Bush supporters' aftermath thread

As I said, this should be investigated.

Ticomaya wrote:

This is particularly troubling considering the suspicions that Iraqi WMD might have been transported to Syria. This revelation could mean Saddam had over a year to work out the transfer with Assad than previously contemplated.

Uh, yeah. So, Assad was told before the invasion that the President of the United States didn't like Saddam very much. I guess he was really surprised...

Ticomaya wrote:

As I said, this should be investigated.

Yes, you did.

But my question was thought to get some info about the legal background for such an investigation.

Sorry for the poorly verbalised interogation sentence.

Sec. 953. Private correspondence with foreign governments

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without
authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or
carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government
or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures
or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof,
in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or
to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this
title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply,
himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof
for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such
government or any of its agents or subjects.

That's not what Rockerfeller said he told Assad. He said he told him it was his view -- again, this is the former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and someone that should know better -- that Bush had already made up his mind to go to war with Iraq.

tico wrote

Quote:

That's not what Rockerfeller said he told Assad. He said he told him it was his view -- again, this is the former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and someone that should know better -- that Bush had already made up his mind to go to war with Iraq.

You guys do make for a wonderful study subject.

The threat or possibility of a US attack on Iraq was, as we all know, a matter of gravest military secrecy. And for good reason. Just imagine the possibilities if Sadaam got word Bush had decided to attack:

- he might try to leave the country
- he could have reconsidered allowing UN inspectors into Iraq again
- he may have been subject to advices from his military that such a war had but one possible conclusion
- he would have had time to deploy an impenetrable shield of helium balloons designed to look like Barbara Bush's bum

As we all know, Saddam had advance warning that a US attack was imminent. All Rockerfeller did was give him an additional 8 months or so to get rid of his WMD.

The U.S. Must Strike at Saddam Hussein
by Richard Perle
New York Times
December 28, 2001

Within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush said, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." From that first statement, Mr. Bush shaped a grand strategy for the war on terrorism that is as transforming of American policy as was Ronald Reagan's pledge to consign an "evil empire" to the "ash heap of history." It breaks with the past by taking aim at states harboring terrorists as well as at terrorists themselves. It is why we have destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan even as we hunt down Osama bin Laden himself. It is why the war against terrorism cannot be won if Saddam Hussein continues to rule Iraq.

Three things about Saddam Hussein make the destruction of his regime essential to the war against terrorism.

First, like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein hates the United States with a vengeance he expresses at every opportunity. It is hatred intensified by a tribal culture of the blood feud - one that he has embraced since Mr. Bush's father defeated him on the field of battle.

Second, Saddam Hussein has an array of chemical and biological weapons and has been willing to absorb the pain of a decade-long embargo rather than allow international inspectors to uncover the full magnitude of his program. The expulsion of inspectors from Iraq three years ago has rendered future inspections worthless; everything that could be relocated has been moved and hidden in mosques, schools, hospitals, farms, private homes. These programs - now involving dozens, perhaps hundreds, of clandestine sites - will prove even more difficult to find than Osama bin Laden.

Alone among heads of state, he has actually used chemical weapons against his own people, killing thousands of unarmed citizens in northern Iraq. We know that he has produced quantities of anthrax sufficient to kill millions of people, as well as other biological agents. Disseminated to would-be martyrs from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or other terrorist groups, Saddam Hussein's biological arsenal could kill very large numbers of Americans.

With each passing day, he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich Iraqi natural uranium to weapons grade. We know he has the designs and the technical staff to fabricate nuclear weapons once he obtains the material. And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even? We simply do not know, and any intelligence estimate that would cause us to relax would be about as useful as the ones that missed his nuclear program in the early 1990's or failed to predict the Indian nuclear test in 1998 or to gain even a hint of the Sept. 11 attack.

Third, we know that Saddam Hussein has engaged directly in acts of terror and given sanctuary and other support to terrorists. In 1993 he planned the assassination of George H. W. Bush during the former president's visit to Kuwait. He operates a terrorist training facility at Salman Pak complete with a passenger aircraft cabin for training in hijacking.

His collaboration with terrorists is well documented. Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the Sept. 11 ringleader, is convincing. More important is his long, continuing collaboration with a number of terrorist groups, some of whose leaders live in and operate from Iraq. He openly, defiantly pays the families of suicide bombers and praises the attacks on Sept. 11. If anyone fits the profile of support for terror, it is Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein's removal from office, we are told privately, would be cheered in the Persian Gulf. The conventional wisdom that an attack on him would be seen as an attack against Islam is an insult to Islam, and it is wrong. To most Muslims, his reign of terror is an abomination. In Iraq itself, his downfall would be met with dancing in the streets. A decent successor regime would be very likely to encourage peace in the region.

The charter of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group of Saddam Hussein's opponents, calls for eradicating weapons of mass destruction and renouncing terrorism. Those opponents need our political and financial support today, and when the time is ripe, they will need our precision air power.

In 1981 the Israelis faced an urgent choice: Should they allow Saddam Hussein to fuel a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad - or destroy it? Once fuel was placed in the reactor, it could not be bombed without releasing lethal radioactive material. Allowing the fueling to go forward meant that the Baghdad regime could eventually get the plutonium to build a nuclear weapon. The Israelis decided to strike pre-emptively, before it was too late: in a spectacular display of precision bombing, the reactor at Osirak was destroyed.

Everything we know about Saddam Hussein forces President Bush to make a similar choice: to take pre-emptive action or wait, possibly until it is too late. We waited too long before acting broadly against terrorism. We were too late to save the victims of Sept. 11. We should have taken terrorism seriously three years ago, when our embassies in East Africa were destroyed. To leave Saddam Hussein in place and hope for the best would repeat that mistake. And narrowing the war against terror to exclude his regime would drain a bold and courageous policy of its great and vital strength.

I'm still waiting for Blatham, McTag, et al, to comment on Morkat's post re Clinton's speech. They say Bush lied but Clinton didn't? Somebody explain this to me, please.

Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 12, 2005; Page A01

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Even within the Bush administration, not everybody consistently viewed Iraq as what Hadley called "an enormous threat." In a news conference in February 2001 in Egypt, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said of the economic sanctions against Hussein's Iraq: "Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce "all relevant Security Council resolutions," and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend "against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

Hadley, in his remarks, went further. "Congress, in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," he said. "And, as you know, the Clinton administration took some action."

But the 1998 legislation gave the president authority "to support efforts to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein" by providing assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including arms, humanitarian aid and broadcasting facilities.

President Bill Clinton ordered four days of bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998, under the 1991 resolution authorizing military force in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Describing that event in an interview with CBS News yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: "We went to war in 1998 because of concerns about his weapons of mass destruction."

blatham: Would you please succinctly articulate the point you are trying to make by posting the Perle article?

Ridiculous argument you've forwarded re Rockefeller's statement is more than likely a mere part of the strategy to lessen the blow the administration's credibility has taken re Plame/Libby through suggestion that the opposition did it too (equivalence and factual matters notwithstanding, as usual).

Ticomaya wrote:

blatham: Would you please succinctly articulate the point you are trying to make by posting the Perle article?

type into google something like "September 15, 2001" and "Iraq" and remind yourself how much debate and commentary was in the air regarding an attack on Iraq.

Of course, the Perle article is a wonderful study in the arrogance and outright bullshit of the neoconservative/Cheney sort, as well. Fun to read it again.

The question is whether or not you are sharp enough to understand that this ridiculous argument you've forwarded re Rockefeller's statement is more than likely a mere part of the strategy to lessen the blow the administration's credibility has taken re Plame/Libby through suggestion that the opposition did it too (equivalence and factual matters notwithstanding, as usual). We both already know that there is no question as to your integrity in such an argument. It's usually missing.