Who Is Lying About Iraq?

[Don K Dyck]

The Clintonistas had a more reasoned foreign policy.

The Bushistas attack everyone who has the affrontery to live over the top of "their" oil.
Even the scandals of Africa hearken back to US foreign interests supporting genocide for oil.

The interesting development in the next year will be the opening of Iran's Eurotrading market for oil sales. This the real reason for sabre rattling on Iran because it is a bigger threat to US dollar hegemony than was Saddams change to selling oil in Euros.

Iran is now backed by Russia, China and Europe so wont be any easybeat for the US to push around this time without risking the whole national financial security. US dollars are artificially inflated by 40% through enforced dollar trading and the end is near. The reckoning will be unkind in a 1929 sort of way.

For China to divest a just portion of its mega holding of US T notes , spells doom for the US economy.

Whether it happens quick or slow, it will happen and the US doesnt have the resources to arbitrarily start a new war front when it already has sucked up 85% of the world loan monies to support its current overreached existence.

Any householder in that position would be crapping their pants right now.
Lucky Bush supporters aren't big on critical thinking about their futures with his policies.

Thanks Woody . . . the following news item from this morning now makes some sense. Even the Federal reserve realises that AmeriKKKa is up poo creek in a barbwire canoe . . .


Yuan float 'in China's interest'

Wednesday Nov 16 08:32 AEST

Federal Reserve Chairman nominee Ben Bernanke says it's in China's own interest to let its currency float freely and he hopes Beijing will do so.

"I think it's very much in China's own interest to let their currency float freely and be determined by the markets," Bernanke said in response to questions at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee.

"They're a very large country, they need to have an independent monetary policy, it's difficult for them to keep sterilising their interventions the way they have been doing so I believe they will come to the recognition, and I hope they do, that it's in their interest to let their currency be determined by market forces," he added.

*****

So while the PR China has been sucking good ole US of A dry of manufacturing jobs, it has also been accumulating a huge trade credit that will have to be paid off some day . . . SOON!

What bets that PR China joins the Eurotrading market by trading in a large slice of their US FR T-notes?

<This strategy should push up the value of other currencies, especially those NOT tied in any way to the $us dollar>

So another piece in the Gary Allen (1971) None Dare Call it Conspiracy jigsaw falls into place.

Does anybody know definitely if Bernanke is a member of the CFR?

 

[miles]

I'm finding it quite amusing that the Bush defenders have nothing left but his own stupidity and ineptitude to excuse him for all he has done, and hasn't done. I can't remember if anyone clung to Nixon in such a desperate fashion as his empire crumbled around him...

I'm finding it amusing that nobody has challenged anything in the article.

 

[Ishmael]

I'm finding it amusing that nobody has challenged anything in the article.

Do they ever miles?

Ishmael

 

[miles]

Do they ever miles?

Ishmael

Yes....but this time their silence is deafening.

 

[Beco]

miles, something I have always wondered since WMD were not found. Is it possible WMD could have been moved elsewhere?

Dumb question I know, perhaps you can shed some light on this.

how would he know??? Unless he moved them himself!!

 

[Borscht]

I normally don't c&p long pieces like this, but it probably won't be available on the WSJ website for very long.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540

____________________________________________________
Who Is Lying About Iraq?
A campaign of distortion aims to discredit the liberation.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Monday, November 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":

This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting:

This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.

Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson:

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")

But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."

Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:

Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

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.

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."

Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.

The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:

My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.

More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.

In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.

That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.

As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.

And again:

The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.

This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.

The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:

The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].

More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:

[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.

To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.

But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.

And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.

I was reading a book about the advance on Berlin a couple of weeks back.

Even when the tanks were rolling through their villages, many Germans still believed in just such a victory of their arms and ideals.

The Fox news network of the day had sold 'em this line about the Fuhrer being infallible.

It had told 'em that soon a corner would be turned, and that Adolf's wonder weapons would magically win the war.

And it had explained away how Slavic sub humans had kicked the shit out of their army.

You'd have loved it there, Miles.

 

[Ishmael]

Yes....but this time their silence is deafening.

The sound of children into mischief.

Ishmael

 

[ChauvanistPig]

I was reading a book about the advance on Berlin a couple of weeks back.

Even when the tanks were rolling through their villages, many Germans still believed in just such a victory of their arms and ideals.

The Fox news network of the day had sold 'em this line about the Fuhrer being infallible.

It had told 'em that soon a corner would be turned, and that Adolf's wonder weapons would magically win the war.

And it had explained away how Slavic sub humans had kicked the shit out of their army.

You'd have loved it there, Miles.

The GOP and Bush Admin needs to hire this guy
http://dunamai.com/Humor/BagdadBob/images/bagdad_bob_large.gif

 

[Borscht]

I'm finding it amusing that nobody has challenged anything in the article.

Presumably the Democrats don't won't to distract you Republicans while you're digging yourselves into an even deeper hole.

'Hmmm. So Bush is really a misunderstood genius ? How interesting. Why not put it on your campaign literature ?'

 

[Borscht]

The GOP and Bush Admin needs to hire this guy
http://dunamai.com/Humor/BagdadBob/images/bagdad_bob_large.gif

LOL.

How do you say 'We've turned the corner' in Arabic ?

 

[miles]

Great posts, Borscht.

 

[Ishmael]

Great posts, Borscht.

Did he say anything?

Ishmael

 

[miles]

Did he say anything?

Ishmael

What a dufus.

 

[Ishmael]

What a dufus.

Sorry I asked miles.

Ishmael

 

[miles]

Sorry I asked miles.

Ishmael

His av fits.

 

[Slowlane]

Nice article Miles, I’m afraid it was a waste of your time though. The left will never believe it and the rest of us already knew.

It’s depressing to listen what they are saying they said, and then re-listen to what they actually said. Or to listen to what they claim Bush said, compared to what he actually said.

Most of the lie seems to be on the other (the left) foot. But then thats how they do things over there.

 

[woody54]

Most of the lie seems to be on the other (the left) foot. But then thats how they do things over there.

The point you continue to avoid is the overview of US political strategic planning over the last 15 years. Everything that is happening has been in planning for years outside the Administration.

What is taking place is what was planned to follow on from Bush I Presidency but the CFR dupe Quayle was just too ridculous to get elected so the neocon agenda was delayed for 8 years That was when Saddam was originally scheduled for the chop.

BushII was dragged out the Bar for the same purpose, cleaned up and thrust into a sure thing Presidential election election to perform a front man job for CFR. Bush obviously came primed with a missioin to accomplish and he started in his first cabinet meeting demanding a way to get into Iraq. The programme of regime change is clearly documented by CFR agenda over that period but Clinton had a different approachto that Republicans have and he took a more diplomatic, less aggressive stance during his Presidency.
CFR needs a sociopath like Bush for this job, they chose him well and made him President.

To ignore this history gives a very shallow and imperfect view of US politics and reduced it to inane left/right meaningless and directionless backbiting.
There is nothing directionless about development of US interests. Its a pity so many are drawn into that pool of partisan blether than follows day to day politicking so they miss the overall stratagies coming on stream.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

Tide turning in GOP senators’ war view
Bipartisan amendment amounts to rebuff to Bush
ANALYSIS
By Dan Balz
The Washington Post
Updated: 10:08 p.m. ET Nov. 15, 2005

For the past three years, President Bush has set the course on U.S. policy in Iraq, and Republicans in Congress -- and many Democrats, too -- have dutifully followed his lead. Yesterday the Senate, responding to growing public frustration with the administration's war policy, signaled that those days are coming to an end.

The rebuff to the White House was muffled in the modulated language of a bipartisan amendment, but the message could not have been more clear. With their constituents increasingly unhappy with the U.S. mission in Iraq, Democrats and now Republicans are demanding that the administration show that it has a strategy to turn the conflict over to the Iraqis and eventually bring U.S. troops home.

"I think this is a clear sign that Republicans are walking away from the president, that they're no longer willing to tie their future and political standing to the president and his policy on Iraq," said Ivo H. Daalder, a Clinton administration official now at the Brookings Institution. "They found this was the easy way out -- an implicit rebuke, not an explicit rebuke. But this was a rebuke."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) declined in an interview to call the Senate-approved amendment, which he co-sponsored, a repudiation of the White House. Instead, he said, it shores up the administration's arguments. He noted that the National Security Council staff had been shown the language in advance and was given the opportunity to critique it.

But Warner also said senators were "not unmindful" of widespread unease in public opinion about the war. Calling the next 120 days critical to success, he said the United States must do all it can to prevent Iraq from fracturing into civil war. But he added that the Senate vote was a "strong message to Iraqi people and the Iraqi government that you have got to come to grip with your internal problems. . . . It's a signal to the Iraqis that we mean business."

The jolt to the White House came just as the administration was attempting to beat back perceptions that the president misled the country before the war by overstating the strength of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. That fight pits Democrats against Republicans.

En route to Asia on Monday, the president delivered another riposte to his critics, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld joined in yesterday, quoting statements from the late 1990s by President Bill Clinton and others in his administration about the threat posed by Iraq.

Another arena
If the fight over prewar intelligence has become a proxy battle over the question of whether it was right or wrong to go to war, yesterday's Senate debate moved the issue to another arena, to the question of whether the U.S. strategy to stabilize Iraq is working and what is the best way to end the occupation there.

James M. Lindsay, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Senate action "doesn't change much in terms of the substance of American policy, but it clearly does signal a change in the parameters of the political debate. . . . It says the American political debate has now shifted to how to get out of Iraq."

There are still significant differences between the two parties on this second question, and sizable differences within the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, prominent Democrats, including Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and former Senate Democratic leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.), have proposed far more explicit plans to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq. Others, such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), remain strong supporters of the war. But the vote yesterday showed that Republicans are growing nervous.

Yesterday's action came on a pair of amendments offered to the defense authorization bill. The Democratic amendment, sponsored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.) and many others, stated that 2006 should be a year of "significant transition" to Iraqi sovereignty, with Iraqi forces taking responsibility for their country's security. It mandated quarterly reports to Congress by the administration on progress toward that goal, and an estimated timetable for the eventual redeployment of U.S. forces. That amendment lost on a 58 to 40 vote.

The Republican amendment, co-sponsored by Warner and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), embraced the bulk of the Democratic amendment but removed what the White House and some Republicans saw as the most odious language, the requirement for the administration to establish an estimated timetable for withdrawal. With that change, the amendment sailed through on a vote of 79 to 19.

It would have been easy for Republicans to defeat the Democratic amendment and leave it at that, but given the state of public opinion and the opposition to Bush's policies, Republicans needed a vehicle to show constituents that they understand the public's frustration and to signal to the White House that they expect more than statements of optimism about the pace of a conflict in which American troops are dying almost every day.

White House communications director Nicole Wallace said the administration was not bothered by the day's events. "The Senate endorsed administration policy, which is a conditions-based withdrawal in Iraq. It also exposed a divide in the Democratic Party," she said.

Bolster confidence
Lieberman, one of five Democrats who oppose the Levin amendment, said he hoped the bipartisan vote would help diminish some of the partisanship that has surrounded the debate over Iraq of late. His goal, he said, is to maintain public support for the mission, but he said the administration must do more to bolster confidence in its strategy.

"This resolution does, on a bipartisan basis, say to the White House and the Pentagon, one, we want you to set out in more clarity what your plan is for success; and two, we want to be more involved with you in pursuing our mission in Iraq to a successful completion," he said.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) called the amendment's request for quarterly reports by the administration on its strategy "an almost meaningless requirement," and said that, had the Democratic amendment passed, it would have been perceived as a vote by Congress to begin a hasty withdrawal -- an interpretation that Levin vigorously rejected.

The amendment by the Senate faces an uncertain future. But as political symbolism, the action yesterday showed the determination of the Senate to demand more from the administration. It also underscored how much elected officials are worried about public anxiety over the war. "That is where the public is," Lindsay said, "and the senators were making sure they were on the right side of the political debate.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10045041/

 

[miles]

The point you continue to avoid is the overview of US political strategic planning over the last 15 years. Everything that is happening has been in planning for years outside the Administration.

What is taking place is what was planned to follow on from Bush I Presidency but the CFR dupe Quayle was just too ridculous to get elected so the neocon agenda was delayed for 8 years That was when Saddam was originally scheduled for the chop.

BushII was dragged out the Bar for the same purpose, cleaned up and thrust into a sure thing Presidential election election to perform a front man job for CFR. Bush obviously came primed with a missioin to accomplish and he started in his first cabinet meeting demanding a way to get into Iraq. The programme of regime change is clearly documented by CFR agenda over that period but Clinton had a different approachto that Republicans have and he took a more diplomatic, less aggressive stance during his Presidency.
CFR needs a sociopath like Bush for this job, they chose him well and made him President.

To ignore this history gives a very shallow and imperfect view of US politics and reduced it to inane left/right meaningless and directionless backbiting.
There is nothing directionless about development of US interests. Its a pity so many are drawn into that pool of partisan blether than follows day to day politicking so they miss the overall stratagies coming on stream.

Woody, this is about facts, not your paranoia.

As usual, you're full of shit.

 

[Pookie]

Woody, this is about facts, not your paranoia.

As usual, you're full of shit.

Actually, you posted an opinion. But by all means, don't let the facts get in your way.

 

[Slowlane]

The point you continue to avoid is the overview of US political strategic planning over the last 15 years. Everything that is happening has been in planning for years outside the Administration.

What is taking place is what was planned to follow on from Bush I Presidency but the CFR dupe Quayle was just too ridculous to get elected so the neocon agenda was delayed for 8 years That was when Saddam was originally scheduled for the chop.

BushII was dragged out the Bar for the same purpose, cleaned up and thrust into a sure thing Presidential election election to perform a front man job for CFR. Bush obviously came primed with a missioin to accomplish and he started in his first cabinet meeting demanding a way to get into Iraq. The programme of regime change is clearly documented by CFR agenda over that period but Clinton had a different approachto that Republicans have and he took a more diplomatic, less aggressive stance during his Presidency.
CFR needs a sociopath like Bush for this job, they chose him well and made him President.

To ignore this history gives a very shallow and imperfect view of US politics and reduced it to inane left/right meaningless and directionless backbiting.
There is nothing directionless about development of US interests. Its a pity so many are drawn into that pool of partisan blether than follows day to day politicking so they miss the overall stratagies coming on stream.

Have you had your diagnoses updated lately?

 

[clit_licker30]

Irrespective of what the Democrats may or may not do, it is what Bush HAS done that is the essence of this thread and he is a proven liar.

That cannot be changed by analysing somebody elses potential choices.

You weasels just cant face the truth about your hero.

Do dribble a lot when you talk? No one has proven President Bush a liar.

This isn't 1973 and the press and the dims aren't going to get away with this slander.

 

[Ishmael]

Do dribble a lot when you talk? No one has proven President Bush a liar.

This isn't 1973 and the press and the dims aren't going to get away with this slander.

Cheney came out today and called the Democrats towing this line 'dishonest.' A polite way of calling them liars.

Ishmael

 

[clit_licker30]

Actually, you posted an opinion. But by all means, don't let the facts get in your way.

It was from an opinion piece. The quotes from dims are factual. Y'all voted for the war before you started trashing it.

"The vast majority of members of Congress who voted for the Joint Congressional Resolution authorizing war against Iraq (296-133 in the House; 77-23 in the Senate)"

Congress critters can't hide from the fact they voted for the war.

 

[The Mutt]

They didn't vote for the war. They voted to give the President authority to go to war. At the time of the vote, the Chimp in Chief was swearing up and down that no decision to go to war had been made, that he would give the inspectors time to do their jobs, and that he would only go to war as a last resort. That was, of course, a big fat lie. The war had been on his agenda from day one.