THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

McTag, Isn't it amazing how this administration changed the justification for war with Iraq, but half the American people continues to buy it. 1) WMDs, 2) al Qaida connection, and 3) for the Iraqi People. Except, when the invasion took place, the first place this US army controlled were the oil fields. Too many dots, if you ask me.

There's nothing in F9/11 to bicker about.

There is much in F9/11 that is falsity.

There is much of that falsity in F9/11 that has been specifically identified and criticized.

However, the only thing seriously wrong with F9/11 is that Michael Moore and his like minded associates have characterized it as a documentary work when it actually is a fictional work.

What evidence do you possess that Saddam lied about possessing WMDs when he agreed at the Gulf War Armistice to disasemble and destroy them, and when disasembled and destroyed, provide evidence that he disasembled and destroyed them?

Read the final 9/11 Commission Report. It alleges Iraq al Qaeda connections both before and after 9/11. What evidence do you possess that their findings are false?

What evidence do you possess that Iraqis will be worse off under their new government than they were under Saddam's government?

What evidence do you possess that "the first place this US army controlled were the oil fields?"

"There is much of that falsity in F9/11 that has been specifically identified and criticized."
Really? Such as? I haven't seen anything, never mind anything convincing.

Failures of the Sept. 11 Commission
By William Raspberry
Washington Post

Monday 26 July 2004

For all its somber-faced seriousness, the report of the Sept. 11 commission turns out to be a childlike explanation of what went so tragically wrong nearly three years ago.

It acknowledges the obvious, but it manages to avoid any semblance of individual responsibility. "The lamp broke," a child might say. Or, as the report would have it, the "system" failed.

Which surprises Ray McGovern not a whit.

"The whole name of the game is to exculpate anyone in the establishment," says McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and a member of a group of former agents called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. " 'Mistakes were made,' but no one is to blame. Why is it that after all this evidence and months and months of testimony, the commission found itself unable even to say if the attacks could have been prevented?"

McGovern has no doubt they could have been. He cites the FBI report of "all those Arab fellows training on aircraft but with no interest in learning how to land them." The report was rejected, unread, he says, by an FBI official, Spike Owen, who nonetheless "received a $20,000 cash award from the administration for his duties in safeguarding the American people."

McGovern cites as well the President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" as evidence that President Bush and his top advisers had information on which they might have acted to prevent the attacks. Instead, he said in an interview Thursday, "the president went off to chop wood in Texas."

The combination of neglecting credible information and acting precipitously on highly questionable intelligence is something he'd not previously encountered in his government service, says McGovern, whose wife's cousin died in one of the World Trade Center towers. He is speaking out now "simply to spread a little truth around," he says.

And the truth as he sees it is that the commission has made two errors in judgment - first, the refusal to place responsibility for intelligence shortcomings on particular individuals and, second, the attempt to repair the damage by proposing creation of a super spy chief, perhaps with Cabinet rank.

Both errors stem from the same impulse to politicize things that ought to be outside politics, according to McGovern, who has a chapter in a forthcoming book from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation: "Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense: Restoring America's Promise at Home and Abroad."

Take the legal memorandum prepared by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales saying, in effect, that the president wasn't bound by the Geneva Convention in his treatment of certain war prisoners.

"Not a lawyer in the country believes that opinion holds water," McGovern said. "It was essentially a political document, one that told the president what he wanted to hear."

Much the same thing happened with the intelligence services, which strained to give the president what he clearly wanted to hear - only to watch the administration stretch that already strained intelligence into a pretext for war.

Putting the top intelligence officer in the Cabinet would only exacerbate that problem, says McGovern. "Being in the Cabinet automatically politicizes the post. The director of central intelligence need not be above the battle, but he should certainly be apart from it."

The failure to remain apart from the battle may be the chief failing of the Sept. 11 commission, McGovern believes. "This commission is not representative of America or of the families of those who died in 9/11. It is an archetypically establishment body, consisting of people who, with the exception of a token white woman, look exactly like me. They are all lawyers or politicians, or both - and all acceptable to Vice President Cheney, who didn't want a commission in the first place. The result is facile, mischievous and disingenuous. The families deserve better."

Suzy, remove that mask and those ear plugs and perhaps you will see and hear what falsity in F9/11 many think has specifically been identified and criticized!

Most flagrant examples are the F9/11 fantasized Bush conversations.

I agree with Kerry the life of the commission should be extended. However, it should become a watchdog agency to watch the progress and implementuon of the needed changes and improvements. The commission should not be part of the administration, but have the freedom of action that a special prosecutor would have to investigate and critique as needed.

I see what you mean now.

I agree! The 9/11 Commission actually entered this "childlike" mode right at the outset when it refused to examine the probable consequences of Jamie Gorelich's so-called "intelligence wall" directive and other serious policy errors occuring over the decade preceding 9/11/2001. Bush in his first eight months failed to correct these policy errors. He didn't begin to correct them until he finally signed the Homeland Security Bill which finally required the several intelligence agencies to share not hoard their intelligence information. The Commision's final report may have its facts right about what happened but certainly not about why or how it happened.

Okay, McG, I'll take my gloves off too, if you insist.

Here's a story that needs to be shared. On a recent flight from Iraq to the US, a guy in first class saw some soldiers returning home. As the first soldier got on the plane to go to coach, he asked the soldier where his seat was. The soldier responded that he had 22E (or some such), but the guy said, no, you have this seat. By the time all the soldiers got on the plane, all the people in first class gave their seats to the soldiers. Now, that's what I call being an American! BTW, it was an American Airlines flight.

Sweet story c.i., thanks.

Awesome!

Strange, that friend Ican has not yet asked for proof of this story.

Would you rather talk about this, or of the article I posted which maintains the Iraq attack was mounted to prevent a slide of the US currency, and a deep recession?

It seems Bush is mentally unstable.
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Last Updated: Jul 29th, 2004 - 09:12:13
Bush Leagues
Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
By TERESA HAMPTON
Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
Jul 28, 2004, 08:09
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President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.

The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President's mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.

"It's a double-edged sword," says one aide. "We can't have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally."

Angry Bush walked away from reporter's questions.
Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.

"Keep those motherfuckers away from me," he screamed at an aide backstage. "If you can't, I'll find someone who can."

Bush's mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President's wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.

Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a "paranoid meglomaniac" and "untreated alcoholic" whose "lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad" showcase Bush's instabilities.

"I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed," Dr. Frank said. "He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated."

Dr. Frank's conclusions have been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical School.

The doctors also worry about the wisdom of giving powerful anti-depressant drugs to a person with a history of chemical dependency. Bush is an admitted alcoholic, although he never sought treatment in a formal program, and stories about his cocaine use as a younger man haunted his campaigns for Texas governor and his first campaign for President.

"President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies," Dr. Frank adds.

The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment on this article.

Although the exact drugs Bush takes to control his depression and behavior are not known, White House sources say they are "powerful medications" designed to bring his erratic actions under control. While Col. Tubb regularly releases a synopsis of the President's annual physical, details of the President's health and any drugs or treatment he may receive are not public record and are guarded zealously by the secretive cadre of aides that surround the President.

Veteran White House watchers say the ability to control information about Bush's health, either physical or mental, is similar to Ronald Reagan's second term when aides managed to conceal the President's increasing memory lapses that signaled the onslaught of Alzheimer's Disease.

It also brings back memories of Richard Nixon's final days when the soon-to-resign President wondered the halls and talked to portraits of former Presidents. The stories didn't emerge until after Nixon left office.

One long-time GOP political consultant who - for obvious reasons - asked not to be identified said he is advising his Republican Congressional candidates to keep their distance from Bush.

"We have to face the very real possibility that the President of the United States is loony tunes," he says sadly. "That's not good for my candidates, it's not good for the party and it's certainly not good for the country."

© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue

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Any psychiatrist who writes a book related to treatment of a patient identified by name should lose his license to practice today. He certainly has zero credibility for ethics or compentence..

Fox, Is that the best you can do? Attack the messenger?

Nope. I just know that no psychiatrist with any credibility or credentials would diagnose a patient based on media observations and write a book on it for anything other than to pander for political advantage. No psychiatrist actuallly treating a patient can ethically name or give personal information about that patient.

How about "What a total load of BS!"?

Well, here, psychiatrists (who are medical doctors here) and psychologists (who didn't study medicine, but psycholgy) would not only loose their licenses/degrees but also punished as criminals ("professional secrecy") (although, the conservatives want to change that partly).