Another first-rate piece by Frank Rich:
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 27, 2005
GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.
The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.
The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.
Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.
The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).
Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."
The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.
What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.
The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "
If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.
SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.
No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.
"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt....
To call the administration a "gang" doesn't do your credibility any favors, Werner. You know as well as I that Bush was cleared of "cooking" the intelligence by two independent panels, and that the intelligence he had was more alarming than that which he had shared with Congress. The Dems who continue to make the claim are nothing but liars. The American people will forgive honest mistakes made by the administration, but as Rathergate and similar attempts at character assassination bear witness, they'll punish the liars. Of that you can be certain.Werner wrote:I guess nobody does, Pizza. We'll just have to live through the remaining three years of this gang's term and hope they'll do no more mischief.
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jbuck919
- Military Band Specialist
- Posts: 26856
- Joined: Wed Jan 28, 2004 10:15 pm
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I was rather wondering what a US presidents was doing in a God-forsaken place like Mongolia. He might have made a trip instead to Tibet, except that partly because of US sinolatry dating back to Nixon there is no such place any more.
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach
"Character assassination" and "liars" vs "gang," Pizza? I'll leave it to others on the board to determine which is the more vicious insult. It's always been a problem to the extremists oif the right to keep the discussion on a dignified level.
And you now say that Bush had more alarming intelligence than he shared with the Congress. (after Cheney claimed that they shared everything with the Congress.) And the events seem to have proven that the intelligence, in either sense of the word, used by the "gang" acting as an Administration was lacking.
I haven't read the Frank Rich piece yet, but I'nm looking forward to it.
And by the way, an "honest mistake" that costs thousands of lives is not something that's easily forgivable.
And you now say that Bush had more alarming intelligence than he shared with the Congress. (after Cheney claimed that they shared everything with the Congress.) And the events seem to have proven that the intelligence, in either sense of the word, used by the "gang" acting as an Administration was lacking.
I haven't read the Frank Rich piece yet, but I'nm looking forward to it.
And by the way, an "honest mistake" that costs thousands of lives is not something that's easily forgivable.
Werner Isler
Werner wrote:"Character assassination" and "liars" vs "gang," Pizza? I'll leave it to others on the board to determine which is the more vicious insult. It's always been a problem to the extremists oif the right to keep the discussion on a dignified level.
And you now say that Bush had more alarming intelligence than he shared with the Congress. (after Cheney claimed that they shared everything with the Congress.) And the events seem to have proven that the intelligence, in either sense of the word, used by the "gang" acting as an Administration was lacking.
I haven't read the Frank Rich piece yet, but I'nm looking forward to it.
And by the way, an "honest mistake" that costs thousands of lives is not something that's easily forgivable.
It isn't what I say -- it's what two independent bi-partisan commisions say. Do you have the results of any bi-partisan investigations that disprove the following?:
"Exhaustive and authoritative examinations of the prewar intelligence, by the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, by the Silberman-Robb commission in 2005, and by the British commission headed by Lord Butler, have established that U.S. intelligence agencies, and the intelligence organizations of leading countries like Britain, France, and Germany, believed that Saddam Hussein's regime was in possession of or developing weapons of mass destruction--chemical and biological weapons, which the regime had used before, and nuclear weapons, which it was working on in the 1980s.
To the charges that Bush "cherry-picked" intelligence, the commission cochaired by former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb found that the intelligence available to Bush but not to Congress was even more alarming than the intelligence Congress had. The Silberman-Robb panel also concluded, after a detailed investigation, that in no instance did Bush administration authorities pressure intelligence officials to alter their findings. Much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. But Bush didn't lie about it."
If you have, post it. I'm looking forward to reading it. If not, then admit your mistake.
History has shown that honest mistakes by politicians -- even those that cost thousands of lives -- are for the most part forgiven: Churchill/Gallipoli; Roosevelt/Pearl Harbor; Kennedy/Bay of Pigs . . . .etc.
Aren't you cherry-picking commision reports that suit your point of view? And what about the 9/11 Commission whose establishment Bush fought tooth and nail, and which uncovered much that he'd have wished away.
I won't go to Churchill/Gallipoli, but are you suggesting that Roosevelt brought about Pearl Harbor? That would align you with so much of the rightlist, isolationist reactionary anti-FDR elements that I can't believe it.
As for the Bay of Pigs, I'm sure that you're aware that the planning for this was done by the tail-end of the administration of Ike (my hero), and fell to JFK to live with. I'm not sure that he could have stopped it or was stuck with it.
You might add Somalia to your list, which was launched by Bush 41 - for praiseworthy humanitarian objectives, as it seemed then. The failure has been gleefully heaped on Clinton's plate, after he was stuck with it after the transition.
I won't go to Churchill/Gallipoli, but are you suggesting that Roosevelt brought about Pearl Harbor? That would align you with so much of the rightlist, isolationist reactionary anti-FDR elements that I can't believe it.
As for the Bay of Pigs, I'm sure that you're aware that the planning for this was done by the tail-end of the administration of Ike (my hero), and fell to JFK to live with. I'm not sure that he could have stopped it or was stuck with it.
You might add Somalia to your list, which was launched by Bush 41 - for praiseworthy humanitarian objectives, as it seemed then. The failure has been gleefully heaped on Clinton's plate, after he was stuck with it after the transition.
Werner Isler
"More of the same old crap from the lying left, purveyed by the liars who claim Bush lied. "
More and More PIZZA RUBBUSH. How foolish does he look as most of America comes to see the folly of the war and the misleading statements and intent of this Administration. But does he care? No, he's a lawyer. He's more interested in the argument then in coming to any understanding.
So Werner keep arguing with him- its what he loves. It's his food.
More and More PIZZA RUBBUSH. How foolish does he look as most of America comes to see the folly of the war and the misleading statements and intent of this Administration. But does he care? No, he's a lawyer. He's more interested in the argument then in coming to any understanding.
So Werner keep arguing with him- its what he loves. It's his food.
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Huckleberry
- Posts: 445
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- Location: A mostly gentle person in a mostly gentle land
Hola, Amigo! You are surely going to provoke some comments from our lawyerly friend, Ralph!oisfetz wrote:A woman and her kid son were walking in a cemetary to visit the tomb
of a relative. and the kid asks; "Hey mam, why did they put two guys
on the same grave"? "two guys in the same grave?. Why do yo say that"?
Well, look at that stone!. There say "Here lies a great lawyer and a good man"
I finally know what I want to be when I grow up:
Chief Dog Brusher, Music Room Keeper, and Assistant Sunlight Manager
in a hillside Mansion for Ancient Musicians.
Chief Dog Brusher, Music Room Keeper, and Assistant Sunlight Manager
in a hillside Mansion for Ancient Musicians.
Indeed Lilith.Lilith wrote:More and More PIZZA RUBBISH.
How foolish does he look as most of America comes to see the folly of the war and the misleading statements and intent of this Administration. But does he care?
No, he's a lawyer. He's more interested in the argument then in coming to any understanding.
It's amazing to me how Pizza just keeps his head buried in the sand.
What is this man's problem?
Why is he so goddamn' irrational?
Does he even care that thousands of Iraqi civilians (2003) were killed in this insane war?
What a disgusting little man.
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Brendan
Differences in political opinion are common, and I find the leftist ignorance and name-calling in support of the enemies of the free world utterly vile. But I wouldn't call you personally disgusting.
He backs his arguments with logic and evidence. You didn't. My respect for Pizza remains, even if I disagree with particluars and some policies he has advocated. If you cannot fathom why someone would respect such a person, even in disagreement, so be it.
He backs his arguments with logic and evidence. You didn't. My respect for Pizza remains, even if I disagree with particluars and some policies he has advocated. If you cannot fathom why someone would respect such a person, even in disagreement, so be it.
What a piece of ideological leftist nonsense you are, Vaseena. Do you care that Saddam killed millions of his own people as well as Iranians, Kurds and Turks? Of course not. Did you enjoy the rape rooms, people being fed into shredders, and gassings of innocents who simply wanted to live their lives in peace? Of course. Otherwise, why don't we hear anything about your concern for them? Do you pick and choose who you want to live and who you want to die? Who the hell appointed you God? If you had been around in the '40s, I'm sure you'd be vomiting the same bile about FDR for fighting the Nazis. Look at all those innocent Germans that were killed in that insane war. Never mind who starts them and who threatens the rest of the world. That's of no concern to you. IDIOT.Vaseena wrote:Indeed Lilith.Lilith wrote:More and More PIZZA RUBBISH.
How foolish does he look as most of America comes to see the folly of the war and the misleading statements and intent of this Administration. But does he care?
No, he's a lawyer. He's more interested in the argument then in coming to any understanding.
It's amazing to me how Pizza just keeps his head buried in the sand.
What is this man's problem?
Why is he so goddamn' irrational?
Does he even care that thousands of Iraqi civilians (2003) were killed in this insane war?
What a disgusting little man.
Leftist cretins such as you always resort to personal attack on those who produce solid evidence that they are lying. You know you're supporting a lie. But that doesn't bother you in the least.
I have yet to hear one frickin' word as to why the two bi-partisan commissions that cleared the Bush administration of any wrongdoing are mistaken. Are they in Bush's pocket also?
LIAR
The 9/11 Commission's report was acknowledged to be flawed. I'm sure that minor fact must have slipped your mind.Werner wrote:Aren't you cherry-picking commision reports that suit your point of view? And what about the 9/11 Commission whose establishment Bush fought tooth and nail, and which uncovered much that he'd have wished away.
I won't go to Churchill/Gallipoli, but are you suggesting that Roosevelt brought about Pearl Harbor? That would align you with so much of the rightlist, isolationist reactionary anti-FDR elements that I can't believe it.
As for the Bay of Pigs, I'm sure that you're aware that the planning for this was done by the tail-end of the administration of Ike (my hero), and fell to JFK to live with. I'm not sure that he could have stopped it or was stuck with it.
You might add Somalia to your list, which was launched by Bush 41 - for praiseworthy humanitarian objectives, as it seemed then. The failure has been gleefully heaped on Clinton's plate, after he was stuck with it after the transition.
You know very well that I didn't say FDR brought about Pearl Harbor. But the intelligence failures happened on his watch and he escaped with his hide. Kennedy ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion; are you pretending that he couldn't have stopped it? Give us a break.
The point I made is that honest mistakes by leaders that cost thousands of lives will be forgiven by most thinking people. They will not forgive those who engage in the pretense that they were not part of the process and blame their own mistakes on others who are no more to blame than themselves. The American people will punish the Dems who persist in the lie that Bush lied.
Well, I'm not sure why you think you should speak for "the American people", but the majority of thse polled seem to feel quite different than you do.pizza wrote: The American people will punish the Dems who persist in the lie that Bush lied.
While you are digging your heels in the sand, your brain firmly in tunnel-view mode, still talking about those amazingly well-concealed WMD that just don't exist, most people have by now caught up with what was evident early on: Iraq was not an appropiate response to 9 / 11; the casus belli was shaky; Powell's case for the UN was based on contrived intelligence and the war has been conducted in as shamelessly bad a way as the lead-up to it.
The falseness of the casus belli intelligence has been amply documented; you just don't acknowledge the existence of this documentation because for you anything that doesn't agree with you comes from the "far left" - with, as I have said before, the funny consequence that twothirds of the US populationwould currently espouse "far left" ideas - rather than just face the facts.
The way it looks now the GOP is the party that is going to be punished for pushing the US in the wrong direction, but of course there's no telling how things will turn out in the future, particularly with a D party that has no alluring alternative to offer. (This has of course been a GOP strategy for some time: running the country in such a deep budgetary ditch that the other party will have to talk about unpopula stuff like taxes no matter what.)
You must enjoy repeating yourself. Every post you offer is precisely the same as the previous one, without the slightest proof of anything you say in any of them.herman wrote:Well, I'm not sure why you think you should speak for "the American people", but the majority of thse polled seem to feel quite different than you do.pizza wrote: The American people will punish the Dems who persist in the lie that Bush lied.
While you are digging your heels in the sand, your brain firmly in tunnel-view mode, still talking about those amazingly well-concealed WMD that just don't exist, most people have by now caught up with what was evident early on: Iraq was not an appropiate response to 9 / 11; the casus belli was shaky; Powell's case for the UN was based on contrived intelligence and the war has been conducted in as shamelessly bad a way as the lead-up to it.
The falseness of the casus belli intelligence has been amply documented; you just don't acknowledge the existence of this documentation because for you anything that doesn't agree with you comes from the "far left" - with, as I have said before, the funny consequence that twothirds of the US populationwould currently espouse "far left" ideas - rather than just face the facts.
The way it looks now the GOP is the party that is going to be punished for pushing the US in the wrong direction, but of course there's no telling how things will turn out in the future, particularly with a D party that has no alluring alternative to offer. (This has of course been a GOP strategy for some time: running the country in such a deep budgetary ditch that the other party will have to talk about unpopula stuff like taxes no matter what.)
The reason I speak for the American people is because I am an American and I understand the American mind. The foundation of Americanism is a sense of fair play; I know how it works from personal experience with juries -- honest mistakes are usually forgiven -- dishonesty is punished. Perhaps that's too difficult a concept for the cynical European mind to grasp, but there it is.
Americans will not be fooled by the dishonest Dems' shrill trickery when it comes to pulling the lever, biased media or no media -- polls or no polls.
They're called "Japanese", oisfetz. You're off to a good start doing what you're presumably complaining about.oisfetz wrote:Hey, Pizza. Why don't you do with those dishonest and traidors Demos
the same you honest and patriotic amercans did with the japs or american
citizens of jap origin after Pearl?, Put all of them on concentration camps!
I can easily understand how an Argentinian wouldn't understand the true meaning of patriotism. Thankfully we never had a Peron to guide us through our difficulties and we deport our Nazis rather than give them sanctuary.
Why, that's so interesting. So who are those people being polled, then? Not Americans? Who are those people who predominantly say they have the feeling Bush didn't quite level with them; who are those people who are giving Bush these record low approval ratings?pizza wrote:Americans will not be fooled by the dishonest Dems' shrill trickery when it comes to pulling the lever, biased media or no media -- polls or no polls.
And when it's about pulling the lever, how come a couple of GOP folks lost their seats recently? And why are house Republians changing their positions on the Iraq War fast, if the American people as you claim to understand them would never be fooled by Democrats? They have nothing to fear for if a (as you claim) totally non-partisan expert of the American soul is so sure the lever goes only one way. But it seems they're pretty scared.
Von Braun joined as a career move, like von Karajan and Schwarzkopf. He was actually arrested by the Nazis in '43 for anti-government statements; he was on an SS hit list in '45 and was saved by American troops along with other rocket engineers. He was not an ideological Nazi.oisfetz wrote:Sure, you deport your nazis like you did with Werner von Brown
The number of Nazi war criminals catered to and protected by the Argentinian government defies belief.
I'm sure you hope they're scared, Hermie, but that's not the case at all. A couple of temporary Republican renegades aren't going to swing an election. It's three years until 2008. The polls next week will be different than those last week. If that's what the Dems are counting on, they're in worse shape than they think. Polls are no substitute for good ideas of which the Dems have none. The pollsters don't pull the levers.herman wrote:Why, that's so interesting. So who are those people being polled, then? Not Americans? Who are those people who predominantly say they have the feeling Bush didn't quite level with them; who are those people who are giving Bush these record low approval ratings?pizza wrote:Americans will not be fooled by the dishonest Dems' shrill trickery when it comes to pulling the lever, biased media or no media -- polls or no polls.
And when it's about pulling the lever, how come a couple of GOP folks lost their seats recently? And why are house Republians changing their positions on the Iraq War fast, if the American people as you claim to understand them would never be fooled by Democrats? They have nothing to fear for if a (as you claim) totally non-partisan expert of the American soul is so sure the lever goes only one way. But it seems they're pretty scared.
Pizza, how is it that your proudly proclaimed nonpartisanship always winds up slamming the Democrats with the vilest insults? Do I detect a strong bias toward the folks who gave us Bush, Cheney, DeLay, and influence peddlers like Abramoff - not to mention their now forgotten sponsors like "Kenny Boy" Lay. What a bunch of paragons!
And who was it who claimed the 9/11 Commission's report was flawed?
And, Oisfetz, I don't know how much of a Nazi Von Braun was - quite possibly Pizza's description of his move here as a career move was right. All these guys made career moves, including Karajan's early joining the Party. But please remember that Von Braun spelled his name Wernher - no namesake of mine.
And who was it who claimed the 9/11 Commission's report was flawed?
And, Oisfetz, I don't know how much of a Nazi Von Braun was - quite possibly Pizza's description of his move here as a career move was right. All these guys made career moves, including Karajan's early joining the Party. But please remember that Von Braun spelled his name Wernher - no namesake of mine.
Werner Isler
pizza wrote:The American people will punish the Dems who persist in the lie that Bush lied.
'Bush lied' is mostly shorthand for 'the Bush Administration lied'.
1)WMD - where are the nukes? Yes, Saddam may have been pursuing them, developing them - but where are they? According to Bush on May 29th, 2003 we found them
http://www.whitehouse.gov/g8/interview5.html
2)Where are the bio-terror and chemical weapons? Saddam had them to use on the Kurds, but where are they now? Some, like VX have short shelf lives. But where are the bottles, and the small pox and the anthrax? Where are the mobil labs?
A) Again Bush said we had found them - see above URL. Again, where are they?
B) The CIA knew Curveball (who was supplying 'info' to the Germans) was unstable, but 'failed??' to pass the unstability word to Powell and Wilkerson at State, thus getting 2 more people to lie. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... all27.html
3) Bush says Saddam had Al Queda ties
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,98060,00.html
"Sec. of State Colin Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no 'smoking gun' proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of al-Qaeda.'I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,' Powell said." [NY Times, 1/9/04] The 9/ll report said the same.
4) The office of Budget Management estimated the cost of the war (money, not casualties) at $50-$60 billion. http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003 ... house.html
More than 200 billion has been spent. Being 8x off the budget could be considered a lie.
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php ... Itemid=182
5) The yellowcake story is moot because Bush 1 left at least 2 tons of yellowcake in Iraq http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/20 ... 1342.shtml.
None the less here are the sixteen words.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases ... 28-19.html
The disproving investigation http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/li ... ter2-j.htm
Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and George Tenet have since backed away from those 16 words.
6) "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. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002
Unmanned drones referenced have a range of 300 miles at most - the US is 6,000 miles from Iraq. http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000690.html
There are more items that Bush himself said that have since proven untrue, and more that his administration said, which can wait for a later post.
'She wants to go with him, but her mama don't allow none of that.'
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
"Proudly" is your word, Werner, not mine. I vote for who I think will do the best job regardless of party affiliation. I don't always slam Democrats. I have great respect for Truman and Humphrey but there ain't too much for the Dems to brag about after them.Werner wrote:Pizza, how is it that your proudly proclaimed nonpartisanship always winds up slamming the Democrats with the vilest insults? Do I detect a strong bias toward the folks who gave us Bush, Cheney, DeLay, and influence peddlers like Abramoff - not to mention their now forgotten sponsors like "Kenny Boy" Lay. What a bunch of paragons!
And who was it who claimed the 9/11 Commission's report was flawed?
And, Oisfetz, I don't know how much of a Nazi Von Braun was - quite possibly Pizza's description of his move here as a career move was right. All these guys made career moves, including Karajan's early joining the Party. But please remember that Von Braun spelled his name Wernher - no namesake of mine.
Calling liars "liars" is not an insult. It's an accurate description of people who lie.
Are you serious? I'm comparing intelligence failures and their consequences.Werner wrote:Are you comparing FDR to Bush?
Assume all the intelligence on Saddam was accurate and Bush ignored it. What do you suppose all the Dem bullshitters would then be saying AFTER he attacked on a Sunday morning and we were caught with our generals playing golf and riding horses?
Most of the above stuff was known to intelligence at the time and wasn't the basis of the administration's reliance. The senators were also briefed on the capabilities of Iraqi drones. There was concern that Iraq would launch drones from Canada, Mexico or Cuba, all within range of the US.operafan wrote:pizza wrote:The American people will punish the Dems who persist in the lie that Bush lied.
'Bush lied' is mostly shorthand for 'the Bush Administration lied'.
1)WMD - where are the nukes? Yes, Saddam may have been pursuing them, developing them - but where are they? According to Bush on May 29th, 2003 we found them
http://www.whitehouse.gov/g8/interview5.html
2)Where are the bio-terror and chemical weapons? Saddam had them to use on the Kurds, but where are they now? Some, like VX have short shelf lives. But where are the bottles, and the small pox and the anthrax? Where are the mobil labs?
A) Again Bush said we had found them - see above URL. Again, where are they?
B) The CIA knew Curveball (who was supplying 'info' to the Germans) was unstable, but 'failed??' to pass the unstability word to Powell and Wilkerson at State, thus getting 2 more people to lie. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... all27.html
3) Bush says Saddam had Al Queda ties
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,98060,00.html
"Sec. of State Colin Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no 'smoking gun' proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of al-Qaeda.'I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,' Powell said." [NY Times, 1/9/04] The 9/ll report said the same.
4) The office of Budget Management estimated the cost of the war (money, not casualties) at $50-$60 billion. http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003 ... house.html
More than 200 billion has been spent. Being 8x off the budget could be considered a lie.
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php ... Itemid=182
5) The yellowcake story is moot because Bush 1 left at least 2 tons of yellowcake in Iraq http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/20 ... 1342.shtml.
None the less here are the sixteen words.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases ... 28-19.html
The disproving investigation http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/li ... ter2-j.htm
Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and George Tenet have since backed away from those 16 words.
6) "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. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002
Unmanned drones referenced have a range of 300 miles at most - the US is 6,000 miles from Iraq. http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000690.html
There are more items that Bush himself said that have since proven untrue, and more that his administration said, which can wait for a later post.
The yellow-cake issue turned out to be true. Wilson was the liar, not Bush.
Saddam of course had ties to Al Qaeda. That's already been proven beyond a doubt. Nobody denies that he allowed their operatives to train in Iraq.
What the president said in the interview with a Polish journalist, cited above was:
"THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
The laboratores and manufacturing devices are the weapons to which he was referring. They were found.
There is an inability of Democrats with IQs presumably larger than their belt-lines to grasp the difference between saying something that one knows to be false, and saying something that one believes to be true but turns out otherwise.
Aside from which the decision to re-invade Iraq wasn't based solely on the issue of WMDs, but that's not something the Dems want to discuss.
Mr. Rich is down for the count!
Frank Rich's War
New York Sun Editorial
November 28, 2005
Those who charge President Bush and Vice President Cheney with lying to get America involved in the war in Iraq, as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich did yesterday, have a special obligation to get the truth correct themselves. It's one thing for Mr. Rich to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq and to blame Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for the decision. It's another for Mr. Rich to accuse our elected leaders of misleading the country while the columnist himself goes about misleading readers of The New York Times.
The Niger Uranium
Mr. Rich's New York Times column yesterday refers to Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address with the "bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium." Those words were, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But those 16 words are neither bogus nor fictitious. They were and are true. A July 2004 report of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported that an Iraqi delegation visited Niger in June of 1999 and met with Niger's then-prime minister, Ibrahim Mayaki. The committee relayed that Mr. Mayaki said the meeting was about "expanding commercial relations" between the two countries, which Mr. Mayaki interpreted to mean "that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales."
A July 2004 report by the British government's Butler Commission found that Mr. Bush's State of the Union comment was "well-founded." As the Commission put it, "It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible. ... The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it."
According to the Butler Commission, Saddam Hussein's government claimed that a 1999 mission to Niger by Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican was for the purpose of conveying an invitation to the Nigerian president to visit Iraq. Now, it's possible that, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, if Frank Rich were president, he would have concluded that the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican probably just had jetted down to Niger for the purpose of hand-delivering an invitation. But the British concluded otherwise, and it's hardly "bogus" or "fictitious" for Mr. Bush to have said so. Given Saddam's known nuclear ambitions - remember Osirak? - and Niger's main export, would it have been prudent for Mr. Bush to take the word of Saddam's envoy over that of the British?
Two Commissions
Mr. Rich's New York Times column yesterday accuses Messrs. Bush and Cheney of "falsely claiming they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence." Yet two major reports that looked into the matter of the administration and intelligence did exonerate the president. Here is a quote from the report of the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission: "The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Here is a quote from the report of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities." Yet, in contravention of those conclusions - reached by groups that included Democrats such as Senators Edwards, Levin, Wyden, and Durbin and Clinton administration officials Lloyd Cutler, William Studeman, and Walter Slocombe - Mr. Rich speaks of "the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade."
September 11 and Iraq
Mr. Rich accuses Mr. Cheney of dissembling by conflating the terrorists of September 11, 2001, with those we are fighting in Iraq. As evidence that Mr. Cheney is lying he cites an American general who says the Iraqi insurgency is 90% homegrown. But it's undisputed that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a Jordanian, Zarqawi, who shares with the rest of Al Qaeda, including the September 11 terrorists, the goal of re-establishing the caliphate. Certainly in their violent targeting of civilians and their jihadist rhetoric, those who attacked New York office buildings on September 11 and those who are blowing up restaurants and hospitals in Iraq have a lot in common. One may choose to emphasize or de-emphasize the similarities, but emphasizing the similarities as Mr. Cheney has done hardly amounts to dissembling.
The DIA Report and Senator Levin
Mr. Rich references a report of the Defense Intelligence Agency released by Senator Levin, a Democrat of Michigan, which Mr. Rich said demolished the credibility of a source the administration used "for its false claims about Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration." Here's how Mr. Levin hyped the report in a press release. "In February 2002, the DIA stated the following, which has remained classified until now: 'Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.' That DIA finding is stunningly different from repeated Administration claims of a close relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Just imagine the impact if that DIA conclusion had been disclosed at the time. It surely could have made a difference in the congressional vote authorizing the war."
The only stunning thing here is the disingenuousness of Messrs. Levin and Rich. First of all, the DIA report is not much different from what Bush administration officials were saying publicly at the time. On February 6, 2002, the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, made a similar argument in public testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying, "Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism, altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It has also had contacts with al-Qa'ida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible - even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences."
Moreover, the notion that the secular Baathists and the Islamic jihadists are so ideologically divergent that they will not work together has been disproven by what is going on now in Iraq, where they are cooperating against Iraqi moderates and American troops.
James Bamford
Mr. Rich cites the reporting in Rolling Stone of James Bamford. Yet even Mr. Rich's own newspaper, the Times, in reviewing Mr. Bamford's 2001 book, remarked on Mr. Bamford's "palpable distaste for the Israeli state." Said the Times review, "Rather too credulously, Bamford sides with the conspiracy theorists."
The Truth
Mr. Rich writes that the White House's record on the road to Iraq recalls the saying, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Here is what Mr. Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, the one whose 16 words about Uranium in Africa caused such a storm. "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages - leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained - by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."
That the president spoke the truth has been sadly confirmed in free Iraq. The Associated Press's Nadia Abou El-Magd interviewed Firas Adnan, whose tongue had been cut off with a box cutter by a Saddam loyalist. Mr. Adnan, "his slurred words barely comprehensible," said of Saddam, "He is a despot, the biggest despot, Iraq will be much better without him." Susan Sachs of Mr. Rich's own New York Times reported from the mass graves of Hilla: "On April 11, 1991, a few weeks into the Shiite rebellion, Iraqi helicopters dropped leaflets over Karbala ordering everyone to leave or be attacked with chemical weapons. Mr. Mohani piled his relatives into a pickup truck and a car and fled. About four miles south of the city, the escape route was blocked. There, he said, he saw Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, executing people randomly at a checkpoint. 'He was telling people to get out of their cars and then he would shoot them, shoot them until his arm was too tired to do it anymore.'"
Does Mr. Rich think his own colleague and the Associated Press are also part of what he derides as "propaganda" and "the disinformation assembly line"? And when it comes time for a new generation to ask their elders what they did during the war to end the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, what are the editors of the Times going to have to say for themselves?
Frank Rich's War
New York Sun Editorial
November 28, 2005
Those who charge President Bush and Vice President Cheney with lying to get America involved in the war in Iraq, as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich did yesterday, have a special obligation to get the truth correct themselves. It's one thing for Mr. Rich to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq and to blame Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for the decision. It's another for Mr. Rich to accuse our elected leaders of misleading the country while the columnist himself goes about misleading readers of The New York Times.
The Niger Uranium
Mr. Rich's New York Times column yesterday refers to Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address with the "bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium." Those words were, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But those 16 words are neither bogus nor fictitious. They were and are true. A July 2004 report of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported that an Iraqi delegation visited Niger in June of 1999 and met with Niger's then-prime minister, Ibrahim Mayaki. The committee relayed that Mr. Mayaki said the meeting was about "expanding commercial relations" between the two countries, which Mr. Mayaki interpreted to mean "that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales."
A July 2004 report by the British government's Butler Commission found that Mr. Bush's State of the Union comment was "well-founded." As the Commission put it, "It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible. ... The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it."
According to the Butler Commission, Saddam Hussein's government claimed that a 1999 mission to Niger by Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican was for the purpose of conveying an invitation to the Nigerian president to visit Iraq. Now, it's possible that, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, if Frank Rich were president, he would have concluded that the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican probably just had jetted down to Niger for the purpose of hand-delivering an invitation. But the British concluded otherwise, and it's hardly "bogus" or "fictitious" for Mr. Bush to have said so. Given Saddam's known nuclear ambitions - remember Osirak? - and Niger's main export, would it have been prudent for Mr. Bush to take the word of Saddam's envoy over that of the British?
Two Commissions
Mr. Rich's New York Times column yesterday accuses Messrs. Bush and Cheney of "falsely claiming they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence." Yet two major reports that looked into the matter of the administration and intelligence did exonerate the president. Here is a quote from the report of the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission: "The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Here is a quote from the report of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities." Yet, in contravention of those conclusions - reached by groups that included Democrats such as Senators Edwards, Levin, Wyden, and Durbin and Clinton administration officials Lloyd Cutler, William Studeman, and Walter Slocombe - Mr. Rich speaks of "the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade."
September 11 and Iraq
Mr. Rich accuses Mr. Cheney of dissembling by conflating the terrorists of September 11, 2001, with those we are fighting in Iraq. As evidence that Mr. Cheney is lying he cites an American general who says the Iraqi insurgency is 90% homegrown. But it's undisputed that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a Jordanian, Zarqawi, who shares with the rest of Al Qaeda, including the September 11 terrorists, the goal of re-establishing the caliphate. Certainly in their violent targeting of civilians and their jihadist rhetoric, those who attacked New York office buildings on September 11 and those who are blowing up restaurants and hospitals in Iraq have a lot in common. One may choose to emphasize or de-emphasize the similarities, but emphasizing the similarities as Mr. Cheney has done hardly amounts to dissembling.
The DIA Report and Senator Levin
Mr. Rich references a report of the Defense Intelligence Agency released by Senator Levin, a Democrat of Michigan, which Mr. Rich said demolished the credibility of a source the administration used "for its false claims about Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration." Here's how Mr. Levin hyped the report in a press release. "In February 2002, the DIA stated the following, which has remained classified until now: 'Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.' That DIA finding is stunningly different from repeated Administration claims of a close relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Just imagine the impact if that DIA conclusion had been disclosed at the time. It surely could have made a difference in the congressional vote authorizing the war."
The only stunning thing here is the disingenuousness of Messrs. Levin and Rich. First of all, the DIA report is not much different from what Bush administration officials were saying publicly at the time. On February 6, 2002, the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, made a similar argument in public testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying, "Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism, altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It has also had contacts with al-Qa'ida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible - even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences."
Moreover, the notion that the secular Baathists and the Islamic jihadists are so ideologically divergent that they will not work together has been disproven by what is going on now in Iraq, where they are cooperating against Iraqi moderates and American troops.
James Bamford
Mr. Rich cites the reporting in Rolling Stone of James Bamford. Yet even Mr. Rich's own newspaper, the Times, in reviewing Mr. Bamford's 2001 book, remarked on Mr. Bamford's "palpable distaste for the Israeli state." Said the Times review, "Rather too credulously, Bamford sides with the conspiracy theorists."
The Truth
Mr. Rich writes that the White House's record on the road to Iraq recalls the saying, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Here is what Mr. Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, the one whose 16 words about Uranium in Africa caused such a storm. "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages - leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained - by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."
That the president spoke the truth has been sadly confirmed in free Iraq. The Associated Press's Nadia Abou El-Magd interviewed Firas Adnan, whose tongue had been cut off with a box cutter by a Saddam loyalist. Mr. Adnan, "his slurred words barely comprehensible," said of Saddam, "He is a despot, the biggest despot, Iraq will be much better without him." Susan Sachs of Mr. Rich's own New York Times reported from the mass graves of Hilla: "On April 11, 1991, a few weeks into the Shiite rebellion, Iraqi helicopters dropped leaflets over Karbala ordering everyone to leave or be attacked with chemical weapons. Mr. Mohani piled his relatives into a pickup truck and a car and fled. About four miles south of the city, the escape route was blocked. There, he said, he saw Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, executing people randomly at a checkpoint. 'He was telling people to get out of their cars and then he would shoot them, shoot them until his arm was too tired to do it anymore.'"
Does Mr. Rich think his own colleague and the Associated Press are also part of what he derides as "propaganda" and "the disinformation assembly line"? And when it comes time for a new generation to ask their elders what they did during the war to end the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, what are the editors of the Times going to have to say for themselves?
"Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular."
-Thomas Macaulay
-Thomas Macaulay
Why should I when you're here.herman wrote:Ever considered the comedy business?pizza wrote:The senators were also briefed on the capabilities of Iraqi drones. There was concern that Iraq would launch drones from Canada, Mexico or Cuba, all within range of the US.
How about a word about the Sun OpEd, funny man? Box-cutter got your tongue?
Well, it's an opinion. Opinions are generally based on a selection of material, and I find opinions that make a different selection more persuasive, also in light of what's happening on a factual basis. The opinion that Saddam was stocking WMD on a huge scale is just fine, but it isn't really supported by the fact none were found. The opinion that Bush really believed the intelligence doesn't square well with the fact that Cheney formed a little intel group to bypass the CIA, nor does it square well with the Downing St Memo. Also, why is Powell saying he's ashamed of his UN presentation? If he was telling the (then) truth there's nothing to be ashamed of.pizza wrote:How about a word about the Sun OpEd, funny man? Box-cutter got your tongue?
But I just don't have your talent for foaming at the mouth at the sight of somebody with a different view. Nor do I believe opinions are facts, the way you do (when it's about your opinion).
But it's an opinion about Rich's misleading opinion to which you subscribed and continue to subscribe despite its obvious fasehoods. Neither do you have a talent for recognizing the truth from a pack of lies even when your nose is rubbed in it.herman wrote:Well, it's an opinion. Opinions are generally based on a selection of material, and I find opinions that make a different selection more persuasive, also in light of what's happening on a factual basis. The opinion that Saddam was stocking WMD on a huge scale is just fine, but it isn't really supported by the fact none were found. The opinion that Bush really believed the intelligence doesn't square well with the fact that Cheney formed a little intel group to bypass the CIA, nor does it square well with the Downing St Memo. Also, why is Powell saying he's ashamed of his UN presentation? If he was telling the (then) truth there's nothing to be ashamed of.pizza wrote:How about a word about the Sun OpEd, funny man? Box-cutter got your tongue?
But I just don't have your talent for foaming at the mouth at the sight of somebody with a different view. Nor do I believe opinions are facts, the way you do (when it's about your opinion).
Have you the faintest idea how easily a wide range of unmanned drones can be obtained, assembled and rendered operative if you have the funds to purchase them? IAI Israel is the world's largest manufacturer of UAVs and they've been making and selling them since the '70s. There are of course other sources as well. All you need is the money.herman wrote:Ever considered the comedy business?pizza wrote:The senators were also briefed on the capabilities of Iraqi drones. There was concern that Iraq would launch drones from Canada, Mexico or Cuba, all within range of the US.
Pizza, you keep denouncing Rich as a former theater critic - is that bad? - and I differ with you here by thinking that it's possible for people to expand their horizons, while writing clearly and incisivlely.
I suggest you try that bit about expanding horizons - the writing part you have no problems with.
I suggest you try that bit about expanding horizons - the writing part you have no problems with.
Werner Isler
pizza wrote: Most of the above stuff was known to intelligence at the time and wasn't the basis of the administration's reliance. The senators were also briefed on the capabilities of Iraqi drones. There was concern that Iraq would launch drones from Canada, Mexico or Cuba, all within range of the US.
Having failed to read the previous source on this, maybe you will read this one http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world ... l_quds.htm
According to the CIA Saddam already had 550 metric tons of yellow cake, and that was their reasoning for not letting the Nigerian yellowcake sentence into the State of the Union address.pizza wrote: The yellow-cake issue turned out to be true. Wilson was the liar, not Bush.
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2 ... r-the-war/
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Re ... p?ID=14295
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/wariniraq/a/niger_3.htm
Why would Saddam need more yellowcake? Maybe some Iraqi went shopping in Niger. Probably lots of people go shopping there. The French had and have control of the situation (maybe a reason not to go to war along side us?). Bad intelligence, but the buck stops on the President's desk.
This is the Iraqi side of the story http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... le4871.htm
Not everyone. Here is a short summary of what the 9/11 commission said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jun16.htmlpizza wrote: Saddam of course had ties to Al Qaeda. That's already been proven beyond a doubt. Nobody denies that he allowed their operatives to train in Iraq.
The CIA doubted it before the war. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/10/iraq.intel/
Al-Qaeda's operatives said bin Laden considered but rejected the idea http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/ ... 37064.html
Out of his mouth – a whopper. He says right here on May 29th, 2003 ‘we found them’. WHERE ARE THEY? This does not speak to before the war vs. after the war intelligence. This is a lie. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/12/wmd.searchpizza wrote: What the president said in the interview with a Polish journalist, cited above was:
"THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
In the vernacular of my children, 'Right back at you'. The Bush folk knew before the war that there was no definate Al Qaeda – Saddam connection. The Bush folk knew on May 29th, 2003 no WMD had been found.pizza wrote: There is an inability of Democrats with IQs presumably larger than their belt-lines to grasp the difference between saying something that one knows to be false, and saying something that one believes to be true but turns out otherwise.
pizza wrote: Aside from which the decision to re-invade Iraq wasn't based solely on the issue of WMDs, but that's not something the Dems want to discuss.
Dems would be glad to talk about why we went to war. Start a thread about why else we went to war. Yes Saddam was a vile thug, and he was not obeying the UN sanctions. Make him obey the sanctions? Nope – tossed out the UN inspectors. Democracy – nope. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031124fa_fact1 Terrorism – well maybe, but hard to make war on a strategy. Stop terrorists? Nope, a sincere effort to stop terrorism starts when one gets Putin to really lock up the nukes, Saudi Arabia to stop financing Hezbollah, Wahabism, and show their books on their charities, and resumes the talks that Bolton stopped on Syrian banking. A sincere terror stopper would tighten our borders and get rid of illegal aliens – a start would be getting rid of the 400,000 with the Social Security number 000-00-0000. Oil, probably the reason – amongst other reasons. http://www.salon.com/opinion/huffington ... 0/postwar/
The real problem is getting out without a post Soviet Union Afghanistan happening. The 'oil spot' plan for spreading sucess in Iraq, which I favored, no longer has a ghost of a chance of being implemented, nevermind sucess. I'm looking for another plan. The Bush folk, as noted in the New Yorker article above, did not follow their planner Drew Eardmann's multilateral plan. Conventional wisdom is those who make the mess should clean it up, and thus let the Republicans (who admittedly wage a right mean political campagne) figure out how to leave before the 2006 elections.
'She wants to go with him, but her mama don't allow none of that.'
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
I suggest you get your denouncers straight, Werner. I never mentioned that he was a theater critic. But since you bring it up, maybe he should go back to the theater. Fiction is obviously his forte.Werner wrote:Pizza, you keep denouncing Rich as a former theater critic - is that bad? - and I differ with you here by thinking that it's possible for people to expand their horizons, while writing clearly and incisivlely.
I suggest you try that bit about expanding horizons - the writing part you have no problems with.
I didn't "fail to read the previous source". It simply isn't comprehensive. There are many sites -- look them up yourself -- that will show at least a dozen models of drones with ranges of 300 - 500 miles that a high school science buff can make operative with a little practice.operafan wrote:pizza wrote: Most of the above stuff was known to intelligence at the time and wasn't the basis of the administration's reliance. The senators were also briefed on the capabilities of Iraqi drones. There was concern that Iraq would launch drones from Canada, Mexico or Cuba, all within range of the US.
Having failed to read the previous source on this, maybe you will read this one http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world ... l_quds.htm
According to the CIA Saddam already had 550 metric tons of yellow cake, and that was their reasoning for not letting the Nigerian yellowcake sentence into the State of the Union address.pizza wrote: The yellow-cake issue turned out to be true. Wilson was the liar, not Bush.
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2 ... r-the-war/
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Re ... p?ID=14295
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/wariniraq/a/niger_3.htm
Why would Saddam need more yellowcake? Maybe some Iraqi went shopping in Niger. Probably lots of people go shopping there. The French had and have control of the situation (maybe a reason not to go to war along side us?). Bad intelligence, but the buck stops on the President's desk.
This is the Iraqi side of the story http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... le4871.htm
Not everyone. Here is a short summary of what the 9/11 commission said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jun16.htmlpizza wrote: Saddam of course had ties to Al Qaeda. That's already been proven beyond a doubt. Nobody denies that he allowed their operatives to train in Iraq.
The CIA doubted it before the war. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/10/iraq.intel/
Al-Qaeda's operatives said bin Laden considered but rejected the idea http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/ ... 37064.html
Out of his mouth – a whopper. He says right here on May 29th, 2003 ‘we found them’. WHERE ARE THEY? This does not speak to before the war vs. after the war intelligence. This is a lie. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/12/wmd.searchpizza wrote: What the president said in the interview with a Polish journalist, cited above was:
"THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
In the vernacular of my children, 'Right back at you'. The Bush folk knew before the war that there was no definate Al Qaeda – Saddam connection. The Bush folk knew on May 29th, 2003 no WMD had been found.pizza wrote: There is an inability of Democrats with IQs presumably larger than their belt-lines to grasp the difference between saying something that one knows to be false, and saying something that one believes to be true but turns out otherwise.
pizza wrote: Aside from which the decision to re-invade Iraq wasn't based solely on the issue of WMDs, but that's not something the Dems want to discuss.
Dems would be glad to talk about why we went to war. Start a thread about why else we went to war. Yes Saddam was a vile thug, and he was not obeying the UN sanctions. Make him obey the sanctions? Nope – tossed out the UN inspectors. Democracy – nope. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031124fa_fact1 Terrorism – well maybe, but hard to make war on a strategy. Stop terrorists? Nope, a sincere effort to stop terrorism starts when one gets Putin to really lock up the nukes, Saudi Arabia to stop financing Hezbollah, Wahabism, and show their books on their charities, and resumes the talks that Bolton stopped on Syrian banking. A sincere terror stopper would tighten our borders and get rid of illegal aliens – a start would be getting rid of the 400,000 with the Social Security number 000-00-0000. Oil, probably the reason – amongst other reasons. http://www.salon.com/opinion/huffington ... 0/postwar/
The real problem is getting out without a post Soviet Union Afghanistan happening. The 'oil spot' plan for spreading sucess in Iraq, which I favored, no longer has a ghost of a chance of being implemented, nevermind sucess. I'm looking for another plan. The Bush folk, as noted in the New Yorker article above, did not follow their planner Drew Eardmann's multilateral plan. Conventional wisdom is those who make the mess should clean it up, and thus let the Republicans (who admittedly wage a right mean political campagne) figure out how to leave before the 2006 elections.
See e.g.:
http://www.globalaerialsurveillance.com/products.html
Two mobile laboratories that produce biological weapons were found. They had only one function -- biological weapons production. Blix also reported finding rockets with chemical warheads that the Iraqis had hidden from UN inspectors. Bush didn't lie. There were other weapons found that the Iraqis had stashed in violation of UN resolutions.
Blix also reported:
"There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date. It might still exist. Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991."
http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/Bx27.htm
Whether Saddam had yellow cake stored is irrelevant. Why would he need more? To make more bombs, what else? The President of Nigeria said the Iraqis were interested in purchasing yellow cake and that was the reason for the invitation. The Brits confirmed it. Whether or not the State of the Union address mentioned it had no bearing on the nature of the transaction. The article you posted by Doug Hanson fully supports the administration's position:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Re ... p?ID=14295
Al Qaeda operatives are known to have trained in Iraq; whether the CIA doubted it is irrelevant. The connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda is well known:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html
Who would expect OpEds from left-leaning rags such as Salon and New Yorker to support the administration's position. What else is new?
Here is what the ISG found - things that might jam radars, if and only if, they could fly. One flew for 14 minutes in January 2003.pizza wrote: I didn't "fail to read the previous source". It simply isn't comprehensive. There are many sites -- look them up yourself -- that will show at least a dozen models of drones with ranges of 300 - 500 miles that a high school science buff can make operative with a little practice.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/ ... 0588.shtml
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/libra ... ery-17.htm
That is a long way from this:
"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. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002
I thought we were counting Bush's lies.pizza wrote: Whether or not the State of the Union address mentioned it had no bearing on the nature of the transaction.
Where are all these things? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jan11.htmlpizza wrote:
Two mobile laboratories that produce biological weapons were found. They had only one function -- biological weapons production. Blix also reported finding rockets with chemical warheads that the Iraqis had hidden from UN inspectors. Bush didn't lie. There were other weapons found that the Iraqis had stashed in violation of UN resolutions.
Blix also reported:
"There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date. It might still exist. Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991."
Here is data avilable before the war. The Germans had this data as well - perhaps a reason not to go to war along side us.pizza wrote: Al Qaeda operatives are known to have trained in Iraq; whether the CIA doubted it is irrelevant. The connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda is well known:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... 2715.story
Here is newer data. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/11/06/iraq.intel/
Note: this is a Defense Intelligence Agency report different from the previously mentioned CIA report.
pizza wrote: Who would expect OpEds from left-leaning rags such as Salon and New Yorker to support the administration's position. What else is new?
Hey, just trying to oblige - I thought you wanted to talk about reasons for going to war other than WMD - my normal course is to follow the money.
'She wants to go with him, but her mama don't allow none of that.'
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
You can get IAI's tech info which shows that UAVs are easily operable and readily available. I find the Israeli experts who deal in these items to be credible. There are other sources as well. A UMV was flown over Israel a couple of weeks ago by Hizbollah, a well-known terrorist organization from Lebanon; there's nothing difficult about getting them and using them.operafan wrote:Here is what the ISG found - things that might jam radars, if and only if, they could fly. One flew for 14 minutes in January 2003.pizza wrote: I didn't "fail to read the previous source". It simply isn't comprehensive. There are many sites -- look them up yourself -- that will show at least a dozen models of drones with ranges of 300 - 500 miles that a high school science buff can make operative with a little practice.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/ ... 0588.shtml
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/libra ... ery-17.htm
That is a long way from this:
"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. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002
I thought we were counting Bush's lies.pizza wrote: Whether or not the State of the Union address mentioned it had no bearing on the nature of the transaction.
Where are all these things? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jan11.htmlpizza wrote:
Two mobile laboratories that produce biological weapons were found. They had only one function -- biological weapons production. Blix also reported finding rockets with chemical warheads that the Iraqis had hidden from UN inspectors. Bush didn't lie. There were other weapons found that the Iraqis had stashed in violation of UN resolutions.
Blix also reported:
"There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date. It might still exist. Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991."
Here is data avilable before the war. The Germans had this data as well - perhaps a reason not to go to war along side us.pizza wrote: Al Qaeda operatives are known to have trained in Iraq; whether the CIA doubted it is irrelevant. The connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda is well known:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... 2715.story
Here is newer data. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/11/06/iraq.intel/
Note: this is a Defense Intelligence Agency report different from the previously mentioned CIA report.
pizza wrote: Who would expect OpEds from left-leaning rags such as Salon and New Yorker to support the administration's position. What else is new?
Hey, just trying to oblige - I thought you wanted to talk about reasons for going to war other than WMD - my normal course is to follow the money.
Where the WMDs are now is irrelevant and anyone with an ounce of brains knows it. If you rob Brinks of a million dollars and hide the money, does that prove no crime occured? Ask Saddam what he did with them.
It's incontrovertible that Iraq had them; Saddam used them; he failed to account for them; mobile bio-weapon laboratories for the production of WMDs were found; Blix proved that large quantities of Anthrax and other bioweapons were not destroyed even according to Iraqi figures; and prohibited weapons including rockets with chemical warheads were found.
Not even the Dems claim they relied on the Polish journalist's informal interview of the president in supporting the administration's decision to go to war. If you read his statement in context, Bush was obviously saying that the discovery of the mobile labs that manufacture WMDs was the equivalent of finding WMDs. Why else would Saddam maintain the means to produce them? The president believed WMDs were there when he said it. That's not lying.
Solid circumstantial evidence supports his conclusion.
So, on May 29th, 2003, 2 months after we set foot on the ground in Iraq we couldn't tell if the WMD were there or not , but Bush can 'believe' we found them, then SAY 'we found them' AND Bush gets a pass because it was an 'informal interview outside the country'??pizza wrote:
Not even the Dems claim they relied on the Polish journalist's informal interview of the president in supporting the administration's decision to go to war. If you read his statement in context, Bush was obviously saying that the discovery of the mobile labs that manufacture WMDs was the equivalent of finding WMDs. Why else would Saddam maintain the means to produce them? The president believed WMDs were there when he said it. That's not lying.
Solid circumstantial evidence supports his conclusion.
I guess he gets a pass for saying 'We do not torture.' as well because he was in Panama at the time http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4415132.stm even though we do torture - this is not the 'only one bad apple in the barrel' Abu Gharib history, though you can find that case here http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact
Here are a few of the other torture cases.
http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/102405/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8327660/
'She wants to go with him, but her mama don't allow none of that.'
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
Elementary school child at an opera outreach performance of "Là ci darem la mano!" Don Giovanni - Mozart.
There is nothing to give him a "pass" for. He clearly said it in conjuction with the discovery of the mobile bio-weapons labs that you conveniently overlook each time you raise the point. Tell us what the labs were for and what Saddam was doing with them.operafan wrote:So, on May 29th, 2003, 2 months after we set foot on the ground in Iraq we couldn't tell if the WMD were there or not , but Bush can 'believe' we found them, then SAY 'we found them' AND Bush gets a pass because it was an 'informal interview outside the country'??pizza wrote:
Not even the Dems claim they relied on the Polish journalist's informal interview of the president in supporting the administration's decision to go to war. If you read his statement in context, Bush was obviously saying that the discovery of the mobile labs that manufacture WMDs was the equivalent of finding WMDs. Why else would Saddam maintain the means to produce them? The president believed WMDs were there when he said it. That's not lying.
Solid circumstantial evidence supports his conclusion.
I guess he gets a pass for saying 'We do not torture.' as well because he was in Panama at the time http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4415132.stm even though we do torture - this is not the 'only one bad apple in the barrel' Abu Gharib history, though you can find that case here http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact
Here are a few of the other torture cases.
http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/102405/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8327660/
You've probably tortured the point beyond recognition.
-
Gregory Kleyn
That's just gibberish, - the kind of emotional reaction and association a 2nd grader might make. Pathetic that you would post it, - even here.Lilith wrote:" mobile bio-weapons labs ..........Tell us what the labs were for and what Saddam was doing with them. Pizza
------------------------------------------------
I'll tell you what they were for.
The mobile bio-weapons labs were to rid CMG of of PIZZA RUBBISH.
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