them---there is plenty of blame to go around in this one--the iraq war could engdanger the entire political class, both rightwing parties, etc. but whatever, at this point, there is no doubt about how this happened. the distortions of information that was assumed to provide an adequate view of the situation in iraq by a bizarrely credulous congress--these distortions were generated within the administration, by the administration--congress fell for it in a context that even in 2001 provided that body with no excuse to do so--now the administration is trying to argue that the fault lay not with the information but with congress and that critics of this entire charade are simply trying to undermine troop morale. this line is so wholly based in denial that it is hard to know where to even start taking it apart--that is is seen as compelling by anyone, anywhere is a sad sad commentary on the ways in which the folk who swim about in conservativeland deal with the conflict between reality and their preferred fantasies about reality. if the american system were anything like a democracy, the bush administration would undoubtedly already have fallen to a vote of no confidence. but this is amurica and so all of us are stuck with these people for another 3 years. i am not sure how they are going to manage to undo the damage that their actions have inflicted upon themselves, upon the american state, upon the country. i am not sure how they plan to actually govern from such a position. i frankly do not see how it is possible. which is not good. but let's assume that somehow, through the various layers of denial, that some kind of problems are actually registering in bushworld--what could be the function of attacking the legislature? what is being defended--the integrity of executive as over against representative power? the positing of a "strong Leader" that has no need for the messiness of actual democratic process? how else to even begin to make sense, from the tactical viewpoint, of the administration's new line on the war in iraq? since this tack cannot be understood as rational on its own terms, maybe the way to think about it is as a tactic. what are the bushpeople doing? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 11-17-2005 at 12:30 PM..

11-17-2005, 01:03 PM	#15 (permalink)
losthellhound Thats MR. Muffin Face now Location: Everywhere work sends me	I dont know why we even allow threads like this. Even the title is nothing more then flamebait This thread, your article, is nothing more then an attept to polarize the board once again into partisan bickering. Don't we have enough threads with the implied title "democrats and replublicans fight here"? Might I suggest that they can be neither hypocrites NOR idiots? A senator can approach the facts presented and say yes.. If those facts are true, then we must act. A senator should not have to second guess the govenment and have those facts proved. (And I dont care what the rest of the world thought, and neither did the senators, they wanted proof from thier govenment). Once the facts were proved false, and the methods for getting those facts were questioned, it is a senator's job to question the actions after those facts. Therefore they are not hypocrites, nor idiots.. They are serving thier people, and thier country __________________ "Life is possible only with illusions. And so, the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live?" -- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

11-17-2005, 01:13 PM	#16 (permalink)
pan6467 Lennonite Priest Location: Mansfield, Ohio USA	You know, if I were a country wanting to weaken the US economy, the credibility of the country not just around the world but at home and I wanted to weaken them militarily....... I'd just use counter espionage and show them anything they wanted to cause them to war with a country. In otherwords..... say country "A" knows that we are watching Iraq for WMD's. They plant all kinds of evidence that says the WMD's are there. The first president just bombs and doesn't do much, the second president, who is looking for reasons, is more compliant and accepting to the false information I am giving out. So seemingly to Congress, the President and everyone the evidence and cause is there on the surface. The President just chose not to dig deep enough to see what the truth was. The US goes to war, the deficit skyrockets and I am sitting on a pile of US dollars waiting for the right minute to dump them onto the market and demand payment of their trade debts to me. Not to mention I have created all kinds of domestic unrest and finger pointing. Of course, I had my good friends who cared far more about power than the people and the truth blindly going down the maze I loaded. Sound absurd? As I have been studying the deficit (both national and trade) I am running across all kinds of info about the Chinese, Japanese, European Central Bank, Gates, Buffett and so on already leaving the Dollar for the Euro. The debt is coming due and IMHO, the scenario I just gave you as paranoid as it sounds.... maybe more realistic than you care or want to believe...... Time will tell. I pray I am wrong. __________________ I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?" Last edited by pan6467; 11-17-2005 at 01:17 PM..

11-17-2005, 01:45 PM	#19 (permalink)
pan6467 Lennonite Priest Location: Mansfield, Ohio USA	I just think both sides need to let it go. The war was fucked up, the reason we went was wrong, and it is becoming a money pit and a serious albatross hanging around the neck of the country choking us all. There would be no loss of "face" asking other countries and the U.N. to help us stabilize the country and get out of there. In fact that would be the wisest of choices. What we need to ask is how our intelligence got so fucked up that we believed false information given to us. The finger pointing continues, the debts mount and China, Japan, Euro and everyone else holding our debt are waiting...... biding their time, making sure that other markets are open ........ The debt and who owns it and what they are going to do with it should be our biggest concern. __________________ I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

11-17-2005, 02:50 PM	#22 (permalink)
losthellhound Thats MR. Muffin Face now Location: Everywhere work sends me	Progress every day Same amount of US soldiers killed in attacks.. No less resistance from insurgents.. oh, and now we're finding that the new Iraqi govenment is torturing prisoners themselves! Great. At least they're not beheading them (as if thats a valid excuse). Leaving a quagmire is one of the only valid options. Its like quicksand.. Or vietnam.. you get out before it turns even worse. __________________ "Life is possible only with illusions. And so, the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live?" -- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

11-17-2005, 10:19 AM	#4 (permalink)
samcol Junkie Location: Indiana	I think they're both. Regardless of whether the Right, the Left, France and Germany said it was the right thing is kind of irrelevant to me. The bottom line is that there were no WMDs and the people who are responsible for sending us to Iraq either need to make heads spin at the intelligence agencies and/or need to be voted out due to their incompetence or lieing. Yes they are all liars and hypocrites, but this shouldn't be used to vindicate the bad decisions of Iraq.

11-17-2005, 10:27 AM	#5 (permalink)
albania Psycho	I don't think that Bush lied because as was said above that would imply some sort of awareness of what is actually true. I also think that this isn't going as far as you believe people are taking it. However, there is one criticism from the left with which i would agree, the fact that he acted on wrong information shows clear lack of good judgment. I say this even though i believe that he was probably mislead by intelligence, no matter what intelligence you have, unless you have a clear and immediate threat, you shouldn't go to war. It is not good judgment to act on supposition no matter from how many people you hear it from. Perhaps, a counter argument is that they truly believed it to be fact, maybe, but i am reminded of a phrase, "The buck stops here", so whether or not it was Bush’s fault he will have to take the blame because ultimately it is his decision and his responsibility.

11-17-2005, 10:32 AM	#6 (permalink)
shakran Tone.	I think that in our desperation to distract attention from the fact that republicans have screwed this country we're forgetting what that vote actually was. The vote was to give Bush the authority to invade IF (this is the important part) if Saddam Hussein refuses to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions Well Mr. Hussein couldn't very well refuse to give up weapons he didn't have now could he? In fact, he finally even said fine, come in and look, you won't find any here. And he was right. So the conditions for war were not met, yet we went to war anyway. Sorry, but the blame lies squarely on the war's architects. The only thing the democrats did wrong was to trust the white house not to put us into a war we shouldn't be in. And I'll hand you that one - that should have been a no-brainer not to trust in that.

11-17-2005, 10:32 AM	#7 (permalink)
alansmithee Junkie	It's simple why so many Dems now claim to have been "duped": it's politically beneficial. The war and police action are largely unpopular now (due largely to the efforts of liberals, and the horrendous mishandling of the police action portion), so political capital is to be gained by being against it. Now, saying "In retrospect, it was a bad idea" might work when dealing with logical people, but that's not the case here. You have to make it look like it wasn't your fault that you supported an unpopular military action. And the best way of doing that is to claim you were misled. And bonus points are to be had by making the opposition look bad by being the ones who were misleading the poor, naive democratic senators.

11-17-2005, 10:54 AM	#8 (permalink)
Rekna Junkie	The title of this thread is just asking for a flame war.....

11-17-2005, 11:28 AM	#10 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	You know it's funny. I was born in 1983, but I know that a great deal of the 60s happened because of not only hatered towards the republicans, but dissapointment and anger towards the democrats for playing republican's games. I know at least some of the people in the TFP comunity were actually involved in the civil rights movement of the 60s. I invite them to share their opinions about the democrats during the civil rights movement.

11-17-2005, 02:51 PM	#23 (permalink)
host Banned	ustwo.....I am not asking that you post anything earthshattering...such as Cheney vehemently denying to a reporter....his own prior quote related to a key intelligence matter....related to his rationale for going to war....his denial of his own words....a declaration that is attributed to him on the white house website.....buy I so feel that it is not unreasonable to request that you raise the bar as to the substance...the level of quality of your posts on politics threads.

11-17-2005, 03:15 PM	#24 (permalink)
Rekna Junkie	this thread is a complete troll and i hate feeding the trolls but I have to say something. The 2nd premise that dems are idiots if their were duped and it is their fault that they didn't check the evidences validity is very similar to saying well that girl deserved to get raped because she was wearing skimpy clothes and got drunk at a frat party. We should be very careful about making arguments/points that blame victims for someone else taking advantage of them.

11-17-2005, 03:37 PM	#26 (permalink)
Locobot is awesome!	thanks for the subject edit Tecoyah - I've editted accordingly Last edited by Locobot; 11-18-2005 at 06:52 AM..

11-17-2005, 03:38 PM	#27 (permalink)
Rekna Junkie	i don't think that analgy fits quiet right either. Maybe a better one would be something along the lines of a car salesman pitches a sale with false advertising and makes claims about how good the car is and someone buys it and then finds out it is a lemon. They complain and the salesman says it's your fault that you took everything I said at face value to bad for you. The salesman is scum and many states have laws against such practice (lemon laws).

11-17-2005, 03:42 PM	#28 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	on no. 18: this dichtomoy is ridiculous. the fact of the matter is quite simple: the administration cooked intel about the situation in iraq. period. as the head of the administration, george w. bush is responsible for the actions of his administration. and don't think for a minute that any other administration would have undertaken the war in iraq--it had nothing to do with 9/11/2001, was and remains a tragic nonsequitor---and because this administration chose to follow this policy, launch and pursue this war, then its chief must take the fall for it. the right's new tack--presenting bush as some kind of victim in this--is passive voice taken to a surreal conclusion ("mistakes were made"--remember reagan's heroic use of this phrasing?)--you would think that the political organization that spends so much time blathering about personal responsibility when it suits their purposes would not be falling for this nonsense. just goes to show an old point: the contemporary far right talks about personal responsibility only when it applies to other people. for themselves--as self-appointed representatives of god, presumably----anything goes. no-one can possibly take the argument that opened this thread, the title of the thread, of politicophile's attempt to recapitulate the same thing in no. 18 seriously. there is nothing to take seriously. the concerns raised by this, however--another 3 years of this horrifying administration--the question of how they intend to govern given the blowback from their previous choices--for which no-one and nothing is responsible but this administration---are real. and i genuinely wonder about the motivation behind the administration's line that it began to trot out over the weekend. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 11-17-2005 at 03:46 PM..

11-17-2005, 04:50 PM	#31 (permalink)
politicophile Addict	Elphaba, can you please go here and tell me how those same Senators voted on the same bill in the full Senate? Also, I can't find an actual record of the vote within the committee. All I've found is that the current committee, which obviously has slightly different membership than the one back then, approved the bill by a vote of 10-4, with three Democrats voting in favor of it. If it turns out that the Intelligence Committee members voted against the use of force, I would be inclined to change my mind about my original post. __________________ The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

11-18-2005, 04:05 AM	#39 (permalink)
tecoyah Illusionary	I have changed the thread title....as it was most definately designed to create a flame war. If Host and Politicophile truly want to get this out of their collective systems....I recommend you two beat each other up in a thread designed specifically for that purpose. Its all good and fine to debate issue, that is what this forum is for, bit when I note things getting personal it becomes difficult to let things go without intervention. We have two options: Ignore function Adult interaction You dont want to see the third option *Note:If it would help....I will make a Moderated thread just for you two to Duke it out __________________ Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

11-18-2005, 05:29 AM	#40 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	The Congress did not have access to the same information that the President did. His daily briefings are way more detailed and Congress does not have access to them. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke