Impeach Bush : NO WMDs (Weapons of Mass Disappearance)

[hapaboy]

Impeach Bush? No WMDs? It's all about the oil (again)? Oh boy....

WMDs: They haven't been found YET. Would anyone like to deny that Hussein had WMD programs? If so, you're calling every major intelligence agency in the world, the UN, Clinton, etc. liars. Whom among you were willing to give a psychopath like Saddam the benefit of the doubt on the issue of whether or not he would eventually use WMD against us himself or give it to terrorists to do so? Apparently, many of you.

Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11: Big freakin' deal. His brutal regime was a threat to an already incendiary region, and of course a threat to the oil supply that runs the world economic engine. But don't just take my word for it: Again, the beloved UN said so, Clinton said so, etc, etc. He paid Palestinian suicide bombers and allowed terrorists to train for airplane hijackings in a special training camp that came complete with an airplane fuselage. He housed former terrorists. His sons raped women they saw on the street who appealed to them, and if their families complained they tortured and killed them as well. Prison overcrowding? Uday or Qusay would simply execute every third prisoner. Etc, etc. Yes, this was a regime we could safely trust.

It's amazing those of you who oppose this war don't understand that's exactly what it is: a WAR. And it has just begun. Major operations may have ceased for the most part in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the real war is only just beginning. This isn't just a battle the US has fought against the Taliban and the Baathist regime. As sure as we fought wars against fascism, Japanese militarism, and communism, this is a confrontation against another ideal, one composed of Islamic fundamentalism, state-level tyranny, and an inate hatred against the most successful non-Islamic democratic society of all - the United States.


Even after 9/11 so many would prefer to use the same doctrines of appeasement, self-introspection (i.e. "why do those Islamic fundamentalists or terrorists hate us? There must be a good reason. Something is wrong with US. We should just let those Islamic fundamentalists/terrorists alone. Surely they'd leave us alone if we left them alone, right?"), and possibly the occasional cruise missile lofted at some goat farms to remind our enemies that we can, well, lob cruise missiles at their goat farms.


And now some of you are now calling to impeach the President, a leader who, unlike his predecessor, recognized that enough was enough, and it was simply time for this country to make war on those who have killed or would dearly love to kill Americans and are making plans to do so.

HA HA HA

 

[TigerO]

I think the facts speak for themselves.

Bush based his unprecedented preemptive attack on another country that had not attacked us and posed no threat to the USA on endlessly repeated, albeit factually totally unwarranted claims that Saddam was linked to 9/11, had ties to Al Qaeda, and that Saddams WMD's posed a massive and imminent threat to the USA.

Never mind that absolutely NO PROOF was ever forthcoming for any of those allegations. Endless repetition of alleged threat does not truth make.

That little fact does not come as a large surprise, as, of course, in reality, Saddam Hussein was NOT linked to 9/11, had NO ties to Al Qaeda, and did NOT pose a threat to the USA.

To this day no WMD'S have been found, nor will any ever be found.

As is, Bush diverted severely limited resources away from targeting Al Qaeda, that attacked us, to funding an attack against Iraq, that did not attack us. This about face that cost us almost all of the sympathy we had after 9/11 had almost no international support because nobody believed Bushs non existent "evidence", "evidence" that consisted of nothing but endlessly repeated verbal allegations that Iraq posed a huge and imminent threat.

As can be seen by all the Weapons of Mass Disappearance that Bush promised us, and that have accordingly duely vaporized into thin air.

"A lack of intelligence

The Sydney Morning Herald

Australia's spies knew the United States was lying about Iraq's WMD programme. So why didn't the Government choose to believe them?

Andrew Wilkie writes.

'Intelligence" was how the Americans described the material accumulating on Iraq from their super-sophisticated spy systems. But to analysts at the Office of National Assessments in Canberra, a decent chunk of the growing pile looked like rubbish. In their offices on the top floor of the drab ASIO building, ONA experts found much of the US material worthy only of the delete button or the classified waste chute to the truck-sized shredder in the basement.

Australian spooks aren't much like the spies in the James Bond movies. Not many drink vodka martinis. But most are smart - certainly smart enough to understand how US intelligence on Iraq was badly skewed by political pressure, worst-case analysis and a stream of garbage-grade intelligence concocted by Iraqis desperate for US intervention in Iraq.

It wasn't just the Australians who were mystified by the accumulating US trash. The French, Germans and Russians had long before refused to be persuaded by Washington's line. British intelligence agencies were still inclined to take a more conservative position. And the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, even went so far as to say during a late April interview that "much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been shaky".

The CIA had clearly lost the plot if its October 2002 report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was anything to go by. Either that, or the agency was party to a disinformation campaign designed to encourage support for a war. How else to explain the excerpt quoted by the Prime Minister in early February: "All key aspects ... of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War."

The CIA's public acknowledgement of a review smells more like early positioning for its day of reckoning than a genuine interest in continuous improvement. The CIA can't afford another serious blunder so soon after its failure to pick up the September 11 attacks.

Australian intelligence agencies made it clear to the Government all along that Iraq did not have a massive WMD program (that dubious honour remains restricted to at least China, France, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, Britain and the US). Nor was Saddam Hussein co-operating actively with al-Qaeda. And there was no indication Iraq was intending to pass WMDs to terrorists.

Now the WMD claims are unravelling. All that US intelligence garbage is on the nose. Coalition forces in Iraq have not found thousands of chemical artillery shells ready to be fired or ballistic missiles loaded with deadly bacteriological agents.

One of the major concerns about the war now is the way it will encourage the proliferation of WMDs. America's adversaries are being encouraged to acquire WMDs to deter US aggression. Mutually assured destruction kept the US and Soviet Union from each other's throats for decades. And, for now, Iran's and North Korea's arsenals seem to be influencing the US to back off...."

continued:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/30/1054177726543.html

Of course, US intelligence experts were also fully cognizant of the fact that Bush's case was based on deceit and lies:



"White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'

The Guardian

Bush's televised address attacked by US intelligence

President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.

"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,807286,00.html

Bush is a liar and a fraud, the faster he is gone the better it's going to be !

Best,

 

[msfe]

House Probers Conclude Iraq War Data Was Weak

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 28, 2003; Page A01


Leaders of the House intelligence committee have criticized the U.S. intelligence community for using largely outdated, "circumstantial" and "fragmentary" information with "too many uncertainties" to conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda.

Top members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent four months combing through 19 volumes of classified material used by the Bush administration to make its case for the war on Iraq, found "significant deficiencies" in the community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq, and said it had to rely on "past assessments" dating to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 and on "some new 'piecemeal' intelligence," both of which "were not challenged as a routine matter."

"The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist," the two committee members said in a letter Thursday to CIA Director George J. Tenet. The Washington Post obtained a copy this weekend.

The letter constitutes a significant criticism of the U.S. intelligence community from a source that does not take such matters lightly. The committee, like all congressional panels, is controlled by Republicans, and its chairman, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), is a former CIA agent and a longtime supporter of Tenet and the intelligence agencies. Goss and the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), signed the letter. Neither was available for comment yesterday. The full committee has not voted on the letter's conclusions.

The CIA, through spokesman Bill Harlow, disputed the conclusions and accused the panel of not conducting "a detailed inquiry on this study."

"The notion that our community does not challenge standing judgments is absurd."

"To attempt to make such a determination so quickly and without all the facts is premature and wrong," Harlow said. "Iraq was an intractable and difficult subject. The tradecraft of intelligence rarely has the luxury of having black-and-white facts. The judgments reached, and the tradecraft used, were honest and professional -- based on many years of effort and experience."

The committee's letter said the buildup to the war in Iraq amounted to "a case study" of the CIA's and other agencies' inability to gather credible intelligence from informants in Iraq or to employ technologies to detect weapons programs.

"Lack of specific intelligence on regime plans and intentions, WMD, and Iraq's support to terrorist groups appears to have hampered the IC's [intelligence community's] ability to provide a better assessment to policymakers from 1998 through 2003," the letter said.

The administration based its argument for going to war on the dangers allegedly posed by Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its supposed ties to al Qaeda. The Goss-Harman letter may give ammunition to critics who say the administration overstated the threat posed by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The committee became concerned about the underlying intelligence on Iraq when U.S. forces failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and when President Bush admitted he should not have used discredited intelligence in January's State of the Union speech to suggest that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African nation.

The committee reviewed the underlying information used by U.S. intelligence agencies to write a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The NIE was the most comprehensive assessment of Iraq available to lawmakers before the war, and many based their approval of Bush's war resolution on it.

The letter acknowledges one sharp difference between the two committee leaders. Harman, the letter indicated, believes the NIE judgments "were deficient with regard to the analysis and presentation." Goss believes the judgments were not deficient and were properly couched to reflect the incomplete nature of the intelligence. A congressional source said Goss "does not believe that [the intelligence] community's judgments were inaccurate."

As to Iraq's ties to terrorists, the committee scrutinized three volumes of data and found "substantial gaps" in credible information from human sources that would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies "to give policymakers a clear understanding of the nature of the relationship." Instead, the agencies had a "low threshold" or "no threshold" on using information the intelligence community obtained on Iraq's alleged ties to al Qaeda.

"As a result, intelligence reports that might have been screened out by a more rigorous vetting process made their way to the analysts' desks, providing ample room for vagary to intrude," the letter states. The agencies did not clarify which of their reports "were from sources that were credible and which were from sources that would otherwise be dismissed in the absence of any other corroborating intelligence."

Goss and Harman were particularly critical of the underlying intelligence used to conclude that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.

"Our examination has identified the relatively fragile nature of this information," the letter states. It notes internal intelligence agency disputes about whether Iraq attempted to buy high-strength aluminum tubes that could be used in nuclear weapons manufacture, and points out the dual-use nature of equipment in other attempted purchases cited in the NIE.

Moreover, Goss and Harman dispelled the assertion, made frequently by administration officials, that they possess more concrete information about Iraq's nuclear intention but are unable to disclose it because it remains classified. "We have not found any information in the assessments that are still classified that was any more definitive," the two wrote Tenet.

On this point, the letter said the committee "had reviewed extensively the allegations that there was a disconnect between public statements by administration officials and the underlying intelligence."

The letter continued: "We do believe . . . that if public officials cite intelligence incorrectly, the IC [intelligence community] has a responsibility to go back to that policymaker and make clear that the public statement mischaracterized the available intelligence." It does not say whether Tenet fulfilled that responsibility.

 

[Madison]

THE COSTS OF WAR
Pay up!
by Justin Raimondo


I review most of the major opinion pieces that appear on this website, and, as you might imagine, I read a lot of news stories every day of the week. The process can become somewhat tedious, and it takes a lot to get my attention. But my blood ran cold as I read this jaw-dropper in the transcript of Senator Robert Byrd's remarks at the opening of the Senate Appropriations Committee hearings on Iraq's reconstruction:

"Last Wednesday, I along with Representatives David Obey and Martin Sabo offered an amendment to the homeland security appropriations conference report that would have provided $125 million to hire 1,300 customs inspectors on America's borders. That amendment was rejected as too expensive. Yet, on the exact same day, the President sent Congress this emergency request for $150 million for 5,350 border inspections personnel including 2,500 customs inspectors – in Iraq."

A chill went up my spine, as I wondered: How is this possible?

Every day we hear this administration invoke the specter of another 9/11. That is the ultimate justification for invading and occupying Iraq, for Patriot Acts I and II, for the immoral and unprecedented doctrine of "preemption." It is the entire basis of our post-9/11 Middle East policy: we're going to "drain the swamp," they say, and establish democracy throughout the Middle East. This will supposedly make Americans safer at home.

But, as Senator Byrd makes all too clear, American security is their last concern. It isn't America's borders they're worried about: it's Iraq's. As Jonathan Weisman noted in the Washington Post the other day, the President's $87 budget request for Iraq is more than double the homeland security budget.

Not that doubling the homeland security budget is the answer, but the point is that we can see, in the details of the President's $87 billion request, what the War Party really cares about. To heck with the homeland. America last – Iraq first. The Washington Post reports:

"Those details include $100 million to build seven planned communities with a total of 3,258 houses, plus roads, an elementary school, two high schools, a clinic, a place of worship and a market for each; $10 million to finance 100 prison-building experts for six months, at $100,000 an expert; 40 garbage trucks at $50,000 each; $900 million to import petroleum products such as kerosene and diesel to a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves; and $20 million for a four-week business course, at $10,000 per student."

"We're not talking sanity here," says Jim Dyer, Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. "The world's second-largest oil country is importing oil, and a country full of concrete is importing concrete."

We haven't been talking sanity in Washington since the drive to war began. All we've heard are lies, and more lies: about the reasons for this war, about alleged "weapons of mass destruction," about Iraq's supposed links to Al Qaeda, – and also about the costs of this war, which Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz adamantly refused to discuss in advance.

As Maureen Dowd puts it in Sunday's New York Times:

"$100 million to hide the families of 100 Iraqis in the witness protection program, $19 million for post office Wi-Fi, $50 million for traffic cops and $9 million for ZIP codes. At these prices, the Baghdad ZIP better be 90210."

$87 billion for the defense of Iraq, the de facto fifty-first American state, and a relative pittance for homeland defense. There is something very wrong – almost sinister – about these kinds of priorities.

Priorities – that's what life is all about. So, what are your priorities? Let me guess: Family, friends, financial security – the personal values that make life worth living. But they're threatened, now, by a clique of war-crazed zealots who clearly don't care about your security, or the national security of the United States.

 

[ElCubano]

Thats a stomach twister.....our tax money goes to them ( iraqi people ) and their money ( oil money )goes to Halliburton...a shift of wealth....incredible...

 

[Madison]

Quote from ElCubano:

Thats a stomach twister.....our tax money goes to them ( iraqi people ) and their money ( oil money )goes to Halliburton...a shift of wealth....incredible...

it's unreal.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2213-2003Sep25.html

A new curriculum for training an Iraqi army for $164 million. Five hundred experts, at $200,000 each, to investigate crimes against humanity. A witness protection program for $200,000 per Iraqi participant. A computer study for the Iraqi postal service: $54 million.

 

[Nolan-Vinny-Sam]

Quote from ElCubano:

Thats a stomach twister.....our tax money goes to them ( iraqi people ) and their money ( oil money )goes to Halliburton...a shift of wealth....incredible...

Bingo!, give da man a cigar

dumya's cabal, very very smart crooks. so devious.

wash rinse and repeat

wouldn't be surprised a bit, to find out 9-11 was orchestrated by dumya's cabal... what a windfall for them.... trillions!!
screwing the Iraqis, and of course the US taxpayer ahahahaha

who says they are stupid??

bring it on boys bring it on.. let the oil$$$ flow yeah baby!!

 

[alfonso]

Madison, those articles you posted are a heap of bullshit. Freakin liberals are unbelievable. Okay, so I was against the war myself, alongside them.

But what the hell do they want now? For America to just pull out and leave Iraq a bombed out mess? (That would, I'm sure, work wonders for "safeguarding" American interests.)

Seems to me liberals like Maureen Dowd never gave two goddamn shits about the people of Iraq. It was all a big front for being able to attack Bush. That's the lowest of low.

American Liberals: "I don't really have a position on anything, but if the USA supports it, then I'm against it."

 

[harrytrader]

See here http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22756

Quote from harrytrader:

Pff all these media campaign against Bush are just the same farce where they present you two false choices: against the evil Bush and for the Evil Saddam or vice versa ! The result is as usual to serve the reaction law: the pro-Bush will say : "look at these crazy guys that prefer to support a terrorist than our own president, we really don't have any lesson to receive from them !" And vice-versa of course. No medias will let the people have another choice : let's bring them down both and stop the comedy !

This is a well-known mass psychology trick used by politicians and medias since a long time !

 

[harrytrader]

. NOP (error )