Senator Prods Bush on Prewar Iraq Claims
Tom Abbott
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Intelligence.html
Senator Prods Bush on Prewar Iraq Claims
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:23 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush could make the controversy
over the now-infamous 16 words of his State of the Union
address go away by telling Americans whether the speech's
justification for war was exaggerated, the vice chairman of
the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday.
[No, he could not, because the liberal press doesn't want
it to go away.]
``It's just a question of was it right, or was it wrong?''
Sen. Jay Rockefeller said.
He said the question is not whether Bush tried to mislead by
using suspect British government information that Iraq
sought to buy uranium in Africa, and that Democrats should
not personalize or politicize the argument.
[The British intelligence is only suspect to President
Bush's enemies.]
``Intelligence is the basis now of war-fighting,''
Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said on ``Fox News Sunday.'' Because
of that, he said, ``it's very important to intelligence to
say that facts really do matter, they count, they have to be
accurate.''
[You state the obvious. Of course, the reason for this
statement is to insinuate that President Bush was
inaccurate.]
Speaking up for the Bush administration, House Speaker
Dennis Hastert said on the same program that the decision to
include the sentence ``was made by the speechwriters and by
the folks in the White House'' using various intelligence
sources that were thought reliable. If it wasn't, he said,
much of the blame falls on former President Clinton.
``You know, intelligence is not an exact science,'' said
Hastert, R-Ill. Before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
``we had a hard time just figuring out what was going,
because our foreign intelligence was decimated. The human
intelligence was decimated in 10 years before'' by Clinton's
proclivity not to use human rights violators and other shady
individuals as intelligence operatives.
``We've spent the last four years, or 3 1/2 years, trying to
build up credible intelligence sources so we can get people
to get the human intelligence that we need,'' Hastert said.
White House officials have admitted that the Iraqi
uranium-shopping report should not have appeared in the Jan.
28 speech and have issued varying versions of why it was.
[That was their one and only mistake in this incident.
Every word President Bush said was true, and they should not
have backed down.]
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has said
no top officials in the White House knew of a report by a
CIA emissary that said the report appeared to be bogus.
[It doesn't matter if forged documents were involved
because other sources, which have not been refuted, pointed
to the same conclusion.]
On CBS' ``Face the Nation,'' Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., a
candidate for next year's presidential nomination, said the
intelligence was available that should have made Bush
realize the information in the uranium report was suspect.
[Some intelligence people thought it was suspect and some
thought it was good information. A President of the United
States should err on the side of caution, and must assume a
worst-case scenario. Besides, the war was not predicated on
this particular bit of intelligence, but was predicated on
Saddam having possessed weapons of mass destruction, which
everyone agrees was accurate, and on the fact that Saddam
refused to tell the disposition of these weapons. President
Bush had to assume he still had them, and acted
accordingly.]
One source was Vice President Dick Cheney, he said.
``The vice president is the one who went to the CIA on
several occasions. He asked specifically for additional
information on the Niger-Iraq connection. The United States
sent an experienced ambassador,
[A Clintonista with a clear prejudice against the Bush
administration and its policies. Hardly a neutral party.]
who came back after a full review with a report that these
were fabricated documents,'' Graham said.
["Full review"! A huge distortion of the truth. This guy
went to Niger, sat around with his old buddies, asked them
is they sold uranium to Saddam, and when they said no, he
accepted their word at face value and went home and claimed
he knew what went on in Niger. It's a joke.]
``You cannot tell me that the vice president didn't receive
the same report that the CIA received, and that the vice
president didn't communicate that report to the president or
national security advisers to the president.''
[If I had received such a report from such a person, I
would have dismissed it and put my faith in more reliable
sources such as British intelligence.]
Rockefeller's misgivings about the administration's handling
of prewar intelligence are so strong that he now says it's
``hard to say'' whether the invasion he voted for was
justified.
[What an idiot! The justification for the invasion was
Saddam not complying with UN Resolution 1441, requiring him
to tell what he did with his weapons of mass destruction.
We don't need the CIA or British intelligence to tell us
Saddam was not in compliance. It was there for all the
world to see, including this Senate demagogue.]
``I hope we find weapons of mass destruction,'' he said.
[We will. Saddam did not give up $100 billion in revenue
just to fool us into thinking he still had weapons of mass
destruction.]
Iraq's purported stockpiles of such arms and Saddam's
willingness to use them were the principal reasons Bush gave
in the spring for pressing with such urgency for military
action. None were used to counter the U.S.-led force's blitz
to Baghdad, and none has been found since.
[House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on "Meet the
Press" a few months ago, that there was "no doubt" Saddam
had weapons of mass destruction. Was she lying about it
Senator?]
The CIA sent David Kay, a former weapons inspector for the
United Nations, to Iraq a month ago to investigate.
Rockefeller was asked about Kay's signals to Rockefeller's
intelligence committee and elsewhere of progress.
``The case he made to us was really more of, `There are
programs of the making of weapons of mass destruction.' Now,
the State of the Union was more about, `They have them,'''
Rockefeller said.
``If you have programs, little bits and pieces, that does
not necessarily make an imminent threat.''
[Do you want to gamble the safety of the American people
on it? I'm glad President Bush does not.]
end
TA
Joe S.
news:0qbmhvgesu27q9hfo...@4ax.com...
> Found at:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Intelligence.html
>
>
> Senator Prods Bush on Prewar Iraq Claims
>
> By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
>
>
> Filed at 1:23 p.m. ET
>
> WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush could make the controversy
> over the now-infamous 16 words of his State of the Union
> address go away by telling Americans whether the speech's
> justification for war was exaggerated, the vice chairman of
> the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday.
>
>
> [No, he could not, because the liberal press doesn't want
> it to go away.]
Bush will not admit this -- though it's now clear to a blind man -- because
he can't admit that he lied.
>
>
>
> ``It's just a question of was it right, or was it wrong?''
> Sen. Jay Rockefeller said.
>
> He said the question is not whether Bush tried to mislead by
> using suspect British government information that Iraq
> sought to buy uranium in Africa, and that Democrats should
> not personalize or politicize the argument.
>
>
> [The British intelligence is only suspect to President
> Bush's enemies.]
And to US intelligence agencies.
>
>
>
> ``Intelligence is the basis now of war-fighting,''
> Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said on ``Fox News Sunday.'' Because
> of that, he said, ``it's very important to intelligence to
> say that facts really do matter, they count, they have to be
> accurate.''
>
>
> [You state the obvious. Of course, the reason for this
> statement is to insinuate that President Bush was
> inaccurate.]
Not inaccurate. Wrong and lying.
>
>
>
> Speaking up for the Bush administration, House Speaker
> Dennis Hastert said on the same program that the decision to
> include the sentence ``was made by the speechwriters and by
> the folks in the White House'' using various intelligence
> sources that were thought reliable. If it wasn't, he said,
> much of the blame falls on former President Clinton.
>
> ``You know, intelligence is not an exact science,'' said
> Hastert, R-Ill. Before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
> ``we had a hard time just figuring out what was going,
> because our foreign intelligence was decimated. The human
> intelligence was decimated in 10 years before'' by Clinton's
> proclivity not to use human rights violators and other shady
> individuals as intelligence operatives.
>
> ``We've spent the last four years, or 3 1/2 years, trying to
> build up credible intelligence sources so we can get people
> to get the human intelligence that we need,'' Hastert said.
>
> White House officials have admitted that the Iraqi
> uranium-shopping report should not have appeared in the Jan.
> 28 speech and have issued varying versions of why it was.
>
>
> [That was their one and only mistake in this incident.
> Every word President Bush said was true, and they should not
> have backed down.]
Tell me another one -- this one had me ROTFLMAO.
>
>
>
> Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has said
> no top officials in the White House knew of a report by a
> CIA emissary that said the report appeared to be bogus.
>
>
> [It doesn't matter if forged documents were involved
> because other sources, which have not been refuted, pointed
> to the same conclusion.]
>
Sources such as the Iraqi National Congress -- which have been refuted.
>
>
> On CBS' ``Face the Nation,'' Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., a
> candidate for next year's presidential nomination, said the
> intelligence was available that should have made Bush
> realize the information in the uranium report was suspect.
>
>
> [Some intelligence people thought it was suspect and some
> thought it was good information. A President of the United
> States should err on the side of caution, and must assume a
> worst-case scenario. Besides, the war was not predicated on
> this particular bit of intelligence, but was predicated on
> Saddam having possessed weapons of mass destruction, which
> everyone agrees was accurate, and on the fact that Saddam
> refused to tell the disposition of these weapons. President
> Bush had to assume he still had them, and acted
> accordingly.]
>
Saddam did not need to tell the disposition of the weapons -- UN inspectors
had already determined that the weapons had been destroyed.
>
>
> One source was Vice President Dick Cheney, he said.
>
> ``The vice president is the one who went to the CIA on
> several occasions. He asked specifically for additional
> information on the Niger-Iraq connection. The United States
> sent an experienced ambassador,
>
>
> [A Clintonista with a clear prejudice against the Bush
> administration and its policies. Hardly a neutral party.]
Dick Cheny a "Clintonista?" Someone alert Cheney - - he'll be delighted to
hear that.
>
>
> who came back after a full review with a report that these
> were fabricated documents,'' Graham said.
>
>
> ["Full review"! A huge distortion of the truth. This guy
> went to Niger, sat around with his old buddies, asked them
> is they sold uranium to Saddam, and when they said no, he
> accepted their word at face value and went home and claimed
> he knew what went on in Niger. It's a joke.]
That's what is publicly known. More than likely, he worked with the CIA
station chief to get to the bottom of it.
>
>
> ``You cannot tell me that the vice president didn't receive
> the same report that the CIA received, and that the vice
> president didn't communicate that report to the president or
> national security advisers to the president.''
>
>
> [If I had received such a report from such a person, I
> would have dismissed it and put my faith in more reliable
> sources such as British intelligence.]
This one also had me ROTFLMAO.
>
>
>
> Rockefeller's misgivings about the administration's handling
> of prewar intelligence are so strong that he now says it's
> ``hard to say'' whether the invasion he voted for was
> justified.
>
>
> [What an idiot! The justification for the invasion was
> Saddam not complying with UN Resolution 1441, requiring him
> to tell what he did with his weapons of mass destruction.
> We don't need the CIA or British intelligence to tell us
> Saddam was not in compliance. It was there for all the
> world to see, including this Senate demagogue.]
Israel has not complied with dozen UN resolutions. Saddle up the 3rd
Infantry Division for the march on Jerusalem.
>
>
> ``I hope we find weapons of mass destruction,'' he said.
>
>
> [We will. Saddam did not give up $100 billion in revenue
> just to fool us into thinking he still had weapons of mass
> destruction.]
We're waiting.
>
>
> Iraq's purported stockpiles of such arms and Saddam's
> willingness to use them were the principal reasons Bush gave
> in the spring for pressing with such urgency for military
> action. None were used to counter the U.S.-led force's blitz
> to Baghdad, and none has been found since.
>
>
> [House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on "Meet the
> Press" a few months ago, that there was "no doubt" Saddam
> had weapons of mass destruction. Was she lying about it
> Senator?]
She was repeating, in good faith, what the President and his clowns had told
her. She was trying to support Bush -- too bad she was duped by her own
president.
>
>
>
> The CIA sent David Kay, a former weapons inspector for the
> United Nations, to Iraq a month ago to investigate.
> Rockefeller was asked about Kay's signals to Rockefeller's
> intelligence committee and elsewhere of progress.
>
> ``The case he made to us was really more of, `There are
> programs of the making of weapons of mass destruction.' Now,
> the State of the Union was more about, `They have them,'''
> Rockefeller said.
>
> ``If you have programs, little bits and pieces, that does
> not necessarily make an imminent threat.''
>
>
> [Do you want to gamble the safety of the American people
> on it? I'm glad President Bush does not.]
Bush wants to trash the security of the American people with John Ashcroft
and his secret arrests without trial.
--
----
Joe S.
>
>
>
> end
>
>
> TA
Starman
wrote:
(outraged-relief snip)
Your stubborn defense of a morally-bankrupt totalitarian regime is at
best lame if not itself disingenuous. Seems, those who champion the
cheap-labor conservatives must needs become so fatalistic and
opportunistic that they lose critical discernment and perspective,
adopting an expedient 'end justifies means' rationale that readily
excuses any manner of exaggeration, deceptions, distortions, frauds,
falsehoods, and outright lies according to convenience. Fact is, the
American citizenry have been brazenly misled to support an immoral,
illegal war involving the commission of grevious war crimes and
atrocities, including the overwhelming use of prohibited dangerous
weapons and the deliberate targetting of civil infrastructure,
contrary to some of the most important agreed-upon civilized rules of
warfare and humanitarian principles instituted in the Geneva and
Nuremburg conventions.
Not only is the Bush Regime illigitimate, but they have done more in
two-and-a-half-years to destroy the most essential values and features
central to American government and economy than any other Presidential
Administration in history. Those who continue to advocate the
GOP/necon agenda despite the voluminous evidence of perfidy, fraud and
contrived catastrophe have either evidently succumbed to its
masterfully created and deployed propaganda, or else have an invested
stake in the model of New World Order being instituted by the necon's
quest for a fascist imperium.
Starman
***
New definition of irony:
'Today's liberal Democrats are like the supporters of the Third Reich
of the '30's and '40's - they absolutely trusted the government to
"make things right". '
--Comment made on the internet by an ardent GW Bush supporter.
"What I found, in critically examining Bush's evidence, is not pretty.
The African uranium matter is merely indicative of larger problems,
and troubling questions of potential and widespread criminality when
taking the nation to war. It appears that not only the Niger uranium
hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's
weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony." ~ James W. Dean
"Like previous forms of totalitarianism, the Bush administration
boasts a reckless unilateralism that believes the United States can
demand unquestioning support, on terms it dictates; ignores treaties
and violates international law at will; invades other countries
without provocation; and incarcerates persons indefinitely without
charging them with a crime or allowing access to counsel. The drive
toward total power can take different forms, as Mussolini's Italy,
Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union suggest." ~ Sheldon S.
Wolin
The focus on missing weapons threatens to obscure the larger
point: that with or without chemical and biological weapons, Iraq was
never a national security threat to the United States.
Granted: Bush and Blair bet that weapons would turn up somewhere. They
lied when they professed certainty about the massive size and dreadful
nature of those weapons. They lied when they asserted an al-Qaeda
connection. They lied when they hid exculpatory evidence from the
public while waving around distortions and forgeries to strengthen
their case. Most importantly, though, they lied when they acted as if
Iraqi weapons, real or imagined, were their reason for going to war in
the first place. ~ Mathew Barganier
http://www.antiwar.com/barganier/ba060903.html
Put me virtually anywhere in the United States, give me a car full of
gas and a Rand McNally roadmap, and I will find weapons of mass
destruction (or what the U.S. would count as such in Iraq) before the
tank needs refilling. That one can't do the same in Iraq shows Saddam
was a minor leaguer, at worst. But, desperate to save face, the War
Party will pass off any discovery as their El Dorado. Let them stumble
over one high-strength aluminum tube, and Pentagon alchemists will try
to make it gold. ~ Mathew Barganier
http://www.antiwar.com/barganier/ba060903.html
-- Cato Institute: In any case, Iraq invasion was unjustified --
excerpts:
The proposition that Saddam Hussein (search) was willing to hand over
weapons of mass destruction to terrorists appears to have been based
on sheer speculation, and implausible speculation at that. Despite
over 20 years of supporting terror against Israel, Saddam never turned
over chemical or biological weapons to Palestinian terror groups
(search), reasoning, correctly, that such action would provoke massive
retaliation. Still less was he likely to hand over such weapons to Al
Qaeda, a group that has long opposed his "socialist infidel" rule and
could not be trusted to keep the deal secret. [and could
not be trusted not to later use it against HIM, we might add,
given the extreme hatred they had for Saddam's "infedel" regime -Ed]
. . .
And even if one believed the administration's assertions that Saddam
might risk destroying his regime by giving Al Qaeda weapons of mass
destruction, it was obvious that a war aimed at overthrowing Saddam
would greatly increase the chances of those weapons ending up in Al
Qaeda's hands.
. . .
Sometime in the coming months, U.S. forces may well happen upon some
VX canisters or anthrax stockpiles, and the administration will
breathe a sigh of relief. Such a discovery may change the media's
focus, but it can't change the facts: This war did not avert a serious
threat to the United States. Instead, it may have created new ones.
"The Case of the Missing WMDs," ~ Gene Healy, senior editor at the
Cato Institute.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,89152,00.html
"American soldiers continue to die in Iraq, and the Republicans do not
want us to know why... It is time to lay bare the conscience of the
White House with full public hearings. The way his claims are
crumbling, hearings may be the only thing that will stop Bush
from plunging his dagger of deceit right through the heart of our
democracy and the hearts of our soldiers." ~ Derrick Z. Jackson
Playing word games with the truth: "President [sic] Bush's top aides
have resorted to silly hair-splitting in trying to deny that he and
they misled America and the world about the nuclear threat supposedly
posed by Saddam Hussein. They did mislead us." ~ Star-News
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/201/nation/Hype_seen_in_weapons_rhetoric+.shtml
''They were definitely making things a little bit clearer than the
truth in order to sell the war,'' said John Pike, who is the director
of GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank in Alexandria, Va. ''They were
acting like it was an electoral campaign -- you can say all kinds of
wild things and whatever it would take to get people to buy the war.''
. . .
While most of the intelligence available to top officials in the runup
to the war is secret, a series of intelligence community assessments
was made public by the administration; others have been leaked to the
media. Many of the assessments raise questions about liberties that
administration officials took in interpreting the data, the
intelligence officials say.
. . .
But weapons specialists note that ''developing a program'' --
intending or endeavoring to acquire weapons of mass destruction --
represents a far less imminent threat than would the possession of a
stockpile of such arms, raising questions about the haste to go to war
in Iraq without broad international support.
Retired Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, a former director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, said policy makers have long had a
tendency to hype intelligence information. ''What we have going on is
this proclivity, not just in this administration, by decision makers
to fail to put things in the right context,'' he said.
________________________________
Fraud Traced to the White House --How California's energy scam was
inextricably linked to a war for oil scheme:
"This story ends as it began: with unrequited lies, deception and
fraud. Three sentences inserted into the National Energy Policy report
reveal: 1) the White House knew the California crisis was man-made; 2)
knew the power companies were manipulating the market in California;
3) and knew these facts at the time the people of California were
being fleeced by the scam; 4) yet the Bush White House did nothing to
stop the fraud. A special prosecutor should be appointed by Congress
to investigate this whole matter as well as what Mr. Bush and Mr.
Cheney knew and when they knew it." ~ Katherine Yurica
Lawson English
"Joe S." <j...@schlatter.org> wrote in message
news:bffga...@enews1.newsguy.com...[...]
> > [The British intelligence is only suspect to President
> > Bush's enemies.]
>
> And to US intelligence agencies.
>
He just said that.
--
Roger
few hours may get it from him.
Maybe we should try whatever they're using in Guantánamo Bay.
"Tom Abbott" <tab...@intellex.com> wrote in message
news:0qbmhvgesu27q9hfo...@4ax.com...