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Talk to the Bushies. They're the ones who fabricated the piece and chose to plant it there. And after slipping their lies to Miller as if they were letting her in on some super-inside latest scoop, they sat back and waited, and when the story ran Page-1, they all scurried around saying see, we're right...even the NY Times agrees with us. This is the level of deceit and mendacity that we have had to live with for eight long years. You've just slopped it all up.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fleet
Doesn't change the fact that both Republican and Democratic politicians believed that Saddam had WMD hidden in his country. So did the major intelligence agencies worldwide.
No, this was no unanimous holding by any means. Everybody knew what Saddam had as of the time of the Gulf War. He had plenty of WMD's at that time. (Notice though that he didn't use any of them against Coalition troops...in fact, he never used them against anyone allied with US interests.) In the years following the war, everyone knew what UNSCOM had seized, accounted for, and just plain destroyed under the cease fire resolution. But that left a gap of known one-time materials that was still unaccounted for. This is what concerned people. The accounting for them was contained in the papers of Hussein Kamel, the Iraqi Director of WMD programs who defected through Jordan in 1995. Iraq had hastily destroyed these stocks immediately after the war, the papers indicated, so that they would not fall into UNSCOM's hands and be taken as evidence against Iraq by the west. It was enough that Iraq retained the knowledge it had built up. It did not any longer need the weapons themselves. As time was short, destruction was hasty and detailed records were not kept, but the volumes reportedly destroyed were a very close match for the gap, such that if Kamel and his papers were accurate, Saddam would have had virtually no usable WMD left anywhere. The probelm was how could you be sure that Kamel was being truthful here (even though all his other testimony proved solid) and that the papers were for real. Since the West (and particulalry the US) had dozens of spies buried in the UN inspector units, we were getting on-the-ground info through 1998, all of it consistent with the by then dead Kamel's reports. In that same year, the Iraq Liberation Act was passed providing funds to anti-Saddam expatriate groups in hopes that they could help bring about regime change internally. One of the things these groups (such as the INC) did with those US taxpayer dollars was manufacture false intelligence and guide that into the hands of many western intelligence services. Some, like the yellow-cake in Niger hoax, were obvious forgeries, but others took actual time to examine and explore, gaining some sense of credibility until such time as they were debunked. That's what your "everybody thought Saddam had WMD" boils down to. A sensible feeling of it being better to err on the side of caution, coupled with lingering uncertainty over the accuracy of Hussein Kamel and his papers, fanned by the cloud of false intelligence and other malicious efforts of the rabble-rousing Iraqi expatriate groups willing to do anything to instigate a western invasion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fleet
So did Saddam's own Generals.
That's a laugh. Saddam's top command knew quite a bit more about what was actually going on than Saddam did.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fleet
As Amazinjohn said, Saddam was to have shown that he destroyed all of his WMD; the U.S. didn't have to prove he had them. Bush gave Saddam plenty of time to do so (so did Clinton when he was president). Bush gave Saddam a final 48-hour window. Saddam did not cooperate and paid the price. So go cry somewhere else!
Saddam cooperated in exactly the manner that was expected. Hemming, hawing, pronouncing, delaying, trying to save face and respect in Iraq and in the region, but cooperating nonetheless. A different expectation would have been childish, just as it is today with respect to Iran. In any case, it was UNSCOM that did the official detsroying, not Iraq, and the US very much did have to prove he had weapons, otherwise there was no threat from Iraq, imminent or otherwise. The Bushies didn't go marching up to the UN to stage Colin Powell's ridiculous dog-and-pony show because they wanted to. They HAD to pretend that they knew Saddam had weapons. They didn't know that, so they had to wing it as best they could. Many people saw through that pretense, and many realized that rather than trying to work with the UN and UNMOVIC, Bush (having long prior abandoned even the pretense of seeking a so-called Second Resolution) was trying to subvert and discredit their work at every turn so as to keep his longstanding plans for invasion intact and on schedule. In the end, Bush had to go earlier than he would have wanted to, but he couldn't risk any more months of Hans Blix driving all over the place and reporting that nothing was there, so come March, in he went. The supposed 48-hour window, btw, was pure theater staged for folks like you.
Where's the proof? Post the links to the facts. This is just propaganda, unless you can prove it.
The real question is why do you not already know these things yourself? Everything that you do not know is not propaganda, though that does seem to be your basis of operations.
I have previously posted in this thread links to statements from NID McConnell, from the DOD Inspector General, and from top CIA officials related to the deliberate manufacture and misrepresentation of intelligence.
For original reporting on Cheney/Libby "visits" to the CIA see the Washington Post for June 4, 2003, page A15 (their archive pages are down at the moment), or read follow-on reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald.
The last time that I checked, conservative Republicans have their own rather amusing list of moral and political paradoxes (and I think those silly little rants relating to liberals have been adequately addressed):
- Hate gay people, but seem to have a predilection for having sex with them
- Advocate a "culture of life" - yet fiercely in support of wars, guns, environmental destruction, and shredding the social safety net that millions depend upon for fiscal solvency
- Infuriated by limits on "freedom of speech" when it relates to millionaires and Big Business bankrolling campaigns (i.e., opposition to campaign finance reform); adamant supporters of outright censorship in terms of a wide gamut of "immoral content" from rap music to video games to "illicit" literature...like Harry Potter
- Claim to be fiercely pro-America, and yet support each and every "free trade" accord that has ravaged communities from St. Louis, Missouri to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
- Frequently complain about liberals and the ACLU limiting freedom of religion...before proceeding to attempt to write Biblical hogwash into the US Constitution
And on and on - that's just an infinitesimally small sampling of common conservative logic.
Quote:
Originally Posted by neil0311
I hate any action that judges people solely on race, but I have no problem with checking Muslim men between age 18-25 at airports more closely. Not all Muslims men are terrorists, but all the terrorists that have struck us have been Muslim men. Acting prudently isn't profiling, provided you have a rational basis for your actions. Should we waste time checking more 80 year old white grandmas from Minnesota, instead of concentrating on what has been the threat so far, which is Muslim men from Arab countries? There is no room for political correctness where lives are at stake.
Another common conservative principle - freedom for all...except for those creepy minorities. You know, I'm sure I can dredge up statistical proof that African Americans commit a disproportionately large percentage of crimes. So why don't we just bar them from owning guns and being outside of their residences at night? Inner-city crime problems solved instantly!
Conservative logic never ceases to amuse me. Of course, when your guiding principles are religious dogma and an unfettered belief that the past was better, what room is there for real logical thinking anyhow?
The last time that I checked, conservative Republicans have their own rather amusing list of moral and political paradoxes (and I think those silly little rants relating to liberals have been adequately addressed):
- Hate gay people, but seem to have a predilection for having sex with them
- Advocate a "culture of life" - yet fiercely in support of wars, guns, environmental destruction, and shredding the social safety net that millions depend upon for fiscal solvency
- Infuriated by limits on "freedom of speech" when it relates to millionaires and Big Business bankrolling campaigns (i.e., opposition to campaign finance reform); adamant supporters of outright censorship in terms of a wide gamut of "immoral content" from rap music to video games to "illicit" literature...like Harry Potter
- Claim to be fiercely pro-America, and yet support each and every "free trade" accord that has ravaged communities from St. Louis, Missouri to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
- Frequently complain about liberals and the ACLU limiting freedom of religion...before proceeding to attempt to write Biblical hogwash into the US Constitution
And on and on - that's just an infinitesimally small sampling of common conservative logic.
Another common conservative principle - freedom for all...except for those creepy minorities. You know, I'm sure I can dredge up statistical proof that African Americans commit a disproportionately large percentage of crimes. So why don't we just bar them from owning guns and being outside of their residences at night? Inner-city crime problems solved instantly!
Conservative logic never ceases to amuse me. Of course, when your guiding principles are religious dogma and an unfettered belief that the past was better, what room is there for real logical thinking anyhow?
Brilliant.
Add:
Hate the New York Times (which has over a century of journalistic experience and excellence despite a few scandals, which happen to every organization after a certain amount of time), yet love Fox News which has single-handedly brought down the standards of the entire cable news universe (by forcing the others to cater to the rubes, for some reason), which admittedly weren't all that high to begin with.
They only care about people until the second they're born, unless it's their own children. Then, it's probably until they "graduate" from home school, unless they start a successful business, or at the very least, achieve a middle-management position at a Fortune 500 company.
They also like to throw around the word "elitist", yet they worship William F. Buckley.
I think you listed "hate gay people despite having sex with them" but it deserves another mention.
I have plenty of contradictions to point out about liberals too, but this isn't the place for that.
Talk to the Bushies. They're the ones who fabricated the piece and chose to plant it there. And after slipping their lies to Miller as if they were letting her in on some super-inside latest scoop, they sat back and waited, and when the story ran Page-1, they all scurried around saying see, we're right...even the NY Times agrees with us. This is the level of deceit and mendacity that we have had to live with for eight long years. You've just slopped it all up.
No, this was no unanimous holding by any means. Everybody knew what Saddam had as of the time of the Gulf War. He had plenty of WMD's at that time. (Notice though that he didn't use any of them against Coalition troops...in fact, he never used them against anyone allied with US interests.) In the years following the war, everyone knew what UNSCOM had seized, accounted for, and just plain destroyed under the cease fire resolution. But that left a gap of known one-time materials that was still unaccounted for. This is what concerned people. The accounting for them was contained in the papers of Hussein Kamel, the Iraqi Director of WMD programs who defected through Jordan in 1995. Iraq had hastily destroyed these stocks immediately after the war, the papers indicated, so that they would not fall into UNSCOM's hands and be taken as evidence against Iraq by the west. It was enough that Iraq retained the knowledge it had built up. It did not any longer need the weapons themselves. As time was short, destruction was hasty and detailed records were not kept, but the volumes reportedly destroyed were a very close match for the gap, such that if Kamel and his papers were accurate, Saddam would have had virtually no usable WMD left anywhere. The probelm was how could you be sure that Kamel was being truthful here (even though all his other testimony proved solid) and that the papers were for real. Since the West (and particulalry the US) had dozens of spies buried in the UN inspector units, we were getting on-the-ground info through 1998, all of it consistent with the by then dead Kamel's reports. In that same year, the Iraq Liberation Act was passed providing funds to anti-Saddam expatriate groups in hopes that they could help bring about regime change internally. One of the things these groups (such as the INC) did with those US taxpayer dollars was manufacture false intelligence and guide that into the hands of many western intelligence services. Some, like the yellow-cake in Niger hoax, were obvious forgeries, but others took actual time to examine and explore, gaining some sense of credibility until such time as they were debunked. That's what your "everybody thought Saddam had WMD" boils down to. A sensible feeling of it being better to err on the side of caution, coupled with lingering uncertainty over the accuracy of Hussein Kamel and his papers, fanned by the cloud of false intelligence and other malicious efforts of the rabble-rousing Iraqi expatriate groups willing to do anything to instigate a western invasion.
That's a laugh. Saddam's top command knew quite a bit more about what was actually going on than Saddam did.
Saddam cooperated in exactly the manner that was expected. Hemming, hawing, pronouncing, delaying, trying to save face and respect in Iraq and in the region, but cooperating nonetheless. A different expectation would have been childish, just as it is today with respect to Iran. In any case, it was UNSCOM that did the official detsroying, not Iraq, and the US very much did have to prove he had weapons, otherwise there was no threat from Iraq, imminent or otherwise. The Bushies didn't go marching up to the UN to stage Colin Powell's ridiculous dog-and-pony show because they wanted to. They HAD to pretend that they knew Saddam had weapons. They didn't know that, so they had to wing it as best they could. Many people saw through that pretense, and many realized that rather than trying to work with the UN and UNMOVIC, Bush (having long prior abandoned even the pretense of seeking a so-called Second Resolution) was trying to subvert and discredit their work at every turn so as to keep his longstanding plans for invasion intact and on schedule. In the end, Bush had to go earlier than he would have wanted to, but he couldn't risk any more months of Hans Blix driving all over the place and reporting that nothing was there, so come March, in he went. The supposed 48-hour window, btw, was pure theater staged for folks like you.
Read again. Slowly this time:
In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committe unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments."
The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
Those who want to voice their objections and criticisms should do so at the CIA, not the Bush Administration.
The last time that I checked, conservative Republicans have their own rather amusing list of moral and political paradoxes (and I think those silly little rants relating to liberals have been adequately addressed):
- Hate gay people, but seem to have a predilection for having sex with them
I don't "hate" them and I certainly don't do the latter with them.
Quote:
Advocate a "culture of life" - yet fiercely in support of wars, guns, environmental destruction, and shredding the social safety net that millions depend upon for fiscal solvency
I don't fiercely support wars. I hate wars but I have the common sense to know that sometimes they are necessary. I do fiercely support the right to own a gun... better that the criminal is killed rather than an innocent citizen. Conservatives are not for "evironmental destruction."
Quote:
Infuriated by limits on "freedom of speech" when it relates to millionaires and Big Business bankrolling campaigns (i.e., opposition to campaign finance reform); adamant supporters of outright censorship in terms of a wide gamut of "immoral content" from rap music to video games to "illicit" literature...like Harry Potter
I have a right not to buy that rap garbage. I don't support censorship of that and video games and some literature, but nothing can stop me from voicing my opinion against it.
Quote:
Claim to be fiercely pro-America, and yet support each and every "free trade" accord that has ravaged communities from St. Louis, Missouri to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
I support fair trade.
Quote:
Frequently complain about liberals and the ACLU limiting freedom of religion...before proceeding to attempt to write Biblical hogwash into the US Constitution]
With the rampant out-of-wedlock births, high crime rates, drug use, etc, I wouldn't mind the Bible being mentioned in the Constitution and in public places.
Quote:
And on and on - that's just an infinitesimally small sampling of common conservative logic.
Conservative logic never ceases to amuse me. Of course, when your guiding principles are religious dogma and an unfettered belief that the past was better, what room is there for real logical thinking anyhow
Why don't we compare with liberal "logic" (even though there is no such thing)...
Liberalism is where:
- The hard-working pay for the lazy.
- The harder-working get punished for their effort through added taxes.
- The people who wait to have children until they can afford to have them pay for people who don't wait until they can afford them.
- Take possession of billiant ideas and don't give any credit to inventors.
Liberals:
- Think that huge government bureaucracy is better than thousands of job-producing companies.
- Think America got rich off greedy corporations who were only interested in making a profit. The truth is that America got rich off capitalism fostering the invention of many items and devices seen today.
Liberalism:
- Embraces the fact that the poorest and laziest people in society contribute the least while taking the most.
- Hates rich corporations, yet fail to acknowledge how many people they employ and how many millions of dollars they contribute to society via taxes and charity.
With the rampant out-of-wedlock births, high crime rates, drug use, etc, I wouldn't mind the Bible being mentioned in the Constitution and in public places.
LOL....Are you serious? What with the whores and the stoning of children and the adultery and all of superstitious nonsense, the bible is one of the trashiest books ever written. Not to mention that it's a mass of contradictions that's been confusing simpletons for millenia. You obviously don't "get" the Constitution.
Big surprise.
Edit- I would bet my life on the fact that the bible was mostly written under the influence of psychedelics, if not outright psychosis.
Re-edit- Oh, man, I just can't get over this one. What makes your magic book so much more special than anybody else's magic book that it needs to be enshrined in the Constitution?!?
LOL....Are you serious? What with the whores and the stoning of children and the adultery and all of superstitious nonsense, the bible is one of the trashiest books ever written. Not to mention that it's a mass of contradictions that's been confusing simpletons for millenia. You obviously don't "get" the Constitution.
Big surprise.
Edit- I would bet my life on the fact that the bible was mostly written under the influence of psychedelics, if not outright psychosis.
Re-edit- Oh, man, I just can't get over this one. What makes your magic book so much more special than anybody else's magic book that it needs to be enshrined in the Constitution?!?
I was watching an episode of "Death Valley Days" (from the late-'50s or early-'60s).
The story was about a school and a school teacher.
Before the lessons started, the teacher and the class began with a prayer. How dare they do that!
I'm not going to get into a Bible discussion because that belongs in the religious forum.
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