quote:Originally posted by the G-man: Assuming that Bush is lying (and I don't), the standard for impeachment is "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Clinton was accused of (and an Arkansas judge later determined he had been) lying under oath (ie, "do you swear to tell the truth...so help you god"), which is perjury. In most states, perjury is a felony (which I take to mean "high crime"). The subject of the perjury is immaterial. The crime is the lying under oath.
Bush is accused of lying to the American people, but not under oath. This is not against the law. In fact (he notes cynically), if lying to voters (or potential voters) were illegal, every politician in America would be in jail right now.
So, at this point, the odds of Bush being impeached over the WMDs are slim and none.
Not all entirely true...
I don't believe he will be impeached, but the issue is not him lying to the American Public so much as his lying to the UN, which noone wants to address because with so much dependency on the US, the UN rerally has no room to prosecute.
And I'm sure that Bush's administration has come up with some kind of loophole where Bush himself will get off the hook because he wasn't informed, purposefully, about certain things that went on in the gathering of evidence against Saddam.
Buchanan has come to his senses. This is the 1st sign that hard questions are going to be a tad more difficult to simply sweep under the rug and be ignored. Don't mind the following, it's just another of my stupid liberal links. :lol:
What was America’s real motive for attacking Iraq? Was it oil? Empire? To make the Middle East safe for Sharon? That these questions are being asked, not only by America’s critics, is the fault of the administration alone. For its crucial argument as to why it had no choice but to launch the first preventive war in American history is collapsing like a sand castle in a rising surf.
Iraq, in retrospect, was no threat whatsoever to the United States. We fought an unnecessary war, and now we must rebuild a nation at a rising cost in blood and treasure.
Before the war, many who opposed it argued that no matter the evil character of Saddam, Iraq had not attacked us, did not threaten us, did not want war with us, could not defeat us. Why then were we about to invade Iraq?
Came the administration answer: Saddam has ties to al-Qaeda. He has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. He is a year or so away from being able to build a nuclear bomb, and he will use these weapons on us or our allies, or give them to terrorists who will use them in the United States. And these weapons will kill not just the 3,000 who perished on Sept. 11, but tens and even hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans. Do you want to risk that? Do you want to do nothing and risk a “mushroom cloud” in an American city? Or do you want to remove this mortal threat now? So went the clinching argument for war.
Opponents answered that the UN inspectors had found nothing, that Saddam had even invited in the CIA to have a look, that surely he could not launch a sneak attack on America or her allies with UN inspectors rummaging around his country. The War Party scoffed. Hans Blix, they said, was an incompetent and an appeaser who would deliberately not find weapons rather than be responsible for causing a war.
So President Bush launched America’s first pre-emptive war, and it was a triumph of American arms. But nearly three months have now elapsed, and we have not yet found a single weapon of mass destruction, though we were told, again and again, that Saddam had “30,000 munitions.”
On June 1, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank revisited the Bush administration’s categorical claims in the run-up to war:
On Aug. 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney told the VFW, “Stated simply, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
On Dec. 2, Ari Fleischer told the White House press corps, “You’ve heard the president say repeatedly that he has chemical and biological weapons.” On Jan. 7, 2003, Fleischer added, “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”
Also in January, Rumsfeld declared, “There’s no doubt in my mind that they currently have chemical and biological weapons.”
In his Feb. 8 radio address, Bush declared, “We have sources that tell us that Saddam recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons—the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”
Cheney added in March, “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”
On March 17, on the eve of war, President Bush told the nation “Intelligence … leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” So persuaded, America united behind the president and went to war.
Something is terribly wrong here. It is impossible to believe the president would deliberately lie to the nation when he knew the full truth would be discovered at war’s end in a few weeks. Either he was misled, or he was deceived, and, so, too, was Secretary of State Colin Powell. Who did it? Who was responsible for the intelligence failure, or the dishonest use of selected intelligence, or the conscious and deliberate deceit of a president and secretary of state?
Where are the weapons? We have searched 300 sites and arms dumps and found not one shell. If Saddam had the weapons, why did he not use them? If he destroyed them before the war, as Rumsfeld now argues, he fulfilled the terms of Resolution 1441 and could have saved himself by showing UN inspectors where and how he did it.
Why would Saddam let himself, his family, and his regime perish protecting weapons he either no longer had or did not intend to use?
Is it possible Iraq never had that vast arsenal of anthrax, VX, sarin, and mustard gas we were led to believe? Did the intelligence agencies fail us, or did someone “cook the books” to meet the recipe for an imperial war? It is time Congress investigated the Office of Special Plans, set up in the Pentagon to sift and interpret all intelligence and placed under neoconservative super-hawk, Paul Wolfowitz.
it looks as if Democrats aern't going to be the only ones to call this Administration into account. I'm just wondering when the public will start doing their part.
That's the only real purpose to it anyway, IMO. I mean, if you can't find any other way to make a case against this administration, why not pick something like this?
maybe he thinks if he owns up to 1 lie, he can deflate the mounting criticism about his justifications for war in Iraq.
He should be more concerned about the day that he'll have to own up to the rest of his lies.
LIE #1: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." – President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.
FACT: This story, leaked to and breathlessly reported by Judith Miller in the New York Times, has turned out to be complete baloney. Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."
LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." – President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.
FACT: This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."
LIE #3: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." – Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."
FACT: There was and is absolutely zero basis for this statement. CIA reports up through 2002 showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
LIE #4: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." – CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.
FACT: Intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s, but found no proof of a continuing relationship. In other words, by tweaking language, Tenet and Bush spun the intelligence180 degrees to say exactly the opposite of what it suggested.
LIE #5: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." – President Bush, Oct. 7.
FACT: No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes.
LIE #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.
FACT: Said drones can't fly more than 300 miles, and Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S. coastline. Furthermore, Iraq's drone-building program wasn't much more advanced than your average model plane enthusiast. And isn't a "manned aerial vehicle" just a scary way to say "plane"?
LIE #7: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." – President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.
FACT: Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war.
LIE #8: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." – Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.
FACT: Putting aside the glaring fact that not one drop of this massive stockpile has been found, the United States' own intelligence reports show that these stocks – if they existed – were well past their use-by date and therefore useless as weapon fodder.
LIE #9: "We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.
FACT: Needless to say, no such weapons were found, not to the east, west, south or north, somewhat or otherwise.
LIE #10: "Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." – President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003.
FACT: This was reference to the discovery of two modified truck trailers that the CIA claimed were potential mobile biological weapons lab. But British and American experts – including the State Department's intelligence wing in a report released this week – have since declared this to be untrue. According to the British, and much to Prime Minister Tony Blair's embarrassment, the trailers are actually exactly what Iraq said they were; facilities to fill weather balloons, sold to them by the British themselves.
quote:That's the only real purpose to it anyway, IMO. I mean, if you can't find any other way to make a case against this administration, why not pick something like this?
you're joking, right?
His enviromental record alone would be a case against this administration. Everything else is just icing. Here, knock yourself out With Bu$h, the enviroment is merely what stands in the way of a good Costco parking lot. "But it's a "liberal site!" they say. Yeah. A pity "balanced" conservative sites don't keep tabs on Bush's assault on the enviroment. They may perhaps keep studies sponsored by conglomerates that dispute independent scientists findings on global warming, enviromental impact on drilling and the like. :lol: Or as the Yellowstone enviromental imapct studies show, Bush would rather Suppress, Ignore, Preempt than to have to concede that perhaps his administration may be wrong.
quote:Willful misinterpretation is another method through which the Bush administration ignores what environmental impact studies actually say. In 2001, the White House requested that the National Academy of Sciences sort out the evidence on global warming. After the Academy returned its report, President Bush focused on portions detailing "Uncertainties in Climate Prediction," suggesting that global warming was a disputed concept.
What he failed to address were the Academy's central conclusions: That global warming is a real threat, that it has intensified in the past 20 years and that greenhouse gases like CO2 are the most likely cause. When the administration's own EPA fortified these facts in 2002, placing even clearer blame on power plant emissions for causing climate change, President Bush shrugged off the findings as a "report put out by the bureaucracy."
"He says he wants sound science to guide the debate, yet he dismisses and avoids anything that doesn't mesh with his political views," says Dr. Susanne Moser of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Yeah. I don't know why i bother either. I know you neocons just cover your ears and go "lalalalalaLiberallalalalaClintonlalalalalalaAgendalalala" whenever any negative news on Bush surfaces.
One thing is being opposed to a certain point of view or ideology and arguing your case fairly to the american public. It's quite another to promote your agenda by lying, supressing or buying your way into your POV winning out. As Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain once said about his bands name vs organized religion "if the religion can't take it, then the religion isn't worth a fuck". And there is no greater religion and no greater group of committed jihadists in the U.S. at the moment than neoconservatives. If I press hard, it's because they press harder.
I still say it's much ado about nothing, manufactured by G.W. Bush's political opposition.
There is plenty of other evidence that Saddam Hussein was not complying with the U.N. terms of surrender from the 1991 Gulf War, and ongoing Iraqi defiance of U.N. international law, mistreatment of his own people, pursuit of WMD according to defectors in Saddam's own military since 1995, etc., that more than warranted the Iraqi invasion.
I wouldn't mind seeing it investigated, just to put all question about initiating the Iraq invasion to rest, which I think is happening. But I don't think it's that big a deal. And I don't think Bush and Blair did anything wrong.
On the contrary, I think they demonstrated great courage and conviction by taking action they knew to be necessary but unpopular.
Here is the transcript of a good roundtable discussion from PBS' The News Hour from Tuesday, July 2. Interviewed are 4 newspaper editors from across the U.S., two opposing Bush's actions, and two supporting Bush's actions. The one whose views best mirror my own is Rachellle Cohen, of the Boston Herald.
RUMMY EVEN HAD THE AUDACITY TO DECLARE THAT THE ADMINISTRATION DIDN'T KNOW UNTIL RECENTLY THAT THE "PROOF" WAS INDEED FORGED DOCUMENTS.
LIE LIE LIE.
AND THEN TO TRY TO LINK THIS WITH 9/11 (AGAIN) AS SO PERHAPS SOME OF THE SHEEP MAY THINK THEIR LIVES ARE AGAIN IN IMMEDIATE PERIL BY THE SAVAGE ARAB (WHETHER THEY HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH 9/11 OR OTHERWISE), REEKS OF DESPERATION.
quote:"Rumsfeld, in a terse exchange with Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said he learned only "within recent days" that the Africa claims were based on faulty evidence. U.N. officials determined the documents were forgeries before the war."
i MEAN C'MON! WHAT IN FACT DOES QUALIFY AS IMPORTANT TO A BUSH SUPPORTER?? B.J'S???
And what do you have to say about Ambassador Joseph Wilson's comments on Meet the Press
quote:"That information was erroneous, and they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British white paper and the president's State of the Union address,"
Any way you slice it, it's deceit in order to sell a war.
Here's more Wilson.
quote:"I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times. "A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses."
In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added,
quote:"It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?"
Again, the issue isn't whether Sadaam was a bad guy, the issue is whether the American public was deceived about Iraq being an immediate threat to the U.S.
Even you have to admit, considering the growing evidence, that this is Iran/Contra all over again. The ends justify the means with these neo-cons. Whether it's ethical or not. Whether it's legal or not. Ideology 1st. The truth last. Every time.
That's a diversion I think the liberal press is pursuing, to smear the Bush administration, despite the fact there was ample evidence and provocation to invade Iraq, whether or not WMD are ever found.
The Democrat/liberal argument is like saying: if you get a warrant to enter a drug dealer's apartment, and when busting into the apartment you find corpses of guys the dealer just shot, traces of drugs, drug money, books detailing the dealer's trade, piles of illegal weapons, but NO ACTUAL DRUGS, that it's a bad bust. Ridiculous. If the Democrats have real evidence, bring it on. But all I see is smear and speculation.
And regarding where I get my news, you DID notice the PBS News Hour link that I posted a few posts above, didn't you? One line above your post?
PBS is considered among the most liberal sources of news, so I would expect they would be more critical of the Bush administration, if what you allege is "proven" is so beyond question what actually happened. But they're not.
I happen to like the in-depth interviews on PBS, and the comparative lack of sensationalism, as compared to the other networks. And despite being arguably a liberal source, at least they let conservatives/Republicans ACTUALLY TALK, as opposed to soundbyting the hell out of them, to make their views sound less intelligent, less logical, and less persuasive.
There are very few places you can get conservative views unfiltered. I like PBS' back-and-forth roundtable dialogues, where I can hear both conservative and liberal views. As opposed to being force-fed liberal propaganda, with no interest in the conservative perspective.
Dave. Ambassador Wilson isn't a Democrat/"lib". He was once praised by Bush Sr. himself.
quote:a 23-year career diplomat who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by then-President George H.W. Bush for his role as the last American to confront Hussein face to face after the dictator invaded Kuwait. In a cable to Baghdad, the president told Wilson: "What you are doing day in and day out under the most trying conditions is truly inspiring. Keep fighting the good fight."
Stop trying to make this into some Democrat conspiracy to bring down Dubya. Lies were told and told repeatedly and convincingly to a willing nation. Period. Again, i say the ends do not justify the means. Ever. Especially when you so vocally declared your Administration to be about integrity.
quote:Originally posted by Dave the Wonder Boy: I still say it's much ado about nothing, manufactured by G.W. Bush's political opposition.
There is plenty of other evidence that Saddam Hussein was not complying with the U.N. terms of surrender from the 1991 Gulf War, and ongoing Iraqi defiance of U.N. international law, mistreatment of his own people, pursuit of WMD according to defectors in Saddam's own military since 1995, etc., that more than warranted the Iraqi invasion.
I wouldn't mind seeing it investigated, just to put all question about initiating the Iraq invasion to rest, which I think is happening. But I don't think it's that big a deal. And I don't think Bush and Blair did anything wrong.
On the contrary, I think they demonstrated great courage and conviction by taking action they knew to be necessary but unpopular.
Here is the transcript of a good roundtable discussion from PBS' The News Hour from Tuesday, July 2. Interviewed are 4 newspaper editors from across the U.S., two opposing Bush's actions, and two supporting Bush's actions. The one whose views best mirror my own is Rachellle Cohen, of the Boston Herald.
quote:The issue has had little resonance with an American public seemingly satisfied with the successful overthrow of the Iraqi regime. In one poll conducted by the University of Maryland, a third of poll respondents believed that banned weapons have been located; 22 percent believed - wrongly -- that chemical or biological weapons were used against American troops. But the questions keep coming.
So in other words, this Adminstration counts on the culture of the sound byte and the ignorance of the American public to accept whatever Donald Rumsfeld says in the 5 seconds he's on the air and have been trained by Bush cheerleaders (starting with FOX and AM radio) to dismiss any questions as "partisan attacks". Sad, really.
More from your link
quote:But I do think it speaks to the credibility of the United States in future operations or in future diplomatic efforts like with Iran and North Korea that the evidence that they bring forward to people is validated in some manner. So sure I think it's of grave concern that these things are found.
Or as Joseph Wilson said.
"It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?"
To clarify. Glad to see Saddam gone (had to say it before some knee-jerk calls me a "Sadaam lover"). However, the ends still do not justify the means. What is your "ample evidence" to invade Iraq by the way, if i may ask?
EDIT
quote:Originally Posted by Dave TWB
There is plenty of other evidence that Saddam Hussein was not complying with the U.N. terms of surrender from the 1991 Gulf War, and ongoing Iraqi defiance of U.N. international law, mistreatment of his own people, pursuit of WMD according to defectors in Saddam's own military since 1995, etc., that more than warranted the Iraqi invasion.
Never mind. You clarified. May I ask why that wasn't enough for the Bush Admin. then? If there was ample evidence and justification, then why the constant lies and embellishments then?? I did provide a detailed list above
END EDIT
That he was a brutal dictator?? Can we then invade No. Korea next? After all, our mission is to "liberate" all oppressed peoples the world over. Never mind not having any plan on how to better their lives after we bomb everything to knigdom come.
from the last link in my posting on 07-01-2003 12:36 AM
quote:There's this section of Baghdad where many of the towering, Stalinist government offices are located. You drive through and it's like a scene from a Godzilla movie or footage from Hiroshima: all the government buildings -- the ministries of health, higher education, defense, telecommunications, transportation -- have been burnt, looted or bombed into oblivion. Only their steel girder frames remain. Iraq's museums, theaters and universities have also been torched and looted by vandals and criminals.
But amid these ruins, one building stands out as so pristine it's surreal. Protected by phalanxes of US soldiers since the very first days of the occupation, it actually seems to gleam amid the apocalyptic landscape. It is, of course, the Ministry of Oil.
quote:Reporter Terrence Smith, giving background prior to the discussion:
The issue has had little resonance with an American public seemingly satisfied with the successful overthrow of the Iraqi regime. In one poll conducted by the University of Maryland, a third of poll respondents believed that banned weapons have been located; 22 percent believed - wrongly -- that chemical or biological weapons were used against American troops. But the questions keep coming.
So in other words, this Adminstration counts on the culture of the sound byte and the ignorance of the American public to accept whatever Donald Rumsfeld says in the 5 seconds he's on the air and have been trained by Bush cheerleaders (starting with FOX and AM radio) to dismiss any questions as "partisan attacks". Sad, really.
Ah. That IS a rather one-sided and caricatured portrayal of the Republican/conservative perspective. And rather bypasses similar actions on the part of the Clinton/Gore White House, to say nothing of the Democrats in the House and Senate I see on the network news spinning their hyperbole almost every night. And I love this charicature of Republicans (and possibly me as well) as some kind of automaton zombie of Republican soundbytes on FOX News. Republican soundbytes (spun by a liberal press that's over 80% Democrat, by the way, according to G-Man's posts earlier in the topic, so that would actually make for some very watered-down Republican soundbytes. Quite the opposite, it is Democrats who RULE the soundbytes on every network but FOX. And if you were paying attention, I prefer PBS News for its less hyperbolic coverage, and LACK of soundbyting.)
quote:Originally posted by whomod:
More from your link
quote:But I do think it speaks to the credibility of the United States in future operations or in future diplomatic efforts like with Iran and North Korea that the evidence that they bring forward to people is validated in some manner. So sure I think it's of grave concern that these things are found.
Or as Joseph Wilson said.
"It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?"
To clarify. Glad to see Saddam gone (had to say it before some knee-jerk calls me a "Saddam lover"). However, the ends still do not justify the means. What is your "ample evidence" to invade Iraq by the way, if i may ask?
quote:Originally Posted by Dave TWB
There is plenty of other evidence that Saddam Hussein was not complying with the U.N. terms of surrender from the 1991 Gulf War, and ongoing Iraqi defiance of U.N. international law, mistreatment of his own people, pursuit of WMD according to defectors in Saddam's own military since 1995, etc., that more than warranted the Iraqi invasion.
Never mind. You clarified. May I ask why that wasn't enough for the Bush Admin. then? If there was ample evidence and justification, then why the constant lies and embellishments then?? I did provide a detailed list above
Well, as Rumsfeld said in the same PBS News Hour, in tonight's broadcast, responding to Senator Levin, virtually EVERYTHING he (Rumsfeld), President Bush, and Democrats such as Senator Levin, and other Democrats, receive in their respective intelligence reports is constantly updated with the most recent intelligence available. And it invariably is corrected and updated, and things that were reported today can be completely disproven or otherwise updated/corrected in two weeks or two months. And that's just as true for the intelligence the Democrats on Capital Hill receive. As I recall, the CIA was on record WELL before the Iraq invasion on 3-20-2003, as not agreeing with the Bush White House's assessment of the Iraqi threat. It was pretty clear to me that there were some who agreed with the Bush White House, and many in intelligence who did not.
I haven't looked into Ambassador Wilson's statements much yet. I don't see that he's presented any clear evidence of wrongdoing yet either. You say:
quote:Originally posted by whomod: Dave. Ambassador Wilson isn't a Democrat/"lib". He was once praised by Bush Sr. himself.
quote:a 23-year career diplomat who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by then-President George H.W. Bush for his role as the last American to confront Hussein face to face after the dictator invaded Kuwait. In a cable to Baghdad, the president told Wilson: "What you are doing day in and day out under the most trying conditions is truly inspiring. Keep fighting the good fight."
But looking at former Ambassador Wilson's biographical summary sure doesn't make him sound like a Republican. He's spent most of his career serving under high-level Democrats: http://www.cpsag.com/our_team/wilson.html
And regarding lack of WMD found, I'll borrow from the same PBS report I linked above:
quote:RACHELLE COHEN: It's obviously not terribly important to the American people, which I think is a significant issue here.
The University of Maryland poll that was alluded to in the lead-in to this, there was a new one out today, and the number of people who actually think we've discovered weapons of mass destruction had dropped to about 23 percent from 34 percent.
But the important figure was that eight out of 10 Americans still thought we belonged in Iraq. And I think the point is that indeed nothing succeeds like success. The image that will live in the minds of the American public is that image of statues being toppled, of a people being however briefly jubilant, being jubilant. And you can't argue with the success of that kind of military operation.
and
quote: RACHELLE COHEN: That would indeed be a serious matter. [If the Bush administration is lying, and if they fabricated evidence of a need for imminent invasion. ]
I don't think anyone likes to think their government is lying to them.
But you don't have to believe our government, you don't have to believe Colin Powell's remarks to the United Nations. All you have to do is look at the earlier report, the first report from Hans Blix and his people. They were the ones who initially said we can't find x, y and z, we can't find this gas, we know this existed, we can't find evidence that it's been destroyed. There was ample evidence from outside sources, especially the inspectors who did indeed want to go back and look for the same things that our military people are still looking for.
Again, my parallel example of the drug dealer's apartment, where you bust the place and find plenty of OTHER criminal evidence, but no cocaine. He's still busted for the other stuff, and so it's still a good bust.
It just seems so obvious to me what's going on:
Democrats/liberals hated Bush before the election. They hated him during the recount in November/December 2000. They hated him every day until 9-11-2001. Then they backed off for a while from the vicious rhetoric, because it seemed unpatriotic. And after about 6 or 8 months of mostly polite silence, Bush bashing came back in force. Since the summer of 2002, it's been pretty much back to where it was.
Democrats and the liberal press have jumped eagerly and bitterly on every hint of every possible shortcoming of the Bush administration since it took office. Every half-baked allegation you guys are SO eager to believe, because you hate the guy and desperately want him to be guilty of SOMETHING.
You hated him in the months leading up to the war in Iraq (even though liberals PRAISED similar invasions of Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia as "humanitarian" invasions under Clinton. But again, that negative spin for the same actions by a Republican.)
I'm utterly convinced that this is a witch-hunt for trumped-up charges against the Republicans. When I see something resembling real evidence, I'll change my mind.
Like I said, let's cut with the liberal press propaganda, and have a real investigation. The rest is just smear tactics.
quote:Originally posted by whomod:
That he was a brutal dictator?? Can we then invade? No. Korea next? After all, our mission is to "liberate" all oppressed peoples the world over. Never mind not having any plan on how to better their lives after we bomb everything to knigdom come.
I have a problem with this, too. I mean, we're in there trying to re-establish order. It took years to re-construct post-WW II Europe, we've been in Iraq for a little over two months.
Reconstruction and stabilization of a nation of 23 million people doesn't happen overnight.
Especially when you have at least three different minorities that have long-enduring hostilities similar to Yugoslavia (Shi'ites, Kurds, Sunni's, and arguably current/former Baath loyalists as well). Plus Saddam Hussein and his Saddam Fedayeen in hiding, taking shots at Americans and Brits, and sabotaging power plants and so forth.
I think you're harder on Bush than you would be on a Democrat.
Somalia in 1993 was an unmitigated disaster. Clinton just cut and ran after a few American soldiers were killed, it was an embarrassment. Clinton was more concerned about popularity polls than actually helping in Somalia. And with the first dead Americans, Clinton left Somalia's destitute masses to the mercy of armed thugs and their warlords. So much for humanitarian aid, when it interferes with your popularity polls.
Haiti was likewise not a model of liberation and prosperity for the Haitian people. Although it was a more valiant effort.
And the half-assed lobbing of missiles at Al Qaida camps in 1998 is what made Osama Bin Ladin a hero throughout the Muslim world. It was clearly token action by Clinton, minimal military action Clinton did to posture toughness without commitment of real military troops, to stroke the polls and not do anything unpopular, rather than do what was necessary to eliminate the known Al Qaida threat. And because Clinton left Bin Ladin to fester and grow bolder, it blew up in our faces on 9-11-2001.
Where was the Democrat/liberal-dominated press when these events were occurring? Oh, that's right, there was a Democrat in the White House. Not quite the same outcry from the media.
And despite the fact that Clinton lied before a grand jury, the liberal press portrayed the Lewinsky affair as Republican harassment of Clinton. When Lewinsky produced a semen-stained dress that proved the charges were unquestionably true, it was dismissed as just a case of Republicans picking on him. And where Republicans had the guts in 1974 to impeach Nixon, Democrats blocked impeachment in 1999, in favor of self-serving politics over justice, to block Clinton's impeachment.
Any one of these events is at least as ripe for investigation as Bush's WMD-based urgency to invade Iraq.
Even the bad economy, which Bush is blamed for, actually slumped into recession a year before Bush was ever elected. But the liberal press, again, distorts the truth and blames it on Bush.
Like I said, I know PBS is part of the liberal press as well, but at least Republicans get to say things in their own words, unsoundbyted. The report I linked in my last post (partly quoted here) is fair to both sides of the issue.
And again, Bush's televised address to the nation on the eve of war with Iraq in March 2003, was far from limited to pursuit of WMD in its list of reasons for the invasion. Primary among them being absolute and total non-compliance with U.N. resolutions.
Again, the issue isn't whether Sadaam was a bad guy, the issue is whether the American public was deceived about Iraq being an immediate threat to the U.S.
Ah, but it's an issue to me. Saddam was a monster who: slaughtered his own people, thumbed his nose at UN cease fire conditions that he agreed to, fired missiles on Israel during the first Gulf War, and invaded another country without provocation.
I don't care what the timeline on those events is, fact is the world is far better off now that Saddam is on the run. I couldn't care less what reason President Bush used to get his ass out of there.
I will now "focus" on the topic at hand...no, I don't think the President will be impeached. However, as I mentioned earlier, General Secretary Davis is in far greater danger of being booted from office. It's technically a recall, and not an impeachment, but still...
(CNN) --The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency approved President Bush's State of the Union speech, which included a statement that Iraq was planning to buy uranium from Africa, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters Friday.
"The CIA cleared the speech. The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety," Rice said, en route to Uganda.
"If the CIA -- the director of central intelligence -- had said, 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone," Rice said.
"The president did not knowingly say anything that we knew to be false. ... We wouldn't put anything ... knowingly in the speech that was false."
President Bush made similar comments during a news conference in Uganda, the fourth stop on his five-nation African tour.
"I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services and it was a speech that detailed to the American people the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. And my government took the appropriate response to those dangers. And as a result, the world is going to be more secure, and more peaceful," Bush said.
The White House has admitted that a false claim that Iraq tried to obtain from Niger uranium oxide -- known as yellowcake -- was included in the State of the Union address in January as President Bush was trying to rally support for the invasion of Iraq.
In that speech, Bush cited British intelligence, saying Iraq had been trying to purchase the uranium from Africa and suggesting that Saddam Hussein's regime was attempting to restart a nuclear weapons program in violation of U.N. resolutions.
Sources said Wednesday that early drafts of the speech cited American intelligence about Niger and the uranium, but intelligence officials urged the removal of the information because they did not have "high confidence" in it.
A number of Democrats, including Presidential contender Sen. John Kerry have called for an independent investigation into allegations the Bush administration overstated the threat posed by Iraq's weapons programs during the debate over war.
"This is not a matter of politics. This is a matter of national security," the Massachusetts Democrat said. "When we go to other countries and say we have evidence of X or Y or Z, it is important that they believe us. And when we go to the American people and ask them to support some effort in the future, it is more than important that they believe us."
The Democratic National Committee prepared an ad assailing the president for using false intelligence in his State of the Union address last January to establish that Saddam was preparing nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the issue directly while traveling with Bush in Africa.
Powell said there was never any "attempt on the part of the president or anyone else in the administration to mislead or deceive the American people."
"We now have to focus on the future," he said, "and that is to build a better Iraq for the Iraqi people and help them put in place a representative form of government that will make sure that there are never any more weapons of mass destruction, and that it's a country that will live in peace with its neighbors."
Fallujah presence adjusted
In Iraq, the U.S. military has reduced its presence at a police station in the restive town of Fallujah, west of the Iraqi capital, a coalition spokesman said Friday. The move is billed as a step toward Iraqis policing themselves.
Calling it a "positive step forward," Maj. Sean Gibson said the 3rd Infantry Division was reducing its presence at one Fallujah police station from 30 to six people. He said Iraqi police in the city -- the site of frequent unrest and attacks against U.S. troops -- had told U.S. military officials that they could handle a greater share of policing duties.
Iraqi police had also complained to U.S. troops that their presence was endangering Iraqi police.
According to Gibson, the six remaining soldiers at the station will work as liaisons between the U.S. military and the police force.
This is good news, Gibson said, noting it has been a goal of the coalition to enable Iraqis to police themselves and to "raise their level of professionalism."
Asked if the movement of the 24 soldiers was out of a concern for their safety, Gibson said he "would not characterize it as concern."
Other developments • Spain's Cabinet voted Friday to send 1,300 troops to Iraq for peacekeeping duties, Defense Minister Federico Trillo said. They will be part of a 12-nation force operating in a south-central sector of Iraq, between Baghdad and Basra. The force will initially be under Polish command, Trillo said, speaking at a nationally-televised news conference after the cabinet meeting. He said the Spanish deployment would begin on Saturday and that the troops would be fully deployed and operational by early September.
• The top military commander in Iraq said that Saddam loyalists have "stepped up" their attacks against U.S. forces in the past week and there "is absolutely no question in my mind" that American soldiers and their Iraqi supporters killed in recent ambushes were victims of "professional assassinations." Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez on Thursday blamed pro-Saddam Fedayeen militias and Special Republican Guard soldiers for the attacks on U.S. troops. "The war is not over and all the American forces and all the American soldiers understand that they were deployed to fight this war," he said.
At least 79 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since Bush announced an end to major fighting May 1. Of those, 32 have been killed by hostile fire and 47 were victims of non-hostile fire or accidents.
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate committee the Pentagon projects that the Iraq war and occupation would cost an average of almost $4 billion a month through September.
• Fatigue, stress, mechanical malfunctions and a disastrous series of errors beset members of the Army's 507th Maintenance Company as they neared Nasiriya, Iraq, on March 23, according to a draft report from the Army. The result was an Iraqi ambush that left 11 soldiers dead and seven captured, the report said. Pfc. Jessica Lynch was among those in the convoy, and U.S. forces later rescued her from an Iraqi hospital.
quote:Originally posted by whomod: Buchanan has come to his senses. This is the 1st sign that hard questions are going to be a tad more difficult to simply sweep under the rug and be ignored. Don't mind the following, it's just another of my stupid liberal links
Sigh....
Another board...
Another complete misunderstanding or misstatement of reality by whomod.
Using Buchanan as some sort of evidence that the republicans are starting to turn on Bush displays ignorance of the facts that (a) Buchanan is a radical isolationalist; (b) Buchanan is a long time foe of the Bush family (he ran against Bush Sr. in the primary, and against W as a third party candidate in 2000, remember?)(guess not);(c)Buchanan left the GOP a few years ago.
quote:Ambassador Wilson isn't a Democrat/"lib". He was once praised by Bush Sr. himself.
Bush Sr. and Jr. have praised libs before. I seem to recall Jr. saying a few nice things about the Hildebeast and Ted Kennedy...and even Paul Wellstone on the occasion of his death. Perhaps that's because Republicans are not quite as filled with single-minded venom as some on the left? But anyway...
Here's a little background on Wilson:
He was an outspoken opponent of U.S. military intervention in Iraq.
He's an "adjunct scholar" at the Middle East Institute — which advocates for Saudi interests. The March 1, 2002 issue of the Saudi government-weekly Ain-Al Yaqeen lists the MEI as an "Islamic research institutes supported by the Kingdom."
He's a vehement opponent of the Bush administration which, he wrote in the March 3, 2003 edition of the left-wing Nation magazine, has "imperial ambitions." Under President Bush, he added, the world worries that "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness."
He also wrote that "neoconservatives" have "a stranglehold on the foreign policy of the Republican Party." He said that "the new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our world view are implanted throughout the region, a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme."
He was recently the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far-left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions — and even the no-fly zones that protected hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam.
And consider this: Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wilson did believe that Saddam had biological weapons of mass destruction. But he raised that possibility only to argue against toppling Saddam, warning ABC's Dave Marash that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might "use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have. For example, if we're taking Baghdad or we're trying to take, in ground-to-ground, hand-to-hand combat." He added that Saddam also might attempt to take revenge by unleashing "some sort of a biological assault on an American city, not unlike the anthrax, attacks that we had last year."
In other words, Wilson is no disinterested career diplomat — he's a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to grind. And too many in the media are helping him and allies grind it.
WASHINGTON - Defending his credibility, President Bush said Monday the United States made the right decision to invade Iraq and the intelligence on which he relied was "darn good" — even though some of it now is in question.
Bush said the United States was reviewing documents and interviewing Iraqis in an intensive effort to support the administration's still unproven claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
"When it's all said and done," Bush insisted, "the people of the United States and the world will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program."
Bush spoke in the Oval Office alongside U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who opposed the U.S.-led war. The two met to discuss Iraq, the Middle East and peacekeeping in Liberia.
Bush has been on the defensive since the administration acknowledged it could not document his State of the Union claim in January that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons. That claim was based on British intelligence that had been called into question by the CIA. Nevertheless, CIA Director George Tenet has accepted responsibility for not seeking removal of the statement from Bush's speech.
Amid the finger-pointing over blame, the embarrassing episode forced the administration to concede it did not know the source of the British intelligence — and, in fact, was not trying to determine the source.
"We don't know if it's true but nobody — but nobody — can say it was wrong," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. "That is not known." Administration officials said Bush's statement was technically correct since he was simply saying that British intelligence said something was true.
Nevertheless, Bush is not pleased with the turn of events, Fleischer said, and the administration is tightening its scrutiny of material that goes into his speeches.
Democrats questioned the administration's explanation, and anti-war advocacy groups launched a television advertising campaign accusing Bush of misleading Americans about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The ad ends with the word "leader" superimposed on Bush's face — and then the word changes to "misleader."
Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused Bush of deception. "He deceived the American people by allowing into a State of the Union speech — at a critical point when he was making the case for war with Iraq _a statement that he either knew was wrong or should have known was wrong."
Dismissing administration claims, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., said, "These officials should be reminded that what is at stake is not just the credibility of one man or even the credibility of the office of the president of the United States. What we place in the balance is the credibility of the United States as a nation and as leader of the free world."
Defending his administration, Bush said, "I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence.
"And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction and that our country made the right decision."
The administration said the questionable intelligence claim was simply one piece in a long, documented list of evidence showing that Iraq was trying to acquire material for nuclear weapons.
Said Fleischer: "The fact of the matter is whether they sought it from Africa or didn't seek it from Africa doesn't change the fact that they were seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program."
The White House also drew a distinction between the way Bush handled intelligence claims about Iraq in a speech he gave in Cincinnati last October compared with his State of the Union address in January.
In October, acting on Tenet's suggestion, Bush excised a sentence about Iraq seeking a specific quantity of uranium from Niger, Fleischer said. Yet, several months later, Bush went ahead and raised the claim about seeking uranium in Africa.
Fleischer said it was an apples-and-oranges difference because the Cincinnati speech mentioned Niger while the State of the Union speech talked about all of Africa, and that there was different reporting from the CIA. "So it's an apple in Cincinnati and an orange in the State of the Union," he said. "The two do not compare that directly."
One final post as I realize this is nothing but a forum by people with blinders on.
Just explain this little bit to my ignorant ass, will you??
Our Darn Good President/TopGun-in-Chief Jethro is losing what little mind he has under the pressure. Now's he's claiming that the reason we invaded was because Saddam "wouldn't let the inspectors in." (See article exerpt below)
WHAT? The U.N. inspectors in fact WERE in Iraq right up until Bush told everyone to get out on the eve of our invasion.
The look of befuddlement on Kofi Annan's face when Bush said this crap in the video clip is priceless.
------------------------------------- President Defends Allegation On Iraq Bush Says CIA's Doubts Followed Jan. 28 Address
By Dana Priest and Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, July 15, 2003; Page A01
President Bush yesterday defended the "darn good" intelligence he receives, continuing to stand behind a disputed allegation about Iraq's nuclear ambitions as new evidence surfaced indicating the administration had early warning that the charge could be false.
Bush said the CIA's doubts about the charge -- that Iraq sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore in Africa -- were "subsequent" to the Jan. 28 State of the Union speech in which Bush made the allegation. Defending the broader decision to go to war with Iraq, the president said the decision was made after he gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." -----------------------------------------------
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president.. is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonous to the American public." - Teddy Roosevelt, in 1918 during the First World War.
"Too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think it will give some comfort to the enemy... if that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments they are welcome to it.. because the maintenance of the right to criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a good deal more good than it will do the enemy." - Senator Robert A. Taft, after Pearl Harbor.
".. We have come here not as conquerors but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny." - Lt. General Sir Stanley Maude in Baghdad, when Britain occupied Iraq - in 1917
"Rumsfeld screwed the pooch, but you're not allowed to mention it. On behalf of all of your children in uniform, who are denied the First Amendment right to free speech for which, in theory, are wearing those uniforms, I wish to state for the record that DONALD RUMSFELD IS AN INCOMPETENT IDIOT!!!"
"What if I fart and the neighbors smell that, you going to write me up for that too?"
"Which supports the theory that the neo-nazis are really Mossad fronts out to build sympathy for the Jewish people in order to advance Israel's agenda."
X 1,000,000
You're so desperate for anything to "incriminate" the President, that you'll quote any source, won't you Jack?
I'd say the right-wing fanatics this president has surrounded himself with are doing a fine job of incriminating him all by themselves. One almost feels sorry for Powell, but, you lie down with dogs......
I recently re-watched President Bush's State of the Union Address on video, and on re-watching the 1 hour speech (originally broadcast January 28, 2003), particularly the concluding 18 minute portion that dealt specifically with Iraq and North Korea, I was struck by how incredibly trumped-up this whole thing is by the Democrats.
The 16 words that are so hotly disputed are an insignificant footnote within the thrust of other evidence of Saddam's tyrrany and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, evidence that is beyond dispute. And verified by documentation of Hans Blix and other U.N. inspectors, Iraqi military defectors, and widely known evidence by many sources listed within the address and elsewhere. It's ridiculous for Democrats and the liberal press to assert that these 16 words are the major thrust of Bush's speech. They are a tiny sidebar in an overwhelming body of evidence that justifies military action. These 16 words are something any newspaper if they included it would run a correction for on page 20, and simply say "We regret the error," and be done with it. But in this case, there is no proven error, only lack of verification.
Here is a link to the concluding 18 minutes of the speech, as it is transcribed verbatim on the White House's website (I took the liberty of italicizing the 16 words that have relentlessly been rehashed in outrage by Democrats and the liberal press):
quote:Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq. A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth, will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States. (Applause.)
Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction.
For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement. He pursued chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, even while inspectors were in his country. Nothing to date has restrained him from his pursuit of these weapons -- not economic sanctions, not isolation from the civilized world, not even cruise missile strikes on his military facilities. Almost three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations, and for the opinion of the world. The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct -- were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq's regime is disarming.
It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see, and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened. The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it. The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it. Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.
Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide. The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving.
From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.
Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations.
Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.
Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack. With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.
Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes. (Applause.)
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option. (Applause.) 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. (Applause.) And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. (Applause.) And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation. (Applause.)
The world has waited 12 years for Iraq to disarm. America will not accept a serious and mounting threat to our country, and our friends and our allies. The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraqi's legal -- Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempt to hide those weapons from inspectors, and its links to terrorist groups. We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him. (Applause.)
Tonight I have a message for the men and women who will keep the peace, members of the American Armed Forces: Many of you are assembling in or near the Middle East, and some crucial hours may lay ahead. In those hours, the success of our cause will depend on you. Your training has prepared you. Your honor will guide you. You believe in America, and America believes in you. (Applause.)
Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make. The technologies of war have changed; the risks and suffering of war have not. For the brave Americans who bear the risk, no victory is free from sorrow. This nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost and we dread the days of mourning that always come. We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended. A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all. If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means -- sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military -- and we will prevail. (Applause.)
And as we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies -- and freedom. (Applause.)
Many challenges, abroad and at home, have arrived in a single season. In two years, America has gone from a sense of invulnerability to an awareness of peril; from bitter division in small matters to calm unity in great causes. And we go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right country. Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world and to ourselves. America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers. Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. (Applause.)
We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America. (Applause.)
END 10:08 P.M. EST
Again, those 16 words are NOT the major thrust of the argument for war. They are a small aside. And their inclusion or exclusion does not change the meaning of the speech at all. The other evidence listed in the speech is overwhelming for Saddam's guilt, with or without those 16 words.
And again, Britain stands by its intelligence. So there's still absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing. Just slander, unfounded emotional displays of outrage by Democrats for the uninformed to suck up, smoke, mirrors, and the liberal press to biasedly and eagerly hype it.
I think it's fair to expect honesty from this or any administration. Since this involved invading & taking over another country I'm glad some questions are being asked when the facts don't add up or conflict.
I would support more strongly the pursuit of truth, if the allegations against Bush were more honest.
Once again, a quick reading of the above posted State of the Union address in question reveals that there was no emphasis given to the Niger/uranium point. It is not the "main reason" that was given for the invasion. It is not even one of the main reasons given. It is barely a footnote in the speech. The main reasons given were: 1) Saddam Hussein's defiance and deliberate hiding of evidence from U.N. weapons inspectors, in 14 resolutions over 12 years. 2) Saddam's pursuit of chemical/nuclear/biological WMD's, evidence that he was clearly pursuing these things, whether or not he currently had them (again, from the U.N. inspections, and also Saddam's own publicly disclosed records of his weapons inventory, were unaccounted for). and 3) Saddam's brutality, torture and murder of his own people, and willingness to use any WMD's he might acquire, as his use of Sarin and Mustard gas on Iranians and his own people made clear.
I don't see ANYTHING in this above quoted State of the Union address to give the slightest weight to the allegations of Democrats and the liberal press that Bush's 16-words included was either THE reason for an invasion, AMONG the main reasons, or even A reason for the Iraq invasion. Like I said, it's a small error, page 10 retraction type material. If it could even be proven to be incorrect. As I said, the British government still says theystand by the intelligence on Niger/uranium as accurate.
It's a trumped-up farce that headlines have been going on for weeks over this. Read the speech!
I don't see any validity for the Democrats' allegations in that speech either. If there were any truth to the Niger/uranium "deception" smear campaign by the Democrats, then surely it would have been given more emphasis in Bush's consistent rhetoric leading up to the war.
___________________________
"Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power. For the last four-and-a-half months, the United States and our allies have worked within the Security Council to enforce that Council's long-standing demands. Yet, some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it." ---George W. Bush, 3/17/2003
As I said before, It' s not just the SOTU speech. The Administration was making all sorts of exxagerations and flat out falshoods in addition to the Niger statement. I'm waiting for the press to get to those..
LIE #1: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." – President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.
FACT: This story, leaked to and breathlessly reported by Judith Miller in the New York Times, has turned out to be complete baloney. Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."
LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." – President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.
FACT: This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."
LIE #3: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." – Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."
FACT: There was and is absolutely zero basis for this statement. CIA reports up through 2002 showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
LIE #4: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." – CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.
FACT: Intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s, but found no proof of a continuing relationship. In other words, by tweaking language, Tenet and Bush spun the intelligence180 degrees to say exactly the opposite of what it suggested.
LIE #5: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." – President Bush, Oct. 7.
FACT: No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes.
LIE #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.
FACT: Said drones can't fly more than 300 miles, and Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S. coastline. Furthermore, Iraq's drone-building program wasn't much more advanced than your average model plane enthusiast. And isn't a "manned aerial vehicle" just a scary way to say "plane"?
LIE #7: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." – President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.
FACT: Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war.
LIE #8: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." – Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.
FACT: Putting aside the glaring fact that not one drop of this massive stockpile has been found, the United States' own intelligence reports show that these stocks – if they existed – were well past their use-by date and therefore useless as weapon fodder.
LIE #9: "We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.
FACT: Needless to say, no such weapons were found, not to the east, west, south or north, somewhat or otherwise.
LIE #10: "Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." – President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003.
FACT: This was reference to the discovery of two modified truck trailers that the CIA claimed were potential mobile biological weapons lab. But British and American experts – including the State Department's intelligence wing in a report released this week – have since declared this to be untrue. According to the British, and much to Prime Minister Tony Blair's embarrassment, the trailers are actually exactly what Iraq said they were; facilities to fill weather balloons, sold to them by the British themselves.
( ...and Bush's statement to the U.N. on 9-12-2002, pointedly summarizing these events, and his case for war with Iraq to force compliance that had not existed during the 12 years Iraq was bound to comply: ) http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html
Clearly, Saddam Hussein is guilty of these things. And it isn't just taking Bush's word for it that these things are true:
Tons of Sarin, VX, Anthrax and other bio/chemical agents are missing, according to weapons inspectors, and Saddam's own inventory records.
Thousands of missiles for delivering them, by Iraq's own inventory reports, once existed and are now missing.
By admission of high ranking officers defecting from Saddam Hussein's military, he had secret programs to develop biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
The fact that those weapons cannot be found does NOT negate the proof that these weapons clearly existed. To say nothing of Saddam's torture, murder, rape, mass extermination, etc., of his own people.
And your listed errors do NOT invalidate the case to go to war against Iraq, nor were any of these errors hard-sold as a main reason, or even ONE of the main reasons to go to war in Iraq.
Would that the liberal press would hold to scrutiny every press conference innacuracy and error of Clinton and other Democrats. Many of these statements listed as "lies" (such as Rumsfeld's proclaimation of having found the mobile weapons labs) were not lies, but the best available information at the time stated. What appeared to be captured weapons labs were later found to be swept of evidence when thoroughly investigated after the statement was given.
The fact remains: Look at Bush's State of the Union Address. Look at his other speeches. What Democrats and the liberal press says he hyped and "deceived" the nation with, to go to war against Iraq, simply is NOT what was in his speeches.
It looks as if The Washington post has finally joined the "liberal media" establishment. :lol:
Bush's Statements Contradicted By Facts
Bush's Statement "A report came out of the... [International Atomic Energy Agency], that [the Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need." Camp David, 9/7/02
The Washington Post says... "There was no new IAEA report... Bush cast as present evidence the contents of a report from 1996, updated in 1998 and 1999. In those accounts, the IAEA described the history of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that arms inspectors had systematically destroyed."
Bush's Statement "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon." United Nations, 9/12/02
The Washington Post says... "Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible."
Bush's Statement "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Cincinnati OH, 10/7/02
The Washington Post says... "What Hussein did not have was the principal requirement for a nuclear weapon, a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And the U.S. government, authoritative intelligence officials said, had only circumstantial evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain those materials."
Bush's Statement "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group of his 'nuclear mujahedeen,' his nuclear holy warriors." Cincinnati OH, 10/7/02
The Washington Post says... "Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center."
Read on to see how the Post's August 10 report picks apart Bush's claims that Iraq's nuclear program presented an imminent threat to the United States.
quote:IRAQ'S NUCLEAR FILE : Inside the Prewar Debate Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01
His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.
An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.
At issue was Iraq's efforts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. The U.S. government said those tubes were for centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. But the IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets.
Joe described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie. According to people familiar with his presentation, which circulated before and afterward among government and outside specialists, Joe said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was "overspecified," "inappropriate" and "excessively strong." No one, he told the inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a rocket.
In fact, there was just such a rocket. According to knowledgeable U.S. and overseas sources, experts from U.S. national laboratories reported in December to the Energy Department and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was manufacturing copies of the Italian-made Medusa 81. Not only the Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the fraction of a millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes.
A CIA spokesman asked that Joe's last name be withheld for his safety, and said he would not be made available for an interview. The spokesman said the tubes in question "are not the same as the Medusa 81" but would not identify what distinguishes them. In an interview, CIA Director George J. Tenet said several different U.S. intelligence agencies believed the tubes could be used to build gas centrifuges for a uranium enrichment program.
The Vienna briefing was one among many private and public forums in which the Bush administration portrayed a menacing Iraqi nuclear threat, even as important features of its evidence were being undermined. There were other White House assertions about forbidden weapons programs, including biological and chemical arms, for which there was consensus among analysts. But the danger of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein, more potent as an argument for war, began with weaker evidence and grew weaker still in the three months before war.
This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal documents and technical evidence not previously made public.
The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:
• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.
• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.
• Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.
• In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket."
• The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.
Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term nuclear potential.
"I never cared about the 'imminent threat,' " said one of the policymakers, with directly relevant responsibilities. "The threat was there in [Hussein's] presence in office. To me, just knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a lot of equipment. You can stare at the yellowcake [uranium ore] all you want. You need to convert it to gas and enrich it. That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the people who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and effort involved in producing the nuclear material and the physics package."
No White House, Pentagon or State Department policymaker agreed to speak on the record for this report about the administration's nuclear case. Answering questions Thursday before the National Association of Black Journalists, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said she is "certain to this day that this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it had biological and chemical weapons, that it had used them." White House officials referred all questions of detail to Tenet.
In an interview and a four-page written statement, Tenet defended the NIE prepared under his supervision in October. In that estimate, U.S. intelligence analysts judged that Hussein was intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and was trying to rebuild the capability to make one.
"We stand behind the judgments of the NIE" based on the evidence available at the time, Tenet said, and "the soundness and integrity of our process." The estimate was "the product of years of reporting and intelligence collection, analyzed by numerous experts in several different agencies."
Tenet said the time to "decide who was right and who was wrong" about prewar intelligence will not come until the Iraqi Survey Group, the CIA-directed, U.S. military postwar study in Iraq of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs is completed. The Bush administration has said this will require months or years.
Facts and Doubts
The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq loomed large in the Bush administration's efforts to convince the American public of the need for a preemptive strike. Beginning last August, Cheney portrayed Hussein's nuclear ambitions as a "mortal threat" to the United States. In the fall and winter, Rice, then Bush, marshaled the dreaded image of a "mushroom cloud."
By many accounts, including those of career officials who did not support the war, there were good reasons for concern that the Iraqi president might revive a program to enrich uranium to weapons grade and fabricate a working bomb. He had a well-demonstrated aspiration for nuclear weapons, a proficient scientific and engineering cadre, a history of covert development and a domestic supply of unrefined uranium ore. Iraq was generally believed to have kept the technical documentation for two advanced German centrifuge designs and the assembly diagrams for at least one type of "implosion device," which detonates a nuclear core.
What Hussein did not have was the principal requirement for a nuclear weapon, a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And the U.S. government, authoritative intelligence officials said, had only circumstantial evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain those materials.
But the Bush administration had reasons to imagine the worst. The CIA had faced searing criticism for its failures to foresee India's resumption of nuclear testing in 1998 and to "connect the dots" pointing to al Qaeda's attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Cheney, the administration's most influential advocate of a worst-case analysis, had been powerfully influenced by his experience as defense secretary just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
Former National Security Council official Richard A. Clarke recalled how information from freshly seized Iraqi documents disclosed the existence of a "crash program" to build a bomb in 1991. The CIA had known nothing of it.
"I can understand why that was a seminal experience for Cheney," Clarke said. "And when the CIA says [in 2002], 'We don't have any evidence,' his reaction is . . . 'We didn't have any evidence in 1991, either. Why should I believe you now?' "
Some strategists, in and out of government, argued that the uncertainty itself -- in the face of circumstantial evidence -- was sufficient to justify "regime change." But that was not what the Bush administration usually said to the American people.
To gird a nation for the extraordinary step of preemptive war -- and to obtain the minimum necessary support from allies, Congress and the U.N. Security Council -- the administration described a growing, even imminent, nuclear threat from Iraq.
The unveiling of that message began a year ago this week.
Cheney raised the alarm about Iraq's nuclear menace three times in August. He was far ahead of the president's public line. Only Bush and Cheney know, one senior policy official said, "whether Cheney was trying to push the president or they had decided to play good cop, bad cop."
On Aug. 7, Cheney volunteered in a question-and-answer session at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, speaking of Hussein, that "left to his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us that in the not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear weapons." On Aug. 26, he described Hussein as a "sworn enemy of our country" who constituted a "mortal threat" to the United States. He foresaw a time in which Hussein could "subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he said. "Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law."
That was a reference to Hussein Kamel, who had managed Iraq's special weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan. But Saddam Hussein lured Kamel back to Iraq, and he was killed in February 1996, so Kamel could not have sourced what U.S. officials "now know."
And Kamel's testimony, after defecting, was the reverse of Cheney's description. In one of many debriefings by U.S., Jordanian and U.N. officials, Kamel said on Aug. 22, 1995, that Iraq's uranium enrichment programs had not resumed after halting at the start of the Gulf War in 1991. According to notes typed for the record by U.N. arms inspector Nikita Smidovich, Kamel acknowledged efforts to design three different warheads, "but not now, before the Gulf War."
'Educating the Public'
Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities."
In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.
The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
The first days of September would bring some of the most important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.
A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan speeches and white papers. There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was among the most prominent.
'A Mushroom Cloud'
The day after publication of Card's marketing remark, Bush and nearly all his top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an Iraqi nuclear bomb.
Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair conferred at Camp David that Saturday, Sept. 7, and they each described alarming new evidence. Blair said proof that the threat is real came in "the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites." Bush said "a report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they [Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
There was no new IAEA report. Blair appeared to be referring to news reports describing curiosity at the nuclear agency about repairs at sites of Iraq's former nuclear program. Bush cast as present evidence the contents of a report from 1996, updated in 1998 and 1999. In those accounts, the IAEA described the history of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that arms inspectors had systematically destroyed.
A White House spokesman later acknowledged that Bush "was imprecise" on his source but stood by the crux of his charge. The spokesman said U.S. intelligence, not the IAEA, had given Bush his information.
That, too, was garbled at best. U.S. intelligence reports had only one scenario for an Iraqi bomb in six months to a year, premised on Iraq's immediate acquisition of enough plutonium or enriched uranium from a foreign source.
"That is just about the same thing as saying that if Iraq gets a bomb, it will have a bomb," said a U.S. intelligence analyst who covers the subject. "We had no evidence for it."
Two debuts took place on Sept. 8: the aluminum tubes and the image of "a mushroom cloud." A Sunday New York Times story quoted anonymous officials as saying the "diameter, thickness and other technical specifications" of the tubes -- precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts -- showed that they were "intended as components of centrifuges."
No one knows when Iraq will have its weapon, the story said, but "the first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."
Top officials made the rounds of Sunday talk shows that morning. Rice's remarks echoed the newspaper story. She said on CNN's "Late Edition" that Hussein was "actively pursuing a nuclear weapon" and that the tubes -- described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as "dual-use" items -- were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."
"There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons," Rice added, "but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Anna Perez, a communications adviser to Rice, said Rice did not come looking for an opportunity to say that. "There was nothing in her mind that said, 'I have to push the nuclear issue,' " Perez said, "but Wolf [Blitzer] asked the question."
Powell, a confidant said, found it "disquieting when people say things like mushroom clouds." But he contributed in other ways to the message. When asked about biological and chemical arms on Fox News, he brought up nuclear weapons and cited the "specialized aluminum tubing" that "we saw in reporting just this morning."
Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," also mentioned the tubes and said "increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked listeners to "imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction," which would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."
Bush evoked the mushroom cloud on Oct. 7, and on Nov. 12 Gen. Tommy R. Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, said inaction might bring "the sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major population centers on this planet."
'Literary License'
In its initial meetings, Card's Iraq task force ordered a series of white papers. After a general survey of Iraqi arms violations, the first of the single-subject papers -- never published -- was "A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein's Quest for Nuclear Weapons."
Wilkinson, at the time White House deputy director of communications for planning, gathered a yard-high stack of intelligence reports and press clippings.
Wilkinson said he conferred with experts from the National Security Council and Cheney's office. Other officials said Will Tobey and Susan Cook, working under senior director for counterproliferation Robert Joseph, made revisions and circulated some of the drafts. Under the standard NSC review process, they checked the facts.
In its later stages, the draft white paper coincided with production of a National Intelligence Estimate and its unclassified summary. But the WHIG, according to three officials who followed the white paper's progress, wanted gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence.
The fifth draft of the paper was obtained by The Washington Post. White House spokesmen dismissed the draft as irrelevant because Rice decided not to publish it. Wilkinson said Rice and Joseph felt the paper "was not strong enough."
The document offers insight into the Bush administration's priorities and methods in shaping a nuclear message. The white paper was assembled by some of the same team, and at the same time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the president and top officials. A senior intelligence official said last October that the president's speechwriters took "literary license" with intelligence, a phrase applicable to language used by administration officials in some of the white paper's most emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere.
The draft white paper precedes other known instances in which the Bush administration considered the now-discredited claim that Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." For a speechwriter, uranium was valuable as an image because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the uranium would return again and again, including the Jan. 28 State of the Union address and three other Bush administration statements that month.
Other errors and exaggerations in public White House claims were repeated, or had their first mention, in the white paper.
Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N. arms inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show "many signs of the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program." Inspectors did not say that. The paper also quoted the first half of a sentence from a Time magazine interview with U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix: "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos." The second half of the sentence, not quoted, was: "but you don't know what's under them."
As Bush did, the white paper cited the IAEA's description of Iraq's defunct nuclear program in language that appeared to be current. The draft said, for example, that "since the beginning of the nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert nuclear reactor fuel for . . . nuclear weapons." The crash program began in late 1990 and ended with the war in January 1991. The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is gone.
'Footnotes and Disclaimers'
A senior intelligence official said the White House preferred to avoid a National Intelligence Estimate, a formal review of competing evidence and judgments, because it knew "there were disagreements over details in almost every aspect of the administration's case against Iraq." The president's advisers, the official said, did not want "a lot of footnotes and disclaimers."
But Bush needed bipartisan support for war-making authority in Congress. In early September, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began asking why there had been no authoritative estimate of the danger posed by Iraq. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote Sept. 9 of his "concern that the views of the U.S. intelligence community are not receiving adequate attention by policymakers in both Congress and the executive branch." When Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then committee chairman, insisted on an NIE in a classified letter two days later, Tenet agreed.
Explicitly intended to assist Congress in deciding whether to authorize war, the estimate was produced in two weeks, an extraordinary deadline for a document that usually takes months. Tenet said in an interview that "we had covered parts of all those programs over 10 years through NIEs and other reports, and we had a ton of community product on all these issues."
Even so, the intelligence community was now in a position of giving its first coordinated answer to a question that every top national security official had already answered. "No one outside the intelligence community told us what to say or not to say," Tenet wrote in reply to questions for this article.
The U.S. government possessed no specific information on Iraqi efforts to acquire enriched uranium, according to six people who participated in preparing for the estimate. It knew only that Iraq sought to buy equipment of the sort that years of intelligence reports had said "may be" intended for or "could be" used in uranium enrichment.
Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director now leading a review of the agency's intelligence analysis about Iraq, said in an interview that the CIA collected almost no hard information about Iraq's weapons programs after the departure of IAEA and U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, arms inspectors during the Clinton administration. He said that was because of a lack of spies inside Iraq.
Tenet took issue with that view, saying in an interview, "When inspectors were pushed out in 1998, we did not sit back. . . . The fact is we made significant professional progress." In his written statement, he cited new evidence on biological and missile programs, but did not mention Hussein's nuclear pursuits.
The estimate's "Key Judgment" said: "Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that UNSCOM inspectors departed -- December 1998."
According to Kerr, the analysts had good reasons to say that, but the reasons were largely "inferential."
Hussein was known to have met with some weapons physicists, and praised them as "nuclear mujaheddin." But the CIA had "reasonably good intelligence in terms of the general activities and whereabouts" of those scientists, said another analyst with the relevant clearances, and knew they had generally not reassembled into working groups. In a report to Congress in 2001, the agency could conclude only that some of the scientists "probably" had "continued at least low-level theoretical R&D [research and development] associated with its nuclear program."
Analysts knew Iraq had tried recently to buy magnets, high-speed balancing machines, machine tools and other equipment that had some potential for use in uranium enrichment, though no less for conventional industry. Even assuming the intention, the parts could not all be made to fit a coherent centrifuge model. The estimate acknowledged that "we lack specific information on many key aspects" of the program, and analysts presumed they were seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
According to outside scientists and intelligence officials, the most important factor in the CIA's nuclear judgment was Iraq's attempt to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. The tubes were the core evidence for a centrifuge program tied to building a nuclear bomb. Even circumstantially, the CIA reported no indication of uranium enrichment using anything but centrifuges.
That interpretation of the tubes was a victory for the man named Joe, who made the issue his personal crusade. He worked in the gas centrifuge program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1980s. He is not, associates said, a nuclear physicist, but an engineer whose work involved the platform upon which centrifuges were mounted.
At some point he joined the CIA. By the end of the 1990s, according to people who know him casually, he worked in export controls.
Joe played an important role in discovering Iraq's plans to buy aluminum tubes from China in 2000, with an Australian intermediary. U.N. sanctions forbade Iraq to buy anything with potential military applications, and members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a voluntary alliance, include some forms of aluminum tubing on their list of equipment that could be used for uranium enrichment.
Joe saw the tubes as centrifuge rotors that could be used to process uranium into weapons-grade material. In a gas centrifuge, the rotor is a thin-walled cylinder, open at both ends, that spins at high speed under a magnet. The device extracts the material used in a weapon from a gaseous form of uranium.
In July 2001, about 3,000 tubes were intercepted in Jordan on their way to Iraq, a big step forward in the agency's efforts to understand what Iraq was trying to do. The CIA gave Joe an award for exceptional performance, throwing its early support to an analysis that helped change the agency's mind about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear ambitions.
"He grabbed that information early on, and he made a name for himself," a career U.S. government nuclear expert said.
'Stretches the Imagination'
Doubts about Joe's theory emerged quickly among the government's centrifuge physicists. The intercepted tubes were too narrow, long and thick-walled to fit a known centrifuge design. Aluminum had not been used for rotors since the 1950s. Iraq had two centrifuge blueprints, stolen in Europe, that were far more efficient and already known to work. One used maraging steel, a hard steel alloy, for the rotors, the other carbon fiber.
Joe and his supporters said the apparent drawbacks were part of Iraq's concealment plan. Hussein's history of covert weapons development, Tenet said in his written statement, included "built-in cover stories."
"This is a case where different people had honorable and different interpretations of intentions," said an Energy Department analyst who has reviewed the raw data. "If you go to a nuclear [counterproliferation official] and say I've got these aluminum tubes, and it's about Iraq, his first inclination is to say it's for nuclear use."
But the government's centrifuge scientists -- at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its sister institutions -- unanimously regarded this possibility as implausible.
In late 2001, experts at Oak Ridge asked an alumnus, Houston G. Wood III, to review the controversy. Wood, founder of the Oak Ridge centrifuge physics department, is widely acknowledged to be among the most eminent living experts.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Wood said in an interview that "it would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges. It stretches the imagination to come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts that feel differently."
As an academic, Wood said, he would not describe "anything that you absolutely could not do." But he said he would "like to see, if they're going to make that claim, that they have some explanation of how you do that. Because I don't see how you do it."
A CIA spokesman said the agency does have support for its view from centrifuge experts. He declined to elaborate.
In the last week of September, the development of the NIE required a resolution of the running disagreement over the significance of the tubes. The Energy Department had one vote. Four agencies -- with specialties including eavesdropping, maps and foreign military forces -- judged that the tubes were part of a centrifuge program that could be used for nuclear weapons. Only the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research joined the judgment of the Energy Department. The estimate, as published, said that "most analysts" believed the tubes were suitable and intended for a centrifuge cascade.
Majority votes make poor science, said Peter D. Zimmerman, a former chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
"In this case, the experts were at Z Division at Livermore [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] and in DOE intelligence here in town, and they were convinced that no way in hell were these likely to be centrifuge tubes," he said.
Tenet said the Department of Energy was not the only agency with experts on the issue; the CIA consulted military battlefield rocket experts, as well as its own centrifuge experts.
Unravelings
On Feb. 5, two weeks after Joe's Vienna briefing, Powell gave what remains the government's most extensive account of the aluminum tubes, in an address to the U.N. Security Council. He did not mention the existence of the Medusa rocket or its Iraqi equivalent, though he acknowledged disagreement among U.S. intelligence analysts about the use of the tubes.
Powell's CIA briefers, using data originating with Joe, told him that Iraq had "overspecified" requirements for the tubes, increasing expense without making them more useful to rockets. That helped persuade Powell, a confidant said, that Iraq had some other purpose for the tubes.
"Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so," Powell said in his speech. He said different batches "seized clandestinely before they reached Iraq" showed a "progression to higher and higher levels of specification, including in the latest batch an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces. . . . Why would they continue refining the specification, go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?"
An anodized coating is actually a strong argument for use in rockets, according to several scientists in and out of government. It resists corrosion of the sort that ruined Iraq's previous rocket supply. To use the tubes in a centrifuge, experts told the government, Iraq would have to remove the anodized coating.
Iraq did change some specifications from order to order, the procurement records show, but there is not a clear progression to higher precision. One tube sample was rejected because its interior was unfinished, too uneven to be used in a rocket body. After one of Iraq's old tubes got stuck in a launcher and exploded, Baghdad's subsequent orders asked for more precision in roundness.
U.S. and European analysts said they had obtained records showing that Italy's Medusa rocket has had its specifications improved 10 times since 1978. Centrifuge experts said in interviews that the variations had little or no significance for uranium enrichment, especially because the CIA's theory supposes Iraq would do extensive machining to adapt the tubes as rotors.
For rockets, however, the tubes fit perfectly. Experts from U.S. national labs, working temporarily with U.N. inspectors in Iraq, observed production lines for the rockets at the Nasser factory north of Baghdad. Iraq had run out of body casings at about the time it ordered the aluminum tubes, according to officials familiar with the experts' reports. Thousands of warheads, motors and fins were crated at the assembly lines, awaiting the arrival of tubes.
"Most U.S. experts," Powell asserted, "think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium." He said "other experts, and the Iraqis themselves," said the tubes were really for rockets.
Wood, the centrifuge physicist, said "that was a personal slam at everybody in DOE," the Energy Department. "I've been grouped with the Iraqis, is what it amounts to. I just felt that the wording of that was probably intentional, but it was also not very kind. It did not recognize that dissent can exist."
Staff writers Glenn Kessler, Dana Priest and Richard Morin and staff researchers Lucy Shackelford, Madonna Lebling and Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
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