posted on June 20, 2003 09:05:41 AM new
how many people does it take to convince you that this present US government lied to start a war, for oil, and FOR other reasons, and who does it take to convince you ? Is this not a justified reason for IMPEACHMENT...
Ex-CIA Director Says Administration Stretched Facts on Iraq
By John Diamond
USA TODAY
Wednesday 18 June 2003
WASHINGTON — Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush administration Tuesday of "overstretching the facts" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in making its case for invading that country.
Turner's broadside adds the retired admiral's name to a list of former intelligence professionals concerned that the CIA and its intelligence reports were manipulated to justify the war. Since Baghdad fell April 9, U.S. forces have been unable to find chemical and biological weapons the White House said were in Iraq.
Turner, who headed the CIA under President Carter, paused for a long moment when asked by reporters whether current CIA Director George Tenet should resign. "That's a tough one," Turner said. The problem did not appear to lie with the CIA, he said, but Tenet should consider resigning if he lost the confidence of President Bush or the American people. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
Turner suggested Tenet should tread cautiously because CIA directors "can be made the fall guy" by administrations when policy judgments based on intelligence go wrong.
Turner said, "There is no question in my mind (policymakers) distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it."
Public criticism of an administration's handling of intelligence is rare from former CIA directors, who typically give the benefit of the doubt to those with full access to classified information.
President Bush has given no indication he is having second thoughts about his decision to invade Iraq.
"We made it clear to the dictator of Iraq that he must disarm," Bush said in a speech Tuesday at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale. "He chose not to do so, so we disarmed him. And I know there's a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain. He is no longer a threat to the free world."
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was known to have chemical and biological weapons in the early and mid-1990s. Late last year, Iraq claimed to have none left, though it offered no proof of having disposed of them. At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer called it "fanciful" and "a fit of imagination" to believe that Saddam would have destroyed his arsenal but neglected to tell the world. Seeking to counter partisan criticism about the intelligence used to justify war, Fleischer said Democrats, including President Clinton, flatly asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the late 1990s.
"The president has every confidence in the intelligence and that weapons will be found," Fleischer said. "The president has full faith in Director Tenet."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been battling similar criticism about alleged misuse of intelligence. Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's Cabinet on the eve of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, said Tuesday that searchers in Iraq had found no sign either of equipment or a workforce for making weapons of mass destruction.
"It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq," Cook told a parliamentary inquiry into Iraq intelligence matters.
Turner's comments come a month after a group of retired U.S. intelligence officers wrote President Bush to "express deep concern" over alleged misuse of intelligence to justify the war.
Published on Wednesday, June 18, 2003 by the Providence Journal
We're In For The Fight Of Our Lives
by Bob Kerr
Spread the word. The war's not over. People are still getting killed.
This week, a sniper took out one of our own. It was part of the small, dirty, hate-fueled war that will go on as long as we stay in Iraq.
We don't understand. We were supposed to be liberators and yet they pick off our soldiers and Marines one or two or three at a time because the hate runs so brutally deep and the insult of our presence festers.
But then we never did prepare for this war. We sent members of the hip-hop generation off to fight and figured their training and the high-tech wonder of their weapons would win the war, secure the peace and create a democratic model in the desert.
What is missing seems to be a basic appreciation of differences. It's happened before. We send the young into a strange land and don't get them ready for the jolting refusal of the locals to speak English or serve cheeseburgers or swoon over that brazen American charm.
We don't get our fighting men and women ready for centuries-old cultures that take offense at our disdainful and irreverent occupation. There are ugly and deadly confrontations because one side has made no attempt to understand the other.
And somebody's son or daughter gets shot in a place far from home by someone who hates Americans. And the best the government can tell the parents right now is that it's pretty sure the death was for a good cause. The evidence isn't really in yet, but as soon as it is it will no doubt be quickly shared with all those who have lost a loved one.
Meanwhile, there's chaos, and people who are there to cover this war that won't end say the resentment grows daily over the American failure to make things work and make the country safe.
And those who have fought in Iraq since way back in March say they have been there long enough and it is time for them to go home, which must sound very strange to those who spent three years fighting their way across Europe or 13 months fighting an elusive enemy in Vietnam.
But that's not all that sounds strange about this tangled mess we have gotten into and seem unable to get out of. There is the man Bill Moyers talked to on public television last week.
The man was a government defense analyst who has retired and is telling a story of deception and lies. He is saying that the U.S. government knew long before going to war in Iraq that the principal reason for the war -- that Saddam Hussein posed a real and immediate threat to the Unites States -- was false.
The analyst told of how a report that the Iraqis had bought nuclear materials from Niger had been shown to be based on forged documents. Yet it still found its way into a speech by President Bush to the American people.
The sense of betrayal is spreading. It must be. And the outrage. That must be spreading, too. Except it's tough to find. The great political voice of opposition has yet to emerge.
Maybe people are willing, even eager, to accept the backup justifications for the war -- removal of a hideous dictator, etc. . . . Maybe it hurts too much to think we've been had. Again.
And I, for one, sure don't want to see another generation of veterans come home to the words "Welcome home, sucker."
So maybe it doesn't really matter that the original reason for going to war might have been a fraud. Reality has become such a flexible thing, after all.
And maybe, just maybe, lying about oral sex is worse than lying about the reasons for sending people off to fight and die.
I've been posting for a week or so on this topic ..."Do you think Bush Misled Us" I'm surprised that you didn't notice. Nobody seems interested. Apparently, most American people don't care that they were lied to. According to polls, one third of those polled think that Weapons of Mass Destruction were found and 22% believe that WMD were used during the war.
An interesting and relevant analysis of how America thinks can be seen in this sampling done by Bob Harris at ThisModernWorld.com
65% couldn't describe the basic facts about Watergate
56% think in war, the media should support the government over questioning it
48% say the news media acted responsibly during the Clinton Wars
45% characterized Watergate was "just politics"
43% attended religious services in the previous 7 days
40% believe the media was biased in favor of Bill Clinton
35% say the government should not fund stem cell research
34% think Rock and Roll has had an overall negative impact on America
33% believe a wife should "submit herself graciously" to a husband
30% say the Bible is the "actual word of God" to be taken literally
29% think people will be "more likely" to afford college for their kids in 2020
28% disapprove of labor unions on principle
28% say the government should have the right to control news reports
27% believe divorce is "morally wrong"
26% thought various disasters in 1999 might "foreshadow the wrath of God"
26% think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank their kids
24% describe themselves as interested in what celebrities think
21% told a pollster they'd never met that they had cheated in a relationship
21% say justice was served in the O.J. Simpson case
20% approve of the how the Catholic Church handles pedophilia
20% believe that the killing of civilians in Vietnam was "relatively rare"
15% were upset at Diana Spencer's death like "someone you knew"
12% think the United States should have a British-style royal family
11% stockpiled food and water in advance of Y2K
11% think "Titanic" was the best American movie of the 20th century
11% would like "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" as their personal physician
10% would eat a rat or an insect on a "reality" TV show
10% think it's advantageous to be a woman in American society
10% believe Oswald acted alone
10% say they are "very likely" to become rich someday
8% could not name a single TV network
8% fear they are "very likely" to be shot or badly hurt by a stranger
7% think Elvis is possibly still alive
6% say Garth Brooks is the best male singer of the 20th century
5% are ?very afraid? of thunder and lightning
5% would be "more likely" to buy food labeled as genetically modified
3% wanted to see the questions on "Millionaire" become less difficult
posted on June 20, 2003 11:36:50 AM new
hi Helenjw
good one and one must keep reminding before it's too late, there is still hope people will wake up, definitely people will wake up when this will affect them personally......
posted on June 20, 2003 03:14:14 PM newebayauctionguy If you find Stansfield Turner too much of a partisan for your taste (though I thought USA Today addressed that issue pretty well) then how about Richard Nixon's very own lawyer, John Dean?
------------------- We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
------------The Talmud
posted on June 20, 2003 08:38:49 PM new...if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked.Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data,if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause.
Excellent article, especially since it doesn't come from a "leftist".
___________________________________
What luck for the leaders that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
[ edited by profe51 on Jun 20, 2003 08:40 PM ]
posted on June 21, 2003 05:24:07 AM new
Aren't we to the point yet where people just realize lying is a neccesary part of politics and we shouldn't expect them to tell the truth?
I mean blame a snake for having fangs. It's what they do......
Consider a town where ten houses simultaneously catch fire
and the local authorities only have the resources to put out
one blaze.
Seven of the houses, fortunately, are unoccupied, but one
contains a single person trapped inside, while a second house
contains a likewise trapped family and a third house has two cats inside.
Then the fire marshal arrives on the scene brandishing a stack of evidence
purporting to show that hidden behind the walls of the cat house is a secret
day care center and dozens of small children will burn alive if the fire isn't put out.
The trucks come, the house is saved while the other nine burn, and then
the firefighters come inside only to discover that there was no daycare center after all,
just the cats.
All of a sudden the town is in an uproar - the fire marshal got the facts all wrong.
Then the marshal turns to his critics, points at the saved cats and asks
"would it really have been better if I'd just let these cats die?"
1) American soldiers are dying because Saddam was alleged to have a specific amount of hidden chemicals and pose a direct threat to our troops and our allies in the region. This is not past history. As you read this, some poor infantryman or MP is on patrol in Iraq and yet another teenager is going to come home in a metal coffin. Some poor Iraqi is going to have his home burst into and searched. In the real world away from the Beltway, real people are being harmed.
2)If the weapons are a threat and exist, they need to be found and destroyed. If they do not exist, we need to know their fate. Not knowing this is gross incompetence on the part of the Bush Administration.
3)The mass murder of Shia and Kurds, while a valid reason for the overthrow of Saddam, are not the valid reasons to send US soldiers to die after the fact. No one asked them to die for people they never heard of. They were sent because of WMD.
4)There was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda in any way, shape or form, and focus against a deadly terrorist sponsor was lost to invade and occupy Iraq.
The only loigical reason to invade and occupy Iraq was due to WMD.
5) As long as US forces are in Iraq, the North Koreans have a free hand. If they were to plunge across the Han River tomorrow, we have ONE heavy division able to deploy to Korea. Half of the US combat power is now stuck playing policeman in Iraq and will be for months, their equipment breaking down daily, men being killed by enemy action.
6)The entire intelligence establishment was sent to find these weapons and cannot. Either they don't exist or were destroyed and if determining that is too difficult for our intelligence community, we need a new one.
7)The fact is that the war is not over and has never ended. When Saddam left the field, guerrillas, some from other Arab countries, took the field. Sure, it would be like starting to play the Yankees, have them quit and then play the Texas Rangers, but unlike baseball, wars have no rules about substitutions. 54 dead Americans, most of who were too young to buy a beer. 54 families burying sons, most teenagers. For what? An American empire in the sand? Certainly not for the right of Iraqis to elect the fundamentalist government of their choice. It may not matter to Paul Wolfowitz, who's children aren't sweltering in the Iraqi summers of 107 degrees in the day, 80 at night. Nor are any of the Beltway Kool Kids children walking point before the glares of hostile Iraqis. Nope, just average Americans get that job.
8) When it comes to national security, one can lie about the details, but the fundamental case should be true. Yes, the Gulf of Tonkin was a mistake, and at best an error, but the fact was that the North Vietnamese were close to toppling the South Vietnamese government. Maybe they should have, but the threat was real and evident to anyone who cared to notice. In this case, even the fundamental case seems to be a lie.
Only the most desperate partisan expects to find bunkers of WMD. Or to have them planted. The time for planting is long over. A few rusty shells may even be worse than no WMD. Because to find junk would mean the Bush Administration sent Americans to die for what? A family grudge? The ambition of exiles? Iraq would have posed no threat and the evidence will be on TV for all to see. Despite the Hearst-like fear mongering of Ken Pollack, Saddam was a minor threat with a weak army who had no chance to rebuild that, much less his special weapons (what the Army calls WMD) program.
It matters if we find them or not because the President said they were there in quantity and that America should risk their sons and daughters to eliminate this threat. Saddam is gone and in hiding somewhere, US troops are still dying, this time in a nasty guerrilla war and someone needs to be held accountable for this. Waving the dead Shia about will not protect Bush and his cronies from the justifiable rage of those burying their teenage sons.
posted on June 22, 2003 10:59:28 AM new
The reason why so many people are blind to what is going on is becouse they have been brainwashed by the media.If you repeat things like the conservetives have been doing and that is all they see people will begin to believe it.
However this way of thinking only apeals to the dumb and the mean people
posted on June 22, 2003 02:09:59 PM new
You people don't get it. The reason why Americans aren't concerned that we haven't found WOMD's yet is because Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction! We may have overestimated Saddam's WOMDs but we greatly underestimated the amount of murder and torture. Each newly discovered mass grave reassures us that what we did was the right thing.
Democrats can whine all they want, but most Americans are glad that we kicked out that evil b@stard. Thanks to us, not the French, not the UN, but thanks to us, his days of cutting off tongues are over.
posted on June 22, 2003 03:13:34 PM new
"If the U.S. intelligence agencies bent their data to damn Saddam, why is it that the French, German and Russian intelligence services all came to the same conclusion? Why is it that every country on the Security Council, ncluding Syria, in the unanimous Resolution 1441, declared that Saddam had failed to account for the tons of chemical and biological agents he had in 1998?" --Charles Krauthammer
"He misled every one of us," Kerry said. "That's one reason why I'm running to be president of the United States."
Well, actually, "every one" overstates the case. The Senate vote in favor of authorizing force in Iraq was 77-23, with Kerry voting "yes." For the sake of argument, let's say Kerry is right and Bush perpetrated a sham. In a hypothetical general-election match-up, who would you rather choose to deal with hostile foreign leaders: a guy who's capable of pulling off such an elaborate deception, or the sucker who fell for it?
posted on June 22, 2003 03:15:11 PM new
Another Bush coverup?
Family members of victims of the terror attacks say the White House has smothered every attempt to get to the bottom of the outrageous intelligence failures that took place on its watch.
Family advocates also wanted to know why the government -- and specifically the Bush administration -- has been so reluctant to find answers to any of the obvious questions about what went wrong that day, why so little has been fixed, and why virtually nobody has accepted any responsibility for the glaring failures.
While the administration of President George W. Bush is aggressively positioning itself as the world leader in the war on terrorism, some families of the Sept. 11 victims say that the facts increasingly contradict that script. The White House long opposed the formation of a blue ribbon Sept. 11 commission, some say, and even now that panel is underfunded and struggling to build momentum. And, they say, the administration is suppressing a 900-page congressional study, possibly out of fear that the findings will be politically damaging to Bush.
~
"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House,"
says Monica Gabrielle. Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon
Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2, died during the attacks.
"As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop
of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."
Another 9/11 family advocate -- a former Bush supporter who requested anonymity -- was more blunt:
"Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening."
posted on June 22, 2003 03:17:56 PM new
Lets stop with the far right spin Bear. They never said that they had WOMD. In fact what they ddi say was they thought he didnt have any becouse the inspections were working. What they did say was the WOMD was UNACOUNTED for.
posted on June 22, 2003 03:24:59 PM new
And maybe those same people should look back to the previous administration for the TRUE cause of 9/11:
Clinton's failure to mobilize America to confront foreign terror after the 1993 attack led directly to 9-11 disaster
Jewish World Review Nov. 14, 2001 / 28 Mar-Cheshvan, 5762 Dick Morris
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- WHEN the terrorist gang controlled by Bin Laden exploded a bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993 killing six and injuring 650 others, President Clinton did not even visit the site of the attack. In his radio address the next day, he expressed his grief and outrage and four days later visited New Jersey where he sent a message to New Yorkers saluting our courage. Other than those statements, he remained aloof and uninvolved.
The attack occurred in the second month of Clinton's presidency. Issues like gays in the military, the recession, and withdrawing our troops from Somalia loomed larger than the 1993 attack. Clinton deliberately remained removed from the attack perhaps in the hope that he would not be blamed so early in his presidency.
Where Bush insisted, from the outset, that the Trade Center attack that took place on his watch was a declaration of war by foreign terrorists against the United States, Clinton treated the attack as a criminal justice situation not unlike the subsequent bombing of the Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. But while in Oklahoma, he connected emotionally with the victims, he had nothing to do with them in 1993.
His failure to mobilize America to confront foreign terror after the 1993 attack had dire consequences and led directly to the 2001 disaster. Two years after the 1993 attack, Sudan, sick of sheltering Bin Laden, offered to turn him over to the United States for prosecution. But, without the president breathing down their neck, investigators had not yet discovered that Bin Laden was behind the 1993 attack. Claiming that we lacked evidence to proceed, the US refused Sudan's offer and suggested they turn him over to the Saudis instead. In doing so, the US was disingenuous. We knew full well that the Saudi Arabian kingdom could not afford politically to prosecute their home-grown terrorist.
Clinton was removed, uninvolved, and distant where the war on terror was concerned. CIA director Woolsey now reveals that he never had a private personal meeting with Clinton during the first two years of his tenure as head of the CIA - exactly the key period in investigating the 1993 attack.
I had a good illustration of Clinton's remoteness from terrorist issues in 1996 when Dick Holbrooke called me, several months after the terrorist attack on US barracks in Ridyah, Saudi Arabia. Holbrooke, who told me that he had never had the opportunity to speak with Clinton directly during the months that he was negotiating the Dayton peace accords in Bosnia, asked that I get hold of the president to pass along a message. Holbrooke said that he had information that the terrorists were planning another attack in Ridyah and that our troops were highly vulnerable.
"They are stuck in the same buildings the terrorists attacked last time," Holbrook told me. "All that has changed is that there are more formidable concrete barriers against car bombs. But a bigger bomb would be just as lethal. They need to be dispersed and camped in the desert in tents with a secured perimeter," he warned.
I called the president and passed along Holbrooke's message. He had no idea that the troops were still in the barracks and said that he had ordered them dispersed to the desert six weeks before. "I've got a meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the morning," the president said "I'll raise hell with them."
Shockingly, he was so little involved in protecting our troops - already the object of a terrorist attack - that he had no idea that his order had not been executed until I happened to call.
Clinton was a one-thing-at-a-time president. Capable of intense focus on the issue du jour, he neglected all back burner concerns. And terror was always on the back burner.
Throughout the first part of his second term, Clinton was immobilized by impeachment. Battling desperately to save his presidency, he simply had neither the time nor the mental energy to immerse himself in a war against terror. Blame him for the perjury that caused impeachment. Blame the GOP for pursuing him. Blame whoever you want, but we were without a president from January, 1998 until April, 1999.
Thereafter, his administration was almost wholly devoted to electing Hillary to the Senate and, to a lesser extent, to making Gore president. Once again, terrorism was not the priority.
posted on June 22, 2003 03:28:53 PM new
Bigcity are you a clone of Helen's?
"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." --John Stuart Mills
"If the U.S. intelligence agencies bent their data to damn Saddam, why is it that the French, German and Russian intelligence services all came to the same conclusion?
They did not come to the same conclusion, Bear. Where have you been?
If you are referring to the speculation that Saddam had WMD, the difference is that Bush told the American people that there was an IMMINENT DANGER of being ATTACKED BY IRAQ. Remember the rush to appropriate funds and the tale that Saddam could launch his weapons in 45 minutes???
In addition, the Bush administration had been informed by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency in SEPTEMBER that there were NO weapons in Iraq.
posted on June 22, 2003 03:41:58 PM new
Imagine the outrage the left would have had back in 1993 if we captured and held Osama Bin ladin without hard evidence.
Kerry's remark was taken out of context by bear. This is the story in which the quote by Kerry was used.
John Kerry says Bush "misled every one of us on Iraq"
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Wednesday that President Bush broke his promise to build an international coalition against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and then waged a war based on questionable intelligence.
"He misled every one of us," Kerry said. "That's one reason why I'm running to be president of the United States."
Kerry said Bush made his case for war based on at least two pieces of U.S. intelligence that now appear to be wrong: that Iraq sought nuclear material from Africa and that Saddam's government had aerial weapons capable of attacking the United States with biological material.
posted on June 23, 2003 11:27:20 AM new
Revisionist..when the truth comes out it's revisionist
What are people proposing? Do you want to demand truth and scrap the whole system of politics we're used to and take a chance on what will emerge as being able to function?
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