Bush supporters' aftermath thread

Hard to stay above snippiness when, for no reason that you can see, your party is throwing itself into the Potomac river.

Cycloptichorn

blatham wrote:

When asked if they trust Bush more than they had Clinton, 48 percent of respondents said they trusted Bush less, while 36 percent said they trusted him more and 15 percent said they trusted Bush the same as Clinton.

For the first time, more than half of the public thinks Bush is not honest and trustworthy -- 52 percent to 46 percent.

Ok, I gotta comment on this. Where in this quote is the public asked whether or not Bush is honest and trustworthy? The only thing that can be derived from this posting is that more than half the public thinks Bush is at least as trustworthy as Clinton.

Seems to me that is a good thing, not a bad thing as blatham is trying to make it by changing what is being said.

Come on, BBB .... didn't you think you had some basis for calling me a hypocrite? Didn't you have something in mind? Are you telling me you can't find anything over on the Democrat's thread to support your claim?
You don't have to apologize ... you can just say, "Upon reflection, I couldn't find anything to support my accusation."
Just let me know ...

Ticomaya wrote:

Come on, BBB .... didn't you think you had some basis for calling me a hypocrite? Didn't you have something in mind? Are you telling me you can't find anything over on the Democrat's thread to support your claim?
You don't have to apologize ... you can just say, "Upon reflection, I couldn't find anything to support my accusation."
Just let me know ...

Go find someone new to play your game with. My statement stands.

BBB

Why was Sen. Jay Rockefeller talking to Bashar Assad about the president's "plans" for Iraq?
by Edward Morrissey
11/16/2005 12:00:00 AM

PRESIDENT BUSH'S DECISION to finally push back against the "Bush lied!" fable paid off in strange ways this past week. Democrats seemed caught by surprise that the president would attack them so frontally on Veteran's Day; the shock caught them flatfooted all weekend long. Senators from the minority caucus could not explain their own words from 2002 supporting the same intelligence, and the same conclusions, as the Bush administration.

The strangest episode came from an appearance by Senator Jay Rockefeller on Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: OK. Senator Rockefeller, the president says that Democratic critics, like you, looked at pre-war intelligence and came to the same conclusion that he did. In fact, looking back at the speech that you gave in October of 2002 in which you authorized the use of force, you went further than the president ever did. Let's watch:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROCKEFELLER: I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11th that question is increasingly outdated.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Now, the president never said that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. As you saw, you did say that. If anyone hyped the intelligence, isn't it Jay Rockefeller?

ROCKEFELLER: No. I mean, this question is asked a thousand times and I'll be happy to answer it a thousand times. I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq, that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11. [emphasis added]

What was the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee doing in Syria, a country which perennially finds itself among the top listings of terrorist-sponsoring nations, discussing President Bush's decision-making on the war on terror with Bashar Assad, one of the worst sponsors of terror in the months after 9/11?

So far, no journalist has had an opportunity to ask Rockefeller that question directly, and Rockefeller hasn't elaborated on the point. We do know, however, that Rockefeller didn't lie about the trip itself. Arabic News covered the January 2002 visit in a short report that confirms Rockefeller's meeting with Assad. While the report does not directly quote Rockefeller after the meeting, it describes the senator as "content" and noted his "happiness" in meeting with the terror-enabler (who now faces condemnation even at the United Nations for his involvement in the assassination of a political opponent in Lebanon).

Rockefeller, for his part, neglected to mention the trip at the time, although he did issue press releases about his meeting with Saudi leaders on the same junket (as noted by the blogger Dinocrat).

If Rockefeller discussed war plans with Assad while the United States had begun military operations against global terrorist organizations, which Assad has been known to fund, surely it is a major breach of the senator's duties? The Logan Act, a piece of rarely enforced legislation, may be pertinent:

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.

By Rockefeller's own admission, he went to Syria (as well as Saudi Arabia) to conduct his own foreign policy initiative. He warned Assad that Bush intended to invade Iraq and could not be deterred--giving Assad plenty of opportunity to communicate with Saddam Hussein, and Hussein plenty of opportunity to prepare for war.

Mind you, it took President Bush nine months from time of Rockefeller's trip to even bring the subject of Iraq to Congress, and even though he got the authorization he wanted, he spent five months after that attempting to negotiate with the United Nations for unanimous backing on military action. That hardly seems like an implacably-resolved president determined to go to war.

None of this is to say that our elected representatives can't speak to foreign heads of state, even those unfriendly to the United States. However, by Rockefeller's own reckoning, this incident involves more than just fact-finding. The man who sits in judgment of American intelligence communities went to a known supporter of Islamist terror at a time when the nation had explicitly declared itself in conflict with such groups, and discussed our wartime preparations with a tyrant who could have--and may have--used that information to America's disadvantage. The timetable, and Rockefeller's admitted intervention, allowed the Assad and Hussein enough time to create strategic planning for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.

Given the facts we know now, it seems to be an excellent example of why Congress passed the Logan Act in the first place.

Edward Morrissey is a contributing writer to The Daily Standard and a contributor to the blog Captain's Quarters.

© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

mysteryman wrote:

Haiti,1994
No UN mandate,no WMD in Haiti,no threat to the US.
BUT,Clinton ordered an invasion anyway.

Quote:

16 Oct 1993--The UN Security Council authorizes military force, including a naval blockade, to enforce the sanctions. Other countriesjoin the naval blockade.

UNSCR 1441 - November 8, 2002

Called for the immediate and complete disarmament of Iraq and its prohibited weapons.
Iraq must provide UNMOVIC and the IAEA full access to Iraqi facilities, individuals, means of transportation, and documents.
States that the Security Council has repeatedly warned Iraq and that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations



Dec 1993--Prime Minister Malval resigns.

5 May 1994--The UN Security Council gives the Haitian military ruler fifteen days to leave the country. The warning includes the threat to remove him by force.

6 May 1994--The Security Council approves tighter sanctions, including banning travel by Haitian military leaders, their families, and their supporters and banning all commerce to and from Haiti except food, medicine, cooking oil, and journalistic supplies.

11 May 1994--The junta installs Supreme Court Justice Emile Jonassaint, 81, as provisional president of Haiti.

10 Jun l994--President Clinton announces more sanctions against the Haitian government, including the cessation of commercial air traffic from the United States and the banning of financial transactions between the countries.

12 Jun 1994--In response to the tightening of sanctions, the junta declares a state of emergency.

4 Jul 1994--Up to 150 Haitian refugees die when their boat capsizes less that a half-mile from the coast of Haiti.

5 Jul 1994--Overwhelmed by thousands of boat people, the United States changes its policy, barring thousands of Haitians from the United States, who are subsequently detained at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Other Haitians are diverted to "safe havens" in other Caribbean countries.

7 Jul 1994--Washington sends 2,000 U. S. Marines to waters off Haiti and states that U.S. forces have been practicing for an invasion.

31 Jul 1994--UN Security Council Resolution 940 allows for the "application of all necessary means to restore democracy in Haiti." This enables a military intervention by the United States. Reacting to the resolution, the military junta declares a state of siege.

...what's also been said, and summarily dismissed by the right is that this war, after all is said and done, got its impetus from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld
and company. They can now accuse others of going along for the ride, but it was, and has always been, their trip. There were voices of dissent that got rolled over. Bush had a hardon for Iraq. And all you Bush apologists can twist in the wind forever, but you know its true.

Quote:

I was briefly tempted to engage you guys in a careful analysis of Podhoretz's claims but experience has taught me that won't be fruitful.

lol, me too!

Extreme - You too?

I have to agree though that any attempt you might make to contribute a careful analysis will not be fruitful.



Blatham's comment reminds me of schoolyard altercations during which one intrepid antagonist tells the other "I could beat the hell out of you if I really cared," just before he slinks away.

Frequently this guy had his a snot nosed droog trailing behind him and adding over his departing shoulder, "Me too!"

Quote:

blatham - you're including Hillary in that camp, right?

sure, why not?

Cycloptichorn

So,when Clinton enforced those same words against Haiti,it was ok.
Is that what you are saying?

Given the facts we know now, it seems to be an excellent example of why Congress passed the Logan Act in the first place.

By James Kuhnhenn and Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney turned up the White House rhetoric Wednesday in attacking critics of the Iraq war, accusing some unnamed lawmakers of lacking "backbone."


Cheney's rough-edged remarks were the latest in the Bush administration's campaign to challenge critics of the war, accusing them of twisting the historical record about how and why the war was launched. Yet in accusing Iraq war critics of "rewriting history," Bush, Cheney and other senior administration officials are tinkering with the truth themselves.


The administration's overarching premise is beyond dispute - administration officials, Democratic and Republican lawmakers and even leaders of foreign governments believed intelligence assessments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That intelligence turned out to be wrong.


But Bush, Cheney, and other senior officials have added several other arguments in recent days that distort the factual record. Below, Knight Ridder addresses the administration's main assertions:


ASSERTION: In a Veterans Day speech last Friday, Bush said that Iraq war "critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."


CONTEXT: Bush is correct in saying that a commission he appointed, chaired by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., found no evidence of "politicization" of the intelligence community's assessments concerning Iraq's reported weapons of mass destruction programs.


But neither that report nor others looked at how the White House characterized the intelligence it had when selling its plan for war to the world and whether administration officials exaggerated the threat. That's supposed to be the topic of a second phase of study by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.


"Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that was not part of our inquiry," Silberman said when he released the panel's findings in March.


The Senate committee concluded that none of the intelligence analysts it interviewed said they were pressured to change their conclusions on weapons of mass destruction or on Iraq's links to terrorism.


But the committee's findings were hardly bipartisan. Committee Democrats said in additional comments to the panel's July 2004 report that U.S. intelligence agencies produced analyses and the key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit weapons in "a highly pressurized climate."


And the committee found that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, analysts were under pressure to avoid missing credible threats, and as a result they were "bold and assertive" in making terrorist links.


In a July 2003 report, a CIA review panel found that agency analysts were subjected to "steady and heavy" requests from administration officials for evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, which created "significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection."


ASSERTION: In his speech, Bush noted that "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate - who had access to the same intelligence - voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."


CONTEXT: This isn't true.


The Congress didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief, a top-secret compendium of intelligence on the most pressing national security issues that was sent to the president every morning by former CIA Director George Tenet.


As for prewar intelligence on Iraq, senior administration officials had access to other information and sources that weren't available to lawmakers.


Cheney and his aides visited the CIA and other intelligence agencies to view raw intelligence reports, received briefings and engaged in highly unusual give-and-take sessions with analysts.


Moreover, officials in the White House and the Pentagon received information directly from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group, circumventing U.S. intelligence agencies, which greatly distrusted the organization.


The INC's information came from Iraqi defectors who claimed that Iraq was hiding chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, had mobile biological-warfare facilities and was training Islamic radicals in assassinations, bombings and hijackings.


The White House emphasized these claims in making its case for war, even though the defectors had shown fabrication or deception in lie-detector tests or had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence professionals.


All of the exiles' claims turned out to be bogus or remain unproven.



War hawks at the Pentagon also created a special unit that produced a prewar report - one not shared with Congress - that alleged that Iraq was in league with al-Qaida. A version of the report, briefed to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and top White House officials, disparaged the CIA for finding there was no cooperation between Iraq and the terrorist group, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed.


After the report was leaked in November 2003 to a conservative magazine, the Pentagon disowned it.


In fact, a series of secret U.S. intelligence assessments discounted the administration's assertion that Saddam could give banned weapons to al-Qaida.


In other cases, Bush and his top lieutenants relied on partial or uncorroborated intelligence.


For example, Cheney contended in an August 2002 speech that Iraq would develop a nuclear weapon "fairly soon," even though U.S. intelligence agencies and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency had no evidence to support such a claim.


The following month, Bush, Cheney and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice asserted that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes for a nuclear-weapons program. At the time, however, U.S. intelligence agencies were deeply divided over the question. The IAEA later determined that the tubes were for ground-to-ground rockets.




A recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 said that an al-Qaida detainee was probably lying to U.S. interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had been teaching members of the terrorist network to use chemical and biological weapons.


Yet eight months after the report was published, Bush told the nation that "we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."




Meanwhile, lawmakers didn't have access to intelligence products that may have been more temperate than what they got, even after they investigated the prewar intelligence assessment. For instance, the Director of Central Intelligence refused to give the Senate committee a copy of a paper drafted by the CIA's Near East and Southeast Asia Office examining Iraq's links to terrorism.


Lawmakers didn't see the main document concerning Iraq and WMD - the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate - until three days before their vote authorizing war. The White House ordered the NIE compiled only after lawmakers, including the then-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., demanded it.




The resolution that authorized use of force against Iraq didn't specifically address removing Saddam. It gave Bush the power to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."


ASSERTION: In his Veterans Day address, Bush said that "intelligence agencies around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."


CONTEXT: Bush is correct in saying that many intelligence agencies, particularly in Europe, believed that Saddam was hiding some weapons of mass destruction capabilities - not necessarily weapons. But they didn't agree with other U.S. assessments about Saddam. Few, with the exception of Great Britain, argued that Iraq was an imminent threat, or that it had any link to Islamic terrorism, much less the Sept. 11 attacks.


France, backed by several other nations, argued that much more time and effort should have been given to weapons inspections in Iraq before war was launched.


ASSERTION: Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, told reporters last Thursday that the Clinton administration and Congress perceived Saddam as a threat based on some of the same intelligence used by the Bush administration.


"Congress, in 1998 authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," Hadley said.


And Rumsfeld, in briefing reporters Tuesday, seemed to link President Clinton's signing of the act to his decision to order four days of U.S. bombing of suspected weapons sites and military facilities in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.


CONTEXT: Congress did pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which stated U.S. support for regime change in Iraq and provided up to $97 million in overt military and humanitarian aid to opposition groups in Iraq.


But it didn't authorize the use of U.S. force against Iraq.


Clinton said his bombing order was based on Iraq's refusal to comply with weapons inspections, a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War.


Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents William Douglas and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this report.

Didn't get the approval of Congress is more relevant as is the attack on the WTC killing thousands of our citizens.

Repeat to yourself-ten times.

The US Congress authorized Bush to send troops to Iraq.

The US Congress authorized Bush to send troops to Iraq

The US Congress authorized Bush to send troops to Iraq

Didn't attack, killing thousands, though.


Do you think that is a relevant fact?

And you can be damn sure that if it was Clinton now waging the war in Iraq, the lefties and Democrats would be strongly defending the action and the GOP would be criticizing it. Such is the way it goes.