Tell me about your mother....
I heard they're going to retain Orenthal to help "find the truth". Have you heard anything about this?
I heard Pelicano is on the case. Hide the kids.
SC&A:
See Schumer Speak!
See Schumer Lie!
(Same thing, isn't it?).
With oil at sixty bucks a barrel, why isn't someone drilling a well on his head?
Regards;
Good question, bilgeman.
Chuckie's outrageous behavior- and deceit- needs to be addressed.
Did Saddamnn and his two choir boy sons enjoy gassing Kurd hamlets?
Did they enjoy arriving after gasses dissipated in order to collect the bits of wealth just laying unprotected by motionless bodies?
Did the troops find gas protective suits stashed away in a hospital during the early part of the Iraq war?
Is anything more than this genocide and future genocide,{gas suits], required to justify stopping Saddam Suni?
Is talk of WMD, just so much hot air?
Sorry, but it looks like kindergarden logic to me. TG
It's one thing when lefty commenters, bloggers and various self-appointed activists seem emotionally unbalanced. Here we have the "leaders" of the Democratic Party acting half-cracked, nutty, loony and downright silly.
You guys have completely missed the boat on this one.
A)"Finding the truth" was the secondary objective in this maneuver. It was a political shot across the bow to the republicans. It is a gentleman's agreement that the majority party gets to set the agenda. It is also a gentleman's agreement that the minority party is not shut out of legislative consultation. The Republicans long ago stopped being gentlemen, so the Democrats decided to stop being gentlemen also. It is about time the Dems started fighting back. If the Repubs are not going to play by the rules, why should the Dems. they are just following Republican example. the message - be gentlemen or don't expect us to be.
B) Was Saddam a threat? Yes. Did Bush lie? I don't know. Did the intelligence justify the war? Possibly, possibly not. The point being not if or if not Saddam was a threat. The point being, did the President knowingly manipulate or misrepresent the information we had? The war may very well be completely justifiable, BUT if Bush knowingly misrepresented the information, it does not matter if the war was justified or not. He still breached the public trust.
It is one thing for Bush, Clinton, Blair, or any other leader to receive faulty information that they passed along to their people, not knowing that it is false.
It is another thing if Bush received information that he knew was faulty or knowingly manipulated the information to deceive the American people.
If Bush didn't know the information he was passing on to us was faulty, then he has done nothing wrong. He was just misinformed.
But if he knowingly deceived us, no matter haw you spin this Siggy, he is still a liar. Even if you agree with the result, there is no defense for the means unless you want to throw all credibility and trust out the window.
So, your assertion that if you think Bush may have lied means you are calling Clinton a liar also is erroneous. We know they both got faulty intelligence. The question is, what else did they do with it.
But Oceania has Always Been At Peace With Eurasia!
You guys just can't get it can you. Certainly there are those who are pacifists; against war period.
That aside, the preponderance of criticism regarding the war in Iraq initiated by this Republican administration is directed toward incompetence.
The Clinton administration with Madeline Albright were very hawkish on the Balkans, Iraq, Al Qaida, etc... but according to Republicans, that was all about sex scandals and efforts to detract from the miscellaneous and sundried investigations.
Certainly, Clinton and his cadre who were competent, could have even taken Iraq down militarily, and he would have done it under a UN banner with all the typical allies behind him. Just like Dubya's Daddy did in the first Gulf War. That's because it was a UN show, and the violations were against the UN sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Actually, 1998 would have been the time to do that, because that's when the inspectors were evicted.. a clear violation.. and intelligence was just as good, if not better in 1998 than it was in 2003. And at no time, not in 1998 nor in 2003, was Iraq's WMD ambitions an imminent threat warranting unilateral (outside UN or even NATO parameters) action by the United States. Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice were saying exactly that in 2001, i.e. Iraq is contained and no progress has been made on Saddam's WMD program.
The fact is that Saddam was greatly hobbled after his invasion of Kuwait. The evidence of a nuclear program was all found after the war with Kuwait in the early 90's. The UN inspectors were all over it after that...breaking equipment, destroying weapons stockpiles, etc.
Saddam's mistake was that he invaded Kuwait before he had nukes. If he hadn't invaded Kuwait, there would have been no inpections and he may have actually acquired the bomb.
But after the war, he was boxed-in, and his efforts were going nowhere. Scott Ritter, who had actually been on the ground in Iraq with the UN inspection teams knew that and said so.
All the rhetoric during the Clinton administration was geared toward maintaining UN sanctions, getting/keeping inpections going, and maintaining the northern and southern no-fly zones, where we were essentially striking Saddam's forces with impunity.
So, incompetence. First incompetence in selecting Iraq as the next best effort in the war on terror; forgetting about Bin Ladin and taking the heat off Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Second, because of politically motivated timelines, rushing into the war with inadequate diplomatic and military preparations.
Third, underestimating the initial and continuing force requirements, and the capacity and willingness of the enemy to prosecute an insurgency for a real long time.
Fourth, underestimating the complexity of achieving a political solution post-war.
What Dubya has achieved, in view of the war on terror, is essentially re-establishing the terrorist breeder reactor al Qaeda had lost in Afghanistan, in
..Iraq.
Dubya has established the conditions for an entirely new generation of terrorists in the training-ground of Iraq, as those that had been hardened in Afghanistan during its war with the Soviets in the 80's.
In short, this Republican administration is guilty of a strategic military blunder of breathtaking proportions.
The troops deserved better political leadership than it has received from this incompetent Republican administration, and it was Republican votes that put them in place. So we understand why they might be a little defensive.
Lt. Gen. William Odom Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88
It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse. The sooner we leave, the less the damage. In the months since the invasion, the U.S. forces have become involved in trying to repress a number of insurgency movements. This is the way we were fighting in Vietnam, and if we keep on fighting this way, this one is going to go on a long time too. The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take ten to fifteen years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population.
Gen. Merrill 'Tony' McPeak Air Force Chief of Staff, 1990-94
We have a force in Iraq that's much too small to stabilize the situation. It's about half the size, or maybe even a third, of what we need. As a consequence, the insurgency seems to be gathering momentum. We are losing people at a fairly steady rate of about two a day; wounded, about four or five times that, and perhaps half of these wounds are very serious. And we are also sustaining gunshot wounds, when, before, we'd mostly been seeing massive trauma from remotely detonated charges. This means the other side is standing and fighting in a way that describes a more dangerous phase of the conflict.
The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil. I blame Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind him -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The vice president himself should probably be included; certainly his wife. These so-called neocons: These people have no real experience in life. They are utopian thinkers, idealists, very smart, and they have the courage of their convictions, so it makes them doubly dangerous.
Get the idea. This Republican administration is the epitome of idiocy. And you voted for them, twice.
Are you for real? Are you in touch with reality at all?
For every military critic, there are 10 equally qualified supporters.
The rest of your comment is speculation and deliberate reinterptrtation of nuance.
There is no substance to your remarks.
Dingo, what is there to suggest that Bush manipulated intelligence to support going to war? I think the whole point of the post here and over at the Anchoress is to point out that everyone on both sides of the aisle had the same information and came to the same conclusion about the necessary course of action. I am not aware of anything that supports the assertion that Bush (or anyone else) knew the intelligence about WMD was flawed.
It seems to me that unless and until this information is presented and verified, it's sensible to assume that there has not been a grand deception. It's also reasonable to conclude that in the absence of any supporting evidence, the Left's insistence that a massive conspiracy has occurred is predicated less on reality and more on desperate politics (among other things).
"Dingo, what is there to suggest that Bush manipulated intelligence to support going to war?"
There are many things that suggest this. The emerging links between the white house and the forged Niger documents and when exactly did they know they were forged. The fact that the White House subverted the CIA in order to present evidence that the CIA was saying was false. The fact that Bush had to cite British intelligence since the CIA and NSA would not sign off on the uranium claims. The fact that Powell was constantly fighting the White House about information they kept adding to his speeches and he kept trying to cut due to it being unverifiable.
"It seems to me that unless and until this information is presented and verified, it's sensible to assume that there has not been a grand deception."
And that was the intent of the move by Reid. Lets investigate. Lets get to the bottom of this. Was Bush duped, or was Bush the duper?
And, if you want verified evidence one way or the other (as you should) why would you not expect the White House to verify its evidence also before presenting it to the American people as fact. The CIA and NSA had many doubts about the intelligence. Should you not expect the same out of the government.
Dingo -
Niger: In his State of the Union address, Bush cited British intelligence indicating that the UK thought Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium in Iraq. The Butler report, as I believe it is called, is still considered credible by the Brits. What do you mean when you say "the emerging links between the White House and the forged Nigerian documents"? Is anyone making a credible case that the WH was involved in the creation of the forgeries? (I thought the Italians were the most likely suspects) Isn't it possible that the WH knew the documents were fake and instead relied upon the Butler report for verification of the imminent threat posed by Hussein?
The fact that Colin Powell disagreed with the administration is neither here nor there. A difference of opinion and philosophy does not support the theory that a conspiracy was underway.
You assertion about the double top secret closed Senate session would be more plausible if the Senate Intelligence Committee hadn't indicated that it was ready to present its findings to the Senate the day before. THAT little debacle, by the way, is perfectly shameful. I don't know how Democrats can look themselves in the eye after all the BSing attached to it.
"In his State of the Union address, Bush cited British intelligence indicating that the UK thought Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium in Iraq."
Yes, that is just the issue. We may have known that the information the Brits were using was faulty and relied on it anyway to make the case for war. It turns out that most of the information came from the same sources which the CIA decided was unreliable.
"Is anyone making a credible case that the WH was involved in the creation of the forgeries?"
We pretty much know that it was the Italians who created the forgeries, but there is growing speculation that we have known that they were forgeries from the beginning but still tried to use them and bypass the CIA on it. Is it true? I have no idea. But, I would like to find out.
"You assertion about the double top secret closed Senate session would be more plausible if the Senate Intelligence Committee hadn't indicated that it was ready to present its findings to the Senate the day before."
Annie, the second phase of the investigation hadn't even started and there was no plan for it to ever start.
As for Powell, it is both here and there. he disagreed with the administrations use of the intel because it was unverifiable, but they still wanted him to present it as fact to the UN. That may not be proof positive, but it certainly raises more questions. It is not merely a difference of opinion.
I know you love the president. there is wrong with that even if I may disagree. But you just can't put blinders on. It broke my heart to learn that Clinton did a lot of the things that he did. But the truth is, our leaders are not nearly as honest with us as we would like them to be even when we really want to believe that they are
"The October 2002 NIE included the statement that Iraq was “trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake” and that “a foreign government service” had reported that “Niger planned to send several tons” of yellowcake to Iraq. The statement about Niger was based primarily on three reports provided by a liaison intelligence service to CIA in late 2001 and early 2002 ... When it finally got around to reviewing the documents during the same time period, the CIA agreed that they were not authentic. Moreover, the CIA concluded that the original reporting was based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable." -- Robb-Silberman Commission Report, page 78.
Much of the Brits intel was based on the early reports.
Today my twin girls turn three! Subsequently, I'm just not able to give the time or thought to a proper response, Dingo. I'm sorry - I know it's a cop out.
I did have a chance to read some of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Niger - if you haven't done so already, I humbly suggest it as good reading.
Since at my core, I'm an inherently lazy gal, I'll leave the discussion with a link that will make all my points for me:
http://biglizards.net/blog/
archi...on_of_mass.html
Obviously, this is someone with a viewpoint favorable to mine, but much of the evidence cited is supported by the Intelligence Committee report I cited above.
Off to bake a dino cake!
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