The CBS 60 Minutes Richard Clarke Interview

nimh wrote:

Tarantulas wrote:
And on a broader note, are we going to sit here and throw hyperlinks at each other all day long? I don't mind digging for information, but it gets rather tedious after a while.

Last hyperlink posted in this thread was by you, to President Bush's speech.

In six subsequent posts, Craven, Walter and I have been contesting the points of your posts on the basis of arguments, not links.

Enough food for thought, I think?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you're saying to me, or what you're asking me to do. In your previous post, you said:

nimh wrote:

Again, you wrote that "every intelligence agency in the world that had any information at all about Iraq was absolutely convinced that Saddam had WMD." You've yet to come up with anything but assertions, your own and a conservative journal's, about that.

That sounds as though you are asking me to back up my statement with evidence. That's why I asked if we were going to have a battle of reference websites. In fact, it sounds as though you have fastened doggedly onto that one statement of mine and are looking for evidence strong enough to hold up in court so that you can be convinced about what I say. Too bad I don't have an unlimited amount of time to spend on researching historical statements so I can prove them to the satisfaction of one interrogator or another. So I will just state for the record that I did hear that statement made by a high-ranking official of the Bush administration at one time. I don't recall where I heard it, but I do believe it to be true, and I'm not interested in coming up with additional reference material to verify it.

I notice that you made a statement about the subject also:

nimh wrote:

Only Bush, Blair, Howard and Aznar claimed to already KNOW Iraq still had WMD - enough even to pose an acute threat to global security.

If you have the time, perhaps you can come up with some backup information to show that your assertion is a verifiable fact. But I won't hold you to that. After all, we're just having a friendly discussion here, right?

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IronLionZion wrote:

Quote:
And I've even heard that Saddam himself was convinced that he had them.

Please elaborate.

He's referencing conjecture after the war when WMDs were not found that speculated that Saddam had been tricked into thinking he had WMDs by his subordinates.

There's no evidence to support it and remains in the realm of conjecture.

In other words, lots of people think the idea of Saddam himself being fooled sounds intriguing and despite there not being any evidence to support the conclusion (it was started by a rambling speculation by a columnist that I do not remember) they propagate the story in discussions.

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Terry Gross interviewed Clarke on Fresh Air today. If you "access" this link today, Wednesday, March 24th, you can simply click on the "current show" bar at the left of the screen when you go to

NPR, clickity-click

If you try this link after March 24th, you'll need to look in the archives for the program. It was a fascinating interview.

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If you remember, Craven, you and I discussed this and I had found a statement in the Kay report where David posited that Saddam likely believed he had WMD. Again no proof but that is where the idea Saddam was fooled came about.

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I think I remember hearing it before Kay. Either way I don't wanna look that up, as it's a theory I find risible.

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kewl.

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Tarantulas wrote:

nimh wrote:
In six subsequent posts, Craven, Walter and I have been contesting the points of your posts on the basis of arguments, not links.

Enough food for thought, I think?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you're saying to me, or what you're asking me to do. In your previous post, you said:

nimh wrote:
Again, you wrote that "every intelligence agency in the world that had any information at all about Iraq was absolutely convinced that Saddam had WMD." You've yet to come up with anything but assertions, your own and a conservative journal's, about that.

That sounds as though you are asking me to back up my statement with evidence. That's why I asked if we were going to have a battle of reference websites.

I think there's been two things going on here (we're grown-up people, we can do two things at the same time ;-)).

First is the point you suggested which I really took issue to. I've been hearing it from a lot of conservatives the last few months, ever since even Mr. Kay declared that there are most probably no WMD in Iraq. It's the line of argument that goes: how can anyone hold it against Bush that he thought Iraq's WMD were an acute enough threat to the world that he had to wage war on it - why, everyone thought so at the time! And then there are quotes from Kerry or Hillary or Pelosi or I dont know who to underpin the thesis that Bush couldnt possibly have been expected to know any better.

Your remark was a version of this, but you expanded it a step by explicitly declaring that all around the world, intelligence agencies shared Bush's estimation. This is clearly false and makes me doubt where you people were when we spent those three months discussing all this last year. It is revisionist history, trying to act like Joschka Fischer, Kofi Annan, Hans Blix and hell, all of us here, weren't saying what we spent months saying last year: that America was being rash, adventurist and wilful by going on inconclusive evidence to insist on the "irrefutable" existence (Powell) of WMD that posed an acute threat, no less, to the world and even America itself.

Thats one.

In the meantime, you brought up UN resolution 1441 as "evidence" for your submission. Your interpretation was one, and brought Craven, Walter and me to argue with it and formulate various reasons why we think your interpretation is wrong, wilfully wrong even perhaps.

Thats what I was referring to when I said, "food for thought" - if you understandably want to pass on the hyperlink-exchange thing, there's enough in the coupla posts above regarding your proposed interpretation of 1441 to react to, I'd say.

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I wasn't around here last year when the previous discussion was going on, so I have no idea what was said. I'm sure the statement I heard was made this year, though. You can say my assertion is "clearly false" if it makes you feel better, but I still believe it to be true. If I ever run across any documentation for it, I'll come back and post it in this thread.

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And to believe them is just, well, just as dumb.

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Hah! Nice job, guys.
I just wanna say that I took the "United We Stand" bumper sticker off of my car when Bush started spreading his WMD tales. Too bad. For a while there, the country and the most of the world WAS united. He screwed it up for us.

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Tarantulas wrote:

I'm sure the statement I heard was made this year, though. You can say my assertion is "clearly false" if it makes you feel better, but I still believe it to be true. If I ever run across any documentation for it, I'll come back and post it in this thread.

Right - and for as long as you can't remember the name of the Bush official who unsurprisingly asserted that "every intelligence agency in the world that had any information at all about Iraq" agreed with Bush's take on Iraqi WMD, you'll just assume that said unknown Bush official (not to mention the "Intellectual Conservative") know better what, say, the German intelligence agency believed than, say, the German foreign minister does. That makes sense. I guess ....

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Meanwhile, I was answering your previous post ...

Tarantulas wrote:

I notice that you made a statement about the subject also:

nimh wrote:
Only Bush, Blair, Howard and Aznar claimed to already KNOW Iraq still had WMD - enough even to pose an acute threat to global security.

If you have the time, perhaps you can come up with some backup information to show that your assertion is a verifiable fact. But I won't hold you to that. After all, we're just having a friendly discussion here, right?

Right, and I'm grateful for the leniency which you'll show me on this count - because like you, I dont feel like spending "an unlimited amount of time" on it. A quick Google I can do, but that'll bring anecdotal rather than foolproof evidence.

I'm also glad for the way you phrase the question. Unlike Hans Blix, who was much more outspoken and detailed in untangling the specifics of Powell's UN allegations, actual foreign ministers were unlikely to formally go on record saying Iraq might not have WMD ... too risky for a diplomat. Suffice it to say that only the UK, Spain and Australia (OK, and Bulgaria) explicitly agreed with Powell about Iraq's purported imminent WMD threat. The other countries underlined the "interest" of the evidence presented, only to then emphasize that it just showed how necessary it was for the weapon inspectors to keep searching until conclusive evidence could be found. (To find variations on this theme, google this.)

Meanwhile, both Blix and foreign ministers were explicit about how the presented evidence was definitely not enough to make the case that Iraq, as I put it, still had WMD enough "to pose an acute threat to global security", that would have made military action unavoidable:

Quote:

(Jan 24)[Russian foreign minister Ivanov] said that "Russia deems that there is no evidence that would justify a war in Iraq."

Quote:

(Feb 6)Chirac issued a statement saying the evidence presented by Secretary of State Colin Powell wasn't enough for France to abandon the pursuit of a diplomatic solution.

Quote:

(Feb 6)CBS News Correspondent Elaine Cobbe reports French intelligence sources say there was nothing very compelling about Powell's presentation. And they dismissed his attempts to link Saddam to al Qaeda

Quote:

(Feb 14)In his address to the Security Council, Blix warned that a finding "of great significance" was that many proscribed weapons were "not accounted for."

"One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist," he said.

Quote:

(Feb 17)Mr Blix appeared to question the US interpretation of satellite photos that Secretary of State Colin Powell said a week earlier showed suspicious activity at an Iraqi weapons site.

"The reported movement of munitions at the site could just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed munitions in anticipation of an imminent inspection," he said.

And, from "the text of a memorandum provided to The New York Times today by French officials expressing the position of France, Germany and Russia about a possible war against Iraq" of Feb 24 - and that would thus have been after Powell's presentation, unlike what I wrote earlier:

Quote:

While suspicions remain, no evidence has been given that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction or capabilities in this field

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Unnamed officials remind me of the ranting that many administration supporters did a year ago, before the war, to the effect that "an Iraqi defector said . . . " Anyone with half a brain and some knowledge of who haunted the corridors on capitol hill knew that "an Iraqi defector" meant Chalabi or one of his cronies. Chalabi had been absent from Iraq for more than forty years before the war began, and yet his self-seving claptrap was quoted as though gospel. I view comments about what any unnamed official reports now with the same scepticism. After David Kelly took his own life, it ought to have been obvious to an intelligent person that there were a great many things rotten, not in the state of Denmark, but in the putative "coalition of the willing." Clarke's current assertions strongly back-up contentions made since before the invasion that members of the intelligence community were being pressured to cobble together specious justifications to support the case for war.

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Chalabi was also convicted of a million dollar plus bank fraud in Jordan, and he's on the lam from that. But then given the problems some of GWB's friends are having of late, he probably fit right in.

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He may be back here on another long hiatus from Iraq, as well, in the event that Sistani gets control of the government, which is very likely.

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(addition to list above, have included it there now)

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reminds me of "Silverado Savings and Loan"
I suppose it's a Bush traditon.

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...and if nothing else, conservatives value tradition.

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Don't know how many of you watched the testimonies today, but Clark was VERY impressive. My new hero.

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Hey Mr. Mountie, i posted a link above for the interview which Terry Gross did with him today (actually recorded yesterday), perhaps you'd like to check it out.

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The CBS 60 Minutes Richard Clarke Interview

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