BBB
Ok, that's three of us now.
Blatham
Blatham, its not good enough to sit at home and rant via A2K.
I just e-mailed my outrage to ABC Nightline, CNBC Hardball, CBS 60 Minutes, Knight-Ridder News Service, and CNN.
The Media must be bombarded with our outrage over this illegal use of the CIA by the Whitehouse.
BBB
You're outraged over a possibility?
McGentric
McGentric, if you are the patriot you claim to be, believing in the Rule of Law and the illegality of the Whitehouse using the CIA to get its enemies as Nixon did, then why aren't you outraged, too?
BBB
the enemy of our enemy-etc
It is also possible that a giant meteor will strike the Earth destroying every living thing on it.
One cannot go through life being outraged over every possibility. Far too much stress.
It's like you guys have forgotten about lawyers. Who do you think is behind all this fuss? Bush or Bush's lawyers? Same thing goes for Rice. The lawyers needed time to figure out what she could say and how to keep from setting a precedent for future administrations. Once a precedent is set for issues like this, they are awfully hard to get reversed in the future. Condi has testified privately before the commission for 4 hours already. What "new" topic are they going to discuss now? Her opinion on Clarke? Who gives a ****.
Clarke, in his pleading for his testimony to be de-classified, knows full well that it won't be because he understands how government works. He spent 30 years in it's grasp, remember?
Quote:"Who do you think is behind all this fuss? Bush or Bush's lawyers? Same thing goes for Rice."
Bush/Rice lawyers primary task is to take direction from Bush/Rice and then find legal justification for defending those directions, until a few days ago those lawyers were finding legal rationale for NOT testifiying and they provided their expertise in so doing, Bush (for whatever reasons) changed his mind (politics?) and ergo the lawyers are now charged with mitigating their prior findings in adjustment to the new instructions from their employer.
stop interjecting the conversation with facts Dys..i miss all the fun...LLooLL
I read PDiddle's post, and forwarded it to Kara and Ul, who are abroad. But they are in play time, both of them, at the moment. Actually, at the moment Ul is boarding a plane for a 10 hour flight to play time.
I have been looking for follow-up information to confirm the use of the CIA in that manner, but haven't seen anything yet.
and guess who else has been calling the commission...
Quote:That interest was revealed when commission critics voiced suspicions that Zelikow had been in contact with Bush political strategist Karl Rove. His spokesman Felzenberg didn't deny the allegation, saying only that they hadn't discussed the commission's business.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/04/02/widows/index.html
From the Wall Street Journal...
Very Awkward Facts
By LAURIE MYLROIE April 2, 2004
The credibility of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has come under withering fire. He has been caught in error after error, omission after omission. I can attest to one error more: a highly revealing error that tells us a great deal about who Richard Clarke really is.
Mr. Clarke singles me out for special criticism in his book, "Against All Enemies." This is not surprising. He believes that Islamic terrorism is the work of a few individual criminals, many of them relatives. I have for years gathered the evidence that shows that terrorism is something more than a mom-and-pop operation: that it is supported by powerful states, very much including Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of "Ramzi Yousef." But who was "Ramzi Yousef"?
The evidence suggests that "Ramzi Yousef" had close connections to the Iraqi security services. This evidence has impressed, among others, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board. Mr. Clarke calls the Yousef-Saddam connection an "utterly discredited" theory, unworthy of serious debate. He likes the phrase so much, he even uses it on the dust jacket of his book. But let's review the facts: Fact #1: "Ramzi Yousef" entered the U.S. in September 1992 on an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing a journey beginning in Baghdad. This fact is attested by the inspector who admitted Yousef into the U.S. Yet Mr. Clarke contends that Yousef entered the U.S. without a passport. Fact #2: The sole remaining fugitive from the 1993 bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is an Iraqi. After the attack, Yasin fled to Iraq. The Iraqi regime rewarded Yasin with a house and monthly stipend. Yet Mr. Clarke claims, incredibly, that the Iraqis jailed Yasin. Fact #3: Seven men were indicted in the 1993 attack. Two of the seven, Yousef and Yasin, have Iraqi connections. Yet Mr. Clarke inflates the number of participants to 12, so as to create the impression that the presence of one or two men with Iraqi connections was no big deal. Fact #4: The truth is, we don't really know much about the prisoner bearing the name "Ramzi Yousef." Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over Yousef's two trials, observed at sentencing: "We don't even know what your real name is." Yet Mr. Clarke claims to know what the judge did not: Yousef, he writes, "was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait where his father worked."
To reach this conclusion, Mr. Clarke has to ignore a forest of awkward facts. In late 1992, according to court documents, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of the 1984 and 1988 passports of Abdul Basit Karim (those documents have Karim born in Kuwait). Yousef claimed to be Karim, saying he had lost his passport and needed a new one to return home. He received a temporary passport, in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, which he used to flee New York the night of the Trade Center bombing.
Karim was, indeed, a real person, a Pakistani reared in Kuwait. After completing high school in Kuwait, Karim studied for three years in Britain. He graduated from the Swansea Institute in June 1989 and returned home, where he got a job in Kuwait's Planning Ministry. He was there a year later, when Iraq invaded.
Kuwait maintained an alien resident file on Mr. Karim. That file appears to have been altered to create a false identity or "legend" for the terrorist Yousef. Above all, the file contains a fingerprint card bearing Yousef's prints. But Yousef is not Karim -- as Judge Duffy implied -- for many reasons, including the fact that Yousef is 6 feet tall, while Karim was significantly shorter, according to his teachers at Swansea. They do not believe their student is the terrorist mastermind. Indeed, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, latent fingerprints lifted from material Mr. Karim left at Swansea bear "no resemblance" to Yousef's prints. They are two different people.
The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim's file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef's. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its terrorist agents.
The debate over Yousef's identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed's identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that pre-date Kuwait's liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef's "uncle," and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef's "brothers."
A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that "it's obvious" that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given "legends," on the basis of Kuwait's files, while Iraq occupied the country.
When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us "against all enemies." Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.
From above WSJ article:
Quote:They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us "against all enemies." Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.
It would be nice to be able to verify or discredit such an assertion. But kinda hard to do when Bush will not release paperwork from the Clinton administration's period in office. I do hope that Clinton and Gore will address this when they testify before the commission.
This entire matter is too important to merely degenerate into a "he said, she said" scenario.
Quote: In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html
She also figures Sadaam mailed the anthrax letters.
Boom! Blatham drops another bomb on 'em.
Thanks for showing the bias.
but after all, she is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Sadaam has also built a tunnel from his cell, flew to Wisconsin to kidnap a student and then turned himself in.
