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| quote: | Democrats Push Big Lie About War
by Allan H. Ryskind
Posted Nov 4, 2005
President Bush lied us into war and the revelations produced by the Scooter Libby indictment only confirm this terrible scandal.
That’s the essence of the vicious slur Democrats are hurling at the GOP these days, with Minority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) shutting down the U.S. Senate to dramatize the charge.
The White House, as the Democrats would now have it, had virtually no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but the President, Dick Cheney and their gang were so intent on removing Saddam from power they invented facts. And when critics such as Joe Wilson spoke truth to power, the “Scooters” in the administration slimed their reputations.
Unpatriotic Mud-Slinging
The episode involving Libby and Wilson, summed up Reid, “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.”
This is unpatriotic mud-slinging, with a touch of Black Helicopter looniness tossed in. To believe that the White House concocted a fable about WMD in Iraq, you would have to believe in a massive conspiracy involving not only the Bush people, but both Bill Clinton’s and George Bush’s CIA director, George Tenet; Bush’s first term secretary of state, Colin Powell; Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright; Clinton’s key NSC Persian Gulf adviser, Kenneth Pollack; and numerous WMD experts at the United Nations.
How many people, for instance, know that Wilson himself, the Democrats’ big stick to beat up on Bush, believed that when the war began Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?
Here is what he wrote in his now infamous July 6, 2003, column in the New York Times, attempting to disprove, unsuccessfully, that the Bush Administration was wrong when it insisted Iraq had been seeking nuclear materials in Niger:
“I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program—all of which were in violation of U.N. resolutions.”
What Wilson said in this column, of course, contained the core rationale the administration gave as to why this country went to war. Was Wilson in on the White House conspiracy, too?
Even though Wilson argued that his oral report to the CIA refuted Bush’s claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger—the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence forcefully asserted quite the opposite—he did believe what virtually the whole world believed: that Saddam Hussein had plenty of WMD and was energetically attempting to acquire more.
Madeleine Albright, appearing on the Sept. 21, 2003, edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” had been certain that Saddam had stockpiled those terrible weapons. She admitted she was very “surprised” that they hadn’t yet been discovered, adding: “But what worries me most now,” is “where is it [WMD], and could it be in the hands of terrorists?”
From 1995 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2001, Kenneth M. Pollack served as director for Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, where he was the principal working-level official responsible for implementation of Clinton’s policy toward Iraq.
Prior to serving Clinton, he spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf military analyst.
Was Clinton’s seasoned expert on the Gulf also in on the Bush plan to fabricate evidence? The conspiracy buffs may think so, for in 2002, when Bush was in office and worrying about what to do about Saddam, Pollack wrote a book titled The Threatening Storm. The subtitle was more provocative: The Case for Invading Iraq.
After analyzing all the WMD evidence at his command, and Saddam Hussein’s career as an aggressor, a mass murderer and a political thug who could not be trusted to keep his word, Pollack concluded: “Unfortunately, the only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces.”
When the WMD weren’t found, Pollack wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly for its first issue in 2004.
He was critical of the Bush Administration’s handling of the war, but he made several informative observations in his critique. Among them:
* “The U.S. intelligence community’s belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush’s inauguration and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure.”
*
“In October of 2002, the National Intelligence Council, the highest analytical body in the U.S. intelligence community, issued a classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD representing the consensus of the intelligence community. Although after the war some complained that the NIE had been a rush job and that the NIE should have been more careful in its choice of language, in fact, the report accurately reflected what intelligence analysts had been telling Clinton Administration officials like me for years in verbal briefings.”
‘Manufactured’ Intellligence
A declassified version of the 2002 NIE was released to the public in July 2003. Among its findings:
* “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions.”
* “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. . . .”
*
“Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program and invested more heavily in biological weapons; most analysts assess [that] Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”
Pollack, citing this crucial report, then said: “U.S. government analysts were not alone in these views. In the late spring of 2002, I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraq WMD. Those present included nearly 20 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.)
“Other nations’ intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the war, the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all, arguing that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within three years [without outside fissile material]. Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States.”
Pollack’s account alone puts the lie to the charge that Bush took us to war on “manufactured” intelligence.
And does anyone seriously believe that Bush’s then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was deliberately deceiving the American people when he made his spectacularly convincing speech against Saddam before the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, just weeks prior to the war?
Powell’s major accusation, that Iraq was awash in WMD, came from CIA Director George Tenet, who had also served as Bill Clinton’s CIA director in the last four years of the Clinton presidency.
George Bush had been assured by Tenet that there was “slam dunk” evidence against Saddam, so the secretary of State descended upon the CIA in Mclean, Va., spending four difficult days sifting through the intelligence, sometimes with his deputy, Richard Armitage.
After the final rehearsal in Washington, Tenet, according to Bob Woodward’s most thorough report, “announced that he thought their case was ironclad and he believed that they had vetted each sentence.”
Powell then informed Tenet that the CIA director would have to sit behind him at the UN, a visible sign that he was backing the secretary of State’s findings.
Powell’s presentation on Feb. 5, 2003, was a tour de force, with even ultra-liberal Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory succumbing. “I can only say,” she wrote, “that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.”
History will determine whether the Bush Administration did the right thing in invading Iraq and we may yet discover definitively why so many experts appeared to have misjudged the WMD threat. But we can conclude that the President took us to war based on convincing, uncooked data compiled by intelligence analysts in both the Clinton and Bush Administrations.
Those who say Bush “lied us into war” based on “manufactured” intelligence are either ignorant or malicious. Either way, they are dangerously undermining whatever chance we still have of rescuing Iraq from chaos and catastrophe.
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| quote: | Jack Kelly: About that Iraq 'deception'
Evidence does link Saddam to WMD programs and terror groups
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The president went on television to announce: "Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors."
Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio ([email protected], 412-263-1476).
"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," the vice chairman of the Intelligence committee told the Senate.
The president was Bill Clinton (Dec. 16, 1998). The senator was Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia (Oct. 10, 2002).
These statements should be kept in mind when assessing the hissy fit Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid threw Tuesday when he called the Senate into secret session to discuss whether Bush administration officials had exaggerated prewar intelligence about Iraq.
Mr. Reid claimed his action was prompted by the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for allegedly lying to a federal grand jury about from whom he learned that Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA.
"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq," Sen. Reid said.
But Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had made it clear that that was not what the Libby indictment was about. "This indictment is not about the war," he said. "This indictment will not seek to prove the war was justified or unjustified."
The Iraq Survey Group found no large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. This could be because no such weapons actually existed.
Or it could be because they were moved to another country between the time Congress authorized the use of force against Iraq and when the war actually began.
"We've had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official told reporter Kenneth Timmerman.
Or it could be the Iraq Survey Group had an unusually restrictive definition of what constitutes a WMD stockpile.
The 4th Infantry Division discovered in an ammo dump near the town of Baiji 55 gallon drums of chemicals which, when mixed together, form nerve gas. They were stored next to surface-to-surface missiles which had been configured to carry a liquid payload.
If prewar intelligence was faulty, the fault lies with the CIA which supplied the erroneous information, not with the political leaders, Democratic and Republican, who relied upon it.
But Democrats who had access to the same intelligence President Bush had, and who because of it voted to authorize war with Iraq, are charging now that the president deliberately deceived the nation into war.
The slender reed on which this weighty charge is hung is the credibility of Mr. Wilson, who the CIA had sent to Niger in 2002 to determine if Saddam had tried to buy uranium there.
The Senate Intelligence Committee snapped that reed when it issued its report on prewar intelligence in July of last year. The committee found unanimously that Mr. Wilson lied when he said Mr. Cheney had sent him on the mission, lied when he denied his wife had recommended him for it and lied when he said he'd found no evidence Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger.
Journalists who interview Mr. Wilson -- who's been enjoying a second 15 minutes of fame in the wake of the indictment of Mr. Libby -- rarely bring this up. Most think it best to ignore facts that get in the way of the story they want to tell.
The press' amnesia has convinced Democrats they can regain power by lying about prewar intelligence. But facts are stubborn things.
"The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments," said the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments," said the Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence, issued in March.
Thanks to really lousy reporting, most Americans are unaware of how much evidence there is of Saddam's WMD programs and his ties to international terror groups. This is a debate Republicans should welcome. |
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| occrider |
I’ll never understand why people post op-ed pieces. They never provide references to their claims, they always argue their points with straw-man or red-herring arguments, and they’re really just arguments that nobody really wants to respond to because the author is not here personally to argue with. Don’t be lazy, formulate and present your own arguments. So for example, the first article simply says that Bush didn’t hype, manipulate, or cherry pick the rationale for going to war because democrats, and analysts thought that Saddam Huessein had chemical weapons. Well no , if people didn’t think that Saddam had chemical weapons the UN wouldn’t have sent in weapons inspectors. What the author doesn’t address is the case, presented by the Bush administration rationalizing the decision to cease diplomatic efforts and go to war. What the author doesn’t address are the arguments and evidence used by the administration when it knew that that evidence was faulty and unsubstantiated. Arguments such as the Nigerian yellow-cake or arguments such Al-Qaeda ties which the author tries to blame on the CIA … unfortunately the CIA made it quite clear to the administration that such information was dubious at best, for example:
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Agency warned of informant's credibility on Iraq
By Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A high al-Qaida official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained al-Qaida members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for al-Qaida's work with illicit weapons.
The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush; Vice President Dick Cheney; Colin L. Powell, who was then secretary of state; and other administration officials repeatedly cited Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training al-Qaida members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.
Bush said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."
Democrats' challenge
The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Sen. Carl M. Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Libi's statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration's misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize in recent days, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, that was to have focused on the use of prewar intelligence.
A White House spokeswoman said she had no immediate comment on the DIA report on Libi. But Senate Republicans have been arguing that Republicans were not alone in making prewar assertions about Iraq, illicit weapons and terrorism that have since been discredited.
Libi, who was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001, recanted his claims in January 2004. That prompted the CIA a month later to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the Sept. 11 commission later in 2004.
Libi was not alone among intelligence sources later determined to have been fabricating accounts. Among others, an Iraqi exile whose code name was Curveball was the primary source for what proved to be false information about Iraq and mobile biological-weapons labs. And American military officials cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi — the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group — who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon misleading information in urging war.
Earlier report
The report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee in July 2004 questioned whether some versions of an intelligence report prepared by the CIA in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Libi's claims.
But neither that report nor another issued by the Sept. 11 commission made any reference to the existence of the earlier and more skeptical 2002 report by the DIA, which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policymakers. As an official intelligence report, the document would have been available to the CIA, the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the DIA document was provided to the Senate panel.
Sketchy details
In outlining reasons for its skepticism, the DIA report noted that Libi's claims lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have taken place.
"It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers," the February 2002 report said. "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."
Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Libi as the foundation for his speech to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing "the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al-Qaida."
At the time of Powell's speech, an unclassified statement by the CIA described the reporting, now known to have been from Libi, as "credible." But Levin said he had learned that a classified CIA assessment at the time went on to state that "the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ht...85_intel06.html
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As for the second op-ed … well that’s just about the worst piece of crap I’ve read in a while. As for one who slammed AnotherWay for his conclusions about election fraud are you sure you want to stand by this op-ed? Because it’s about 20 times worse. For example, the “potential nerve agents” in 55 gallon drums in Baiji that were next to waiting Surface to Surface rockets? Ummmm could they be ROCKET FUEL????
| quote: |
A 55-gallon drum found in the Tigris River town of Baiji, north of Baghdad near Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, initially tested positive for the nerve agent cyclosarin. It later turned out to be rocket fuel.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/...-wmd-usat_x.htm
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Jesus Christ, do these loonies ever check upon the veracity of their information? Or is that the point of an op-ed piece … blissful ignorance make for a more compelling argument? |
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