White House aide says Bush did not lie about Iraq

Hadley is involved in the Niger report over his head. He may very well be indicted before it's over.

I'm reading the thread title and I'm thinking to myself - "Dog bites man."


Of course it's a reference to that old saying that "Dog bites man" isn't news but "Man bites dog", is news.

So, a White House Aide protecting anyone in the White House isn't news.

Well it wouldn't be if Bush and Cheney and the cabal weren't in so much trouble.

Because they're in strife it's news that a White House Aide is defending them.

In the upside down world we live in now, it is actually newsworthy that "Dog bites man."

I'm waiting for the obvious headlines: "President, Vice-President, tell the truth."

That would be newsworthy.

Did Bush lie about Iraq? If so, exactly what was his lie?

We'll know the answers to both questions soon enough I think. The hounds are barking.

With so many in these parts saying it, as if it's a fact, maybe one of them will pop up and prove it.

It's funny but in politics - I mean the process of politics - inference is all important. You don't have to come right out and accuse a la Zola - you only have to muddy the waters a bit or toss out a suggestion here and there.

That's what's happening now.

There is doubt in the public mind that Bush in fact told the truth about the reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. What's that doubt based on? That's the question of the moment. In the political process that's all that's required.

Of course the right of the accused to know exactly what it is that he or she is being accused of will come into play if there are judicial proceedings - ie impeachment. But until that happens all that's needed is inference.

Not quite. When he begins, as he has, to challenge his accusers, and if they continue to come up empty or try to duck it--watch the poll numbers. A movie about Saddam's Iraq and actual footage of Iraqi people reacting to their freedom and elections has been released recently...more people are finally speaking up about what has been proven, and what continues to be a baseless lie about Bush.

I know there is a core of around 30% who don't want to know the truth. But, it's only about 30%.

Specifically on Bush - he has no choice but to fight back. The stunning thing is that he has to.

Re the 30% - I reckon that's about right - every individual or party has their core. But it's not the core that will win the election for you, you have to get those swinging or wavering voters. The other person's or party's core is obviously out of reach.

Not that it matters for Bush of course, but it will matter for his legacy and for the coming elections (and here I enter my ignorance zone because without going back through my textbooks I couldn't tell you anything about said elections so I will stop here).

There is nothing more proven to make someone look guilty than having to say they're not guilty all the time. Finally the bush administration is on the defensive.

The lies were in telling only half the truth. Very easy to say and easily proven as the report came out last week in the CIA document. More than a little bit of the evidence that Powell shoveled at the UN speech was already in doubt before he started shoveling that manure.

57% of Americans believe Bushie deliberately lied us into war. A serious charge that people did not come to lightly.

It's the WMD, Stupid

George Bush and Judy Miller will now forever be linked in the weakest argument: On Saddam Hussein's WMD, they both want us to believe that they just couldn't have done better.


Speaking at Tobyhanna Army Depot on Veteran's Day, the President assailed the swarm that he claims is rewriting history. "Intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein," the President said. Congress members, a bipartisan Senate investigation, the United Nations, all agreed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the President said.


Miller wrote a letter to the public editor of The New York Times yesterday with another installment of her soap opera. What struck me was the throwaway line in her letter that "like many others in the press, I reported intelligence that proved faulty."


Why is it that WMD seems to make us so stupid?

I agree with the President on much of his selective defense: I don't think that the administration "manipulated" intelligence with regard to Iraq's WMD. The bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, the so-called Robb-Silberman commission, found no evidence of political pressure by the White House to get the intelligence community to reach the conclusions it did. Much of the worst criticism of the administration did come during the 2004 Presidential election and thus did have a political tinge.



But these are empty arguments when it comes to the central issue: The United States government, which is the world leader in "intelligence," just got it wrong when it came to assessing the state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And despite significant intelligence community reorganization and numerous sage commissions reconstructing the miserable story, the weaknesses associated with the U.S. government failure persist.



Judy Miller is also dead wrong. I have suggested here that the media could have done better, and have been asked by numerous readers to explain how. Ms. Miller, I'll point out, wasn't a cub reporter covering WMD. I remember assisting Judy on nuclear weapons stories during the Carter administration. As the Iraq war loomed, Miller was coming off of just finishing Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, a scare mongering book written with two Times colleagues.



All of which is to say that well before the 9/11 attacks, EVERYONE was seemingly united in the argument that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was getting inexorably worse. In the pre-blog world, mainstream discourse demanded adherence to the WMD dogma: The problem of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons was getting worse; more countries were proliferating with their bombs; "loose nukes" and other unsecured weapons and technologies were accumulating in the wrong hands.

All voices from all sides -- if they could be called sides -- echoed the same conclusion. Governments and militarists argued that the Iraq's and Iran's and North Korea's and China's were ever more frightening and potent threats and that nothing should be spared to fight the threat and the spread. Peaceniks and professional arms controllers and United Nations do-gooders argued that not enough was being done: that government commitment wasn't strong enough, that budgets weren't big enough, that intelligence wasn't good enough, that action wasn't strong enough. This was the universal truth. When bombs hit Baghdad on the night of March 19, 2003, they rode on a non-partisan midless WMD beam.



The real truth about WMD is far more difficult for all of these parties: The threat of nuclear war today, or biological war, or chemical war, is no where near what it has been in our lifetimes. The worldwide arsenals of nuclear weapons have declined by more than two-thirds since the late-1960's peak of the Cold War. The likelihood of accidental or unintentional war has virtually diminished. The spread of nuclear weapons -- particularly U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons, which were once deployed in scores of countries at hundreds of sites -- has significantly declined. The roster of countries out of the WMD business far exceeds the numbers who have "gone nuclear" in the past 20 years.



I'm not arguing for a minute that much more doesn't have to be done to rid the world of the WMD menace. And I'm not confident that the countries that actually possess real nuclear arsenals -- specifically the United States, China, Russia, Israel, Pakistan, and India -- won't use their WMD in their perceived vital interest. What I do think though is that the controlling opinion in the world today, even by many in the disarmament community, is that continued actual disarmament by the actual WMD powers is a waste of time. This is not some lefty explanation for why North Korea and Iran feel justified in pursuing WMD; it is just an argument that says we long ago gave up on the notion that pursuit of a universal solution to the WMD problem was an essential pressure point in dealing with the new WMD powers.



If you want to understand how WMD became the justification for war with Iraq, then understand that throughout the 1990's, WMD served so many so well. Saddam's pursuit provided the first Bush administration great Cold War-ish comfort. The massive failure to understand the extent of Iraq's program prior to Desert Storm led to a high point for United Nations inspection and disarmament work and mobilized the minds of an intelligence community otherwise completely bereft in a post-Cold War desert. Disintegration of the Soviet Union kindled a gentleman's non-proliferation salon. The Clinton administration discovered Anthrax and could appear actually forward looking on national security. The domestic WMD consequence management business was born, paving the way for the post 9/11 homeland security industry. An even larger ballistic missile defense industry got its boost. Nuclear weapons stayed alive ready to fight another day. Clocks were constantly reset for minutes to midnight. WMD was always good for a front page story.



After 9/11, the Bush administration didn't concoct Iraq's WMD -- they inherited it. There is no question that the White House decided cynically to pound on Saddam's supposed WMD pursuits to justify a war it wanted anyway. But Bush and Company, like Miller and her ilk had already lost their critical faculties on WMD; they had long ago stopped considering whether WMD was really as great of a threat as say, straight old fashioned terrorism without a spore or a toxin or a radioactive isotope in sight.



The constant drone on weapons of mass destruction, from Greenpeace to the White House, from the Nobel peace-prize winning International Atomic Energy Agency to Strategic Command, conveys the same sorry message: Nothing is as important, no war isn't justified…

washingtonpost

Yes, a serious charge. Please post a link that supports your claim.

Ticomaya, I find it hard to believe that you haven't seen the NBC poll that has 57% of Americans saying the believe Bushie deliberately lied us into war. I could give you a thousand links on that poll taken just a few days ago. I think if you did a google search, looked it up yourself, you just might benefit more than if I did it for you. Show a little initiative.

This defense of Bush amuses me.

For years, he had a majority of Americans believe that Saddam worked in hand in glove with the 9/11 terrorists, even though there was no evidence of this.

So now the worm has turned, and the Bush defenders all cry, "Prove he lied!"

Why bother? Perception counts, except now it's working against him. Take a beating!

Can you give me just one link to the official poll results themselves? I don't need a thousand links to a bunch of wacko leftist "Impeach Bush Now" blogs. Thanks.

57% of Americans Think Bush is Dishonest

Yahoo.com



Ipsos: http://www.ap-ipsosresults.com

There ya go.

I'm sure someone here will take on the AP poll as some sort of Democratic front. One of the other Bush apologists made that claim about the Wall St. Journal poll on another thread.

Ticomaya, typical Bushit. Can you please, please, please do my homework for me? hahaha. You spend a lot of time talking about this stuff and I find it hard to believe you didn't see this plastered all over network news or in your daily newspaper or even on this forum where it's been posted a number of times. But purely for the sake of rejoicing at the awakening of America I'll post it for you. Will you now claim that an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is "leftist". http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9981177/

The news here is that they could only find one aide that was willing to stick up for Bush.