Post by chunkymonkey on Jul 29, 2004 1:00:14 GMT -5
midwestfan said:
Answer: Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean (D), appearing on "Face the Nation" in September 2002
Good reference, MWF! The point is, (R), that we had 8 years of talk and little action. From the 9-11 report:
The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamist extremists had given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers. Although Usama Bin Ladin himself would not emerge as a signal threat until the late 1990s, the threat of Islamist terrorism grew over the decade. In February 1993, a group led by Ramzi Yousef tried to bring down the World Trade Center .... In October 1993, Somali tribesmen shot down U.S. helicopters ... In early 1995, police in Manila uncovered a plot by Ramzi Yousef to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners ... 1995, a car bomb exploded outside the office of the U.S. program manager for the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, killing five Americans ... In June 1996, a truck bomb demolished the Khobar Towers ... In February 1998, Usama Bin Ladin and four others issued a self-styled fatwa, publicly declaring that it was God’s decree that every Muslim should try his utmost to kill any American, military or civilian ... In August 1998, Bin Ladin’s group, al Qaeda, carried out near-simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies ... In December 1999, Jordanian police foiled a plot to bomb hotels and other sites frequented by American tourists ... In October 2000, an al Qaeda team in Aden,Yemen, used a motorboat filled with explosives to blow a hole in the side of a destroyer ...
The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were far more elaborate, precise, and destructive than any of these earlier assaults. But by September 2001, the executive branch of the U.S. government, the Congress, the news media, and the American public had received clear warning that Islamist terrorists meant to kill Americans in high numbers.
It would be nice if these Monday morning quarterbacks in the Demo. party would admit that they saw the threat, talked about it, said it needed to be dealt with, read many of the same reports 43 read, believed there were WMD's, voted for action ... but now act like none of that ever happened. And the same can be said for the UN, France and Germany.
Let's suppose we come into October and we find a stash of WMD's ... buried 20 feet in the sand. My bet is that the flipflop would occur and the Demo's will start quoting their earlier warnings. They certainly wouldn't say, "We were wrong, Bush was right." This is all about politics. It's not about convictions ... What can be said to get a vote.
Last Edit: Jul 29, 2004 1:02:16 GMT -5 by chunkymonkey
Post by chunkymonkey on Jul 29, 2004 1:16:03 GMT -5
(R)uffda! said:
But the Islamist terrorists weren't coming from Iraq!
We shot the dog because the cat threw up on our bed.
What if the dog was feeding the cat and carried it over to the bed so it would throw up? ;D
I saw a 60-minutes program during the Clinton years where they filmed a Osama training camp teaching teenagers and 20-somethings how to kill Americans. In that segment, was a grounded 727 that terrorists used for mock highjackings. The 727 was in Iraq. Also in that segment were classrooms where grammer school kids were taught as a part of their curriculum that America was the Great Satan, etc. (Note, I'm not saying that classroom was in Iraq ...) In addition, it was well-known that Iraq funded terrorism (ie ... blow yourself up and your family gets $25k).
Notice that today, Saudi Arabi has shut down the "America is Satan" curriculum. I think they got the point ... you can't teach terrorism, fund terrorism, allow it to hang around ... and then not be included as a terrorist state.
Last Edit: Jul 29, 2004 1:17:44 GMT -5 by chunkymonkey
Kenneth Pollack is a former CIA analyst and director for Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council under Clinton. Far from an opponent of American militarism, he authored a book entitled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Nevertheless, in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine he has published an article that provides an insight into the means by which the Bush administration concocted intelligence to support its war plans. Pollack writes:
“The Administration gave greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded....
“Requests were constantly made for detailed analyses of newspaper articles that conformed to the views of Administration officials—pieces by conservative columnists such as Jim Hoagland, William Safire, and George F. Will....
“They set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, in order to sift through the information on Iraq themselves. To a great extent OSP personnel ‘cherry-picked’ the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration’s pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest.
“Most problematic of all, the OSP often chose to believe reports that trained intelligence officers considered unreliable or downright false. In particular, it gave great credence to reports from the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader was the Administration-backed Ahmed Chalabi.... One of the reasons the OSP generally believed Chalabi and the INC was that they were telling it what it wanted to hear.... Thus intelligence analysts spent huge amounts of time fighting bad information and trying to persuade Administration officials not to make policy decisions based on it....
“The Bush officials who created the OSP gave its reports directly to those in the highest levels of government, often passing raw, unverified intelligence straight to the Cabinet level as gospel. Senior Administration officials made public statements based on these reports—reports that the larger intelligence community knew to be erroneous (for instance, that there was hard and fast evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda).”
In a now notorious interview that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz gave to Vanity Fair magazine in May of 2003, he, apparently inadvertently, acknowledged that the claim of an imminent threat from Iraqi WMDs was decided upon by the Bush administration as the most effective pretext for invading Iraq. The key excerpts from the interview, which was subsequently published in the July 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, first appeared in American press reports on May 28, 2003.
Wolfowitz told his interviewer, Sam Tannenhaus, that three possible rationales were discussed: Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi support for terrorism, and the Baathist regime’s internal repression. Here is what Wolfowitz said:
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction....
“[T]here have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.... The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale that we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there’s the most disagreement within the bureaucracy....”<br> Does this read like the deliberations of objective policy makers who were being “misled” by faulty intelligence? To ask the question is to answer it.
In this interview—which is available on the US Department of Defense’s web site—Wolfowitz made the devastating admission that there was no consensus within the intelligence establishment of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Yet Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others in the administration routinely made precisely this claim, and the administration continues to do so up to the present day. Furthermore, in direct contradiction to subsequent statements of Bush spokesmen, including Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary told Vanity Fair that Saddam Hussein’s internal repression was “not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk.”<br> These published statements from one of the key war planners confirm that the issue of WMDs was cynically chosen as the best means to “sell” the war to a skeptical and reluctant public.
One other by now well-known link in the chain of government lies is sufficient to expose the absurdity of the argument that Bush was “misled” by faulty intelligence. In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address, Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” This was the most spectacular and chilling of the WMD claims made in the speech. It was immediately picked up by the broadcast news media and splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the US.
With this statement, Bush presented to the American people as fact a claim that had been specifically rejected at least three months earlier by none other than CIA director George Tenet. The head of the CIA had personally telephoned the White House in advance of the president’s October 7 speech in Cincinnatti, Ohio, to urge Bush to remove this allegation from the text of his address. The African uranium claim was, in fact, deleted from that speech.
Tenet intervened to stop Bush from using the African uranium claim for good reason. The previous February, Joseph Wilson IV, a 23-year career diplomat and US envoy to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf war, had been dispatched to Niger, at the behest of Cheney, to access the allegation that Iraq had purchased uranium from the central African country. The claim was based on a document that had been sold to the Italian intelligence service and passed on to Britain and the US.
Wilson reported back that the claim was “bogus and unrealistic.” A number of American and international intelligence agencies concluded that the document purporting to deal with the Iraqi uranium buy was a crude forgery. Two weeks before the start of the US-British invasion of Iraq, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in his report to the United Nations Security Council, declared the document to be “inauthentic” and dismissed the claim of Iraqi attempts to purchase African uranium as a fraud.
Yet even before Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union speech, the African uranium canard reappeared in administration propaganda. A December 19 fact sheet issued by the US State Department listed Iraq’s failure to declare “efforts to procure uranium from Niger” as one of the omissions in Baghdad’s December 12 report to the UN on its compliance with UN resolutions. In a column published in the January 23 New York Times entitled “Why We Know Iraq is Lying,” Condoleezza Rice wrote: “[T]he [Iraqi] declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad....”<br> Neither these statements nor Bush’s citation in his State of the Union Address can credibly be attributed to mere accident or bureaucratic incompetence. That Bush’s use of the bogus claim was premeditated and calculated is underscored by the fact that he attributed it to “the British government”—a ploy intended to get around the fact that it had been discredited by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies.
Why was it so important for the Bush administration to revive this particular WMD lie, notwithstanding objections from the head of the CIA himself? The answer is to be found in the increasingly unfavorable political situation the war plotters faced at the end of 2002. By December, UN weapons inspectors had returned to Iraq and had found no evidence of chemical or biological weapons stockpiles or nuclear weapons programs. Anti-war demonstrations were gaining strength in Europe and elsewhere internationally, and ever-larger numbers were marching in the streets of American cities. Moreover, the US and Britain were confronting growing opposition from France, Russia, China and Germany in their efforts to ram a new resolution authorizing an attack on Iraq through the UN Security Council.
It therefore became all the more critical, from the standpoint of Bush and company, to play the nuclear card: that is, to insist on their previous warnings that Iraq was perhaps only a year away from building a nuclear bomb. The threat of terrorists launching attacks with nuclear weapons was the government’s most effective means of generating an atmosphere of fear and panic, and thereby facilitating its war plans. But even Bush, Cheney and the others had been obliged to acknowledge that the precondition for Iraq constructing a nuclear weapon was its ability to obtain fissile material. The Niger canard fit the bill, and so they used it.
One of the few reasonably frank statements to come from the US political establishment was this assessment given last July by Joseph Wilson IV to the Washington Post, after Wilson went public about his role in the Niger affair: “It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war.
Post by Barefoot In Kailua on Jul 29, 2004 1:43:30 GMT -5
(R)uffda and Gorf, you are ruining the integrity of the game. Start your own thread to spew your lies and propaganda. A lack of intellect is no excuse to ruin the game!
Now, who was the idiot that said this...."I will be a president who will fight to protect Medicare and Social Security. I’m Dick Gephardt. That’s why I approved this message."
