At that point, the ever-vigilant John McIntire corrected Attorney Heidelbaugh on her (relatively minor) musical gaffe. It wasn't George Clinton, (the master of funk) who appointed George Tenet, but Bill Clinton, President of the United States.Again we're talking about "there was no weapons of mass destruction." Everyone agrees, all the Democrats, all the Republicans, George Tenet of the CIA who was appointed by George Clinton, everyone agrees that everyone believed--
--everyone believes that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons. And they believed he was capable of making a nuclear weapon within a year. Everyone believed that. And it did - yes, yes, yes, there's no question about that. And it did in fact turn out to be incorrect that he was able to build a nuclear weapon.Later, speaking on what the general mood of the culture believed just after 9/11, she said:
We believe that Saddam Hussein has these weapons of mass destruction and we do not want to be in a position where we are attacked and so we should affirmatively step forward.Now we can't fault Heidelbaugh for not knowing last week what is now known this week. And I think it's fair to say that what she believes to be true is a good example of how well the propaganda program from the current administration worked. Heather Heidelbaugh is certainly an intelligent person (certainly smarter than me, that's fer darn shure). For someone as so sharp to be taken in so completely only shows how good the propaganda was.
And what's known now that wasn't known then? From the McClatchy papers:
A long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report made public Thursday concludes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence.The report, in PDF form, can be found here.
The news is rather bad for dubya and his cohorts.
CNN:
Reuters:The Bush administration misused intelligence to build a case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report issued Thursday.
The White House exploited its ability to declassify intelligence selectively to bolster its case for war, the committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, said in the report.
Senior officials disclosed and discussed sensitive intelligence reports that supported the administration's policy objectives and kept out of public discourse information that did not, he said.
The report also found that the administration misled the American people about contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
U.S. President George W. Bush and his top policymakers misstated Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq's arms programs as they made a case for war, the Senate intelligence committee reported on Thursday.The New York Times:
Even that last part - about how their statements were "substantiated" - does not bode well for them. The next phrase - about how they did not always reflect any agencies' uncertainty - points as well directly to their dishonesty. If they didn't always point out how much "uncertainty" there was about what they were saying, they were presenting something as true that they knew wasn't true.The committee’s report cited some instances in which public statements by senior administration officials were not supported by the intelligence available at the time, such as suggestions that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda were operating in a kind of partnership, that the Baghdad regime had provided the terrorist network with weapons training, and that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague in 2001.
But the report found that on several key issues, including Iraq’s alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other top officials before the war were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates of the intelligence agencies, though the statements did not always reflect the agencies’ uncertainty about the evidence. All the weapons claims were disproved after invading troops found no unconventional arsenal and little effort to build one.
And that's a lie. Plain and simple.
Bush lied. People died.
13 comments:
yes and he and cheney and rumsfeld and rove and the rest are going to walk away with billions.
war can be profitable and war can keep leaders in power.
on what stone tablets is it written than no one in american politics would ever have bad, selfish, unethical motives?
wars have been used before many times for money or egos or both, why did it take so long for more people here to admit it?
why are there still some that won't?
John K. says: This is the Senate Intel Committee headed by a Democrat that drew this conclusion. LOL LOL LMAO. Yah like we could expect any other conclusion from this non-partisan group. By the way, is this the same group of Democrats who said Iraq was involved in a civil war and that we were losing? I bet it is. LOL
Two REPUBLICANS on the committee approved of the report.
John K's response is typical wingnut...
John K. says: I think I am going to split my side open LMAO at the previous comment. Well there you go, bi-partisanship, two Republicans voted with the Democrats. LOL LOL LOL What re-elect those Republicans, they vote with the Democrats. LOL LOL LOL Man is that a dumb post.
Were Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld: pwned by Iran?
John K. says: Let's see how bad Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield were lying. Right now 5 'mastermind' terrorists are on trial. A whole bunch, over 400, terrorists are steaming in prison camps in Cuba. Al queda is in retreat in Afhganistan. Adam Gadahn is rumoured to have been bombed into oblivion and of course Bin laden is where? And we are kicking huge butt in Iraq. Under the Democrats plan all the above mentioned terrorists would be running around raising money and planning terrorist strikes. Remember left wing kooks, Saddam paid $25,000 to anyone who blew themselves up and took some Jews with them. So Bush lied, about what? Not letting the Sen. Kerry approach to terrorism, (you have to get used to it) apply. I'll take Bush anyday. You lost on this one and the only way you can salvage anything is to come up with these lame statements from some Senate Committee with an agenda. Get real. LOL
Typical wingnut response. I am sure John K didn't even bother to read the report - and yet he's pronouncing it a fraud.
Safe guess that John K is among the 25% who still approve of the god-awful way dubya's been doing his job.
Those are Nixon resignation levels, by the way.
In March 1952, Harry Truman's approval had been dragged to 25% by the Korean War.
Obama used him in his speech the other night, lumped in with Roosevelt and JFK, as a model of Democrat foreign policy.
Interesting...
I'm so glad to see that John K. takes all of this so seriously with all of those LOLs and LMAOs.
John K. this isn't a game. It's extremely disrespectful that you keep treating it that way.
With all the supposed reverence you have for this country and its soldiers, you would think you would understand that.
So let's cut out the LOLs and LMAOs when it comes to anything related to Iraq, Afghanistan, or our military...shall we?
John K. says: It is disrespectful I treat it this way? You guys endorse Olbermouth calling our troops "cold blooded killers and mercenairies". You call for their defeat. You claimed there was a civil war when no such case existed. YOu falisified Iraqi casuality figures. And you politicize the war for power gains. Are you going to let the military vote this time around? You didn't in 2000 and 2004. You deserve to be mocked like this LOL LOL LMAO at how lame you are.
Whoa - that's lotsa charges there, John.
Any citations to any of those "facts"?
Given your past usage of fact-free charges (ie Major Andre) until you give some kind of citation all of those, I'm just gonna assume it's all rightwing BS.
Yeah, care to back any of those charges up with actual facts or are you just going to continue to shoot your mouth off?
Couple of things he's flat-out wrong about or just plain ignorant - to suggest that there was no sectarian struggle in Iraq is to acknowledge, much like Bush and McCain(yet another thing they have in common) that there's no difference between Sunnis and Shias, because if you don't understand the differences, you can have no appreciation for the fact that the two Islamic factions are violently opposed to one another.
It could be that they simply choose to ignore these differences because it undermines their bloodlust for war with Iran, a predominantly Shia nation which is unlikley to ally with Sunni Al Qaeda, just as a secular leader like Saddam Hussein was very unlikely to ally with extremeist Sunnis since he recognized such religious groups as threats to his own power, a fear that produced some of Hussein's genocidal activities.
Afghanistan - well, they really have forgotten about this war...our particular conservative friend here seems to be especially ignorant of the realities of Northern Pakistan, where much of the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership escaped to when the Bush Admnistration failed to bring them to justice. Thank god we were selling the Pakistani's billions of dollars in weapons so that Musharaff could make his own deals with the tribal leaders in Northern Pakistan, essentially granting them amnesty and free reign.
Our great ally - the dictator Musharaff - allowed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup and establish a staging area for attacks into Afghanistan, a country whose political power doesn't extend much further than the boundaries of the capitol city, Kabul. According to the Senlis Council nearly 54% of the country is host to a permanent Taliban presence(particularly in the South - what a shock!). They control the infrastructure and the economy in these areas.
This defeated Taliban is so decimated, that just recently they had the audacity to attempt to assassinate President Karzai in broad daylight during a public ceremony.
Politicizing the war to gain power? Wouldn't that be lying the country into war, dressing up the evidence and then holding a vote a few weeks before pivotal mid-term elections? Wouldn't that be smearing a US veteran, a triple amputee, as an appeaser of Osama bin Laden just to win his Senate seat?
And who is this you? All of us lefties, I guess...
But I would like to see proof that Olbermann said that, because I know that he never has nor would he ever.
I'd like to see proof that members of the military were not permitted to vote.
I'd like to see proof that we are actually, as it was so eloquently stated, "kicking huge butt" in Iraq when all the evidence, despite the magical mystery Surge, suggests that all we've managed to do is maintain the status quo - a powerless and chaotic Iraqi government; a level of violence not conducive to the development of democratic principles or any sustainable government; the continued investment of billions of dollars on a strategy that has not improved our national security.
Look at Katrina, the lax financial policies that have led us to the brink of economic catastrophe, the fundamentally flawed decision to invade Iraq...all the evidence points to the most glaring and dangerous negligence ever displayed by an American Presidential administration.
Well, it is difficult to try to be entirely objective and to decide whether to restrict oneself to the topic of the post or include other issues.
It is true that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons in the eighties, when we suppoted him (during Reagan/Bush 41). But after 1991 the UN weapons inspectors did a pretty good job of removing those weapons and shutting down Iraq's early nuclear weapon program. That’s why the dedicated NPR-listening segment of the population had trouble believing Bush/Cheney when they made those accusations about Iraq and mushroom clouds. Long before this report, the President made that supposedly “comical” video where he is looking for WMD’s in his office, that tended to seal the issue with many of us.
Not many people pretend the democrats are perfect or blameless. But the Bush administration (and the Republican Congress) has made a series of choices and accusations that were simply far beyond what any previous president had done, even Nixon. And when John K. claims he is very amused by things the Democrats say, whether they are having problems or whether they accuse the Republicans of misbehavior, then he is, like the President has, figuratively spitting on the ultimate sacrifices made by the men and women who serve in the military.
Economists don’t like Bush either.
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