Democrats Have Proof Pre-War Intel Was Manipulated

Again with Clinton's sexual life.
Get a life people!! Who cares if he had a harem going?! Or if he takes it up the you-know-what?!

So silly.

Since there is nothing of substance that these Clinton-bashers and Bush-defenders have to offer, the man's sex life is about the only thing they have going for them, flushd. Its relevance to world affairs is itself irrelavant in their view. It's a bashing point, that's all.

Merry
Merry Andrew wrote "Do try to make some sense, Mortkat."

Merry, I don't think that's possible because it's above his/her pay grade.

BBB

Morkat
Morkat, 27 A2Kers, so far, have accessed the thread where I originally posted the Rendon article. Seems to be of some interest to them.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=63724&highlight=man+sold+iraq+war

BBB

Merry Andrew- I am sure you will not agree with this post but I assure you that the quote in this post comes from a jurist who knows five hundred times more about the law than you do.

Richard A. Posner- "An Affair of State"
(Judge Posner was Chief Judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit)

quote P. 45

Obviously, the fact that a witness is asked about his sex life does not confer a license to lie, on the theory that sex is private and questions about sex therefore immaterial per se. Sexual activity is material to many claims, both old and new, ranging from actions for divorce and disputes over custody and prosecutions for rape, incest, sodomy, child molestation, and the production of pornographic films to actions for sexual harrassment, palimony, defamation, the knowing transmission of a sexually transmitted disease, and paternity."

P. 45

and

"The only crime plausibly attributed to the President growing out of his affair with Lewinsky is obstruction of justice....Obstruction of Justice is an umbrella term for a variety of specific STATUTORY CRIMES INVOLVING CORRUPTING OR OTHERWISE INTERFERING IMPROPERLY WITH THE COURSE OF LEGAL JUSTICE"...The President's alleged obstructions fell into two classes; IMPROPERLY INFLUENCING OTHER WITNESSES, MAINLY IN THE PAULA JONES CASE; AND COMMITTING PERJURY IN HIS DEPOSITION IN THAT CASE, IN HIS TESTIMONY BEFORE THE GRAND JURY AND IN HIS ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS PUT TO HIM BY THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE"

P. 38

Rebut that, Merry Andrew.

BBB Did you say 27 A2Kers or 270? Even if it is only 27 and you can get all of them to write to the Senators and Representatives, I am sure that a ground swell can be started to charge Mr. Rendon with ?, I don't know--something.

Good Luck, but it is my opinion that the case against Bill Clinton was much more critical to our Presidency both in the past and the future.

As, Richard Posner commented in his book- "An Affair of State" quote

"For those who think authority depends on mystery, the shattering of the presidential mystique has been a disaster for which Clinton ought to have rights paid with his job"

P. 266

Now, I am certain that you do not agree with this last statement, however, I do and if there are many other Americans who view the presidency as more debased and without a mystique, no one can say that the Clinton debacle does not have influence on our lives and the President's Administration even up to this day.

Mortkat
Mortkat, is it hard on your back to carry your soap box around to all of the political threads on A2K?

BBB

Re: Mortkat


No BBB - it's the inflatable model - you fill it with hot air and voila!

Beware pricks.

You're still using an outhouse? Plumbing just isn't that expensive these days.

People with no real argument have to whine about Clinton, it's all they have left.

The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD


The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?rnd=1132588954234&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.872

According to the Chicago Tribune's long piece about "What we know Today"- November 20, 2005- P. 11 even French President Jacques Chirac said in February 2003-quote

"There is a problem--the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is...right in having decided that Iraq should be disarmed"

Yeah everyone said it - But no one but Bush and Co pushed with all that urgency to invade. And he was wrong to cherry-pick evidence in order to do it. And that's the point.

What I Knew Before the Invasion
What I Knew Before the Invasion
By Bob Graham
Sunday, November 20, 2005; B07

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.

As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda.

In the early fall of 2002, a joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry committee, which I co-chaired, was in the final stages of its investigation of what happened before Sept. 11. As the unclassified final report of the inquiry documented, several failures of intelligence contributed to the tragedy. But as of October 2002, 13 months later, the administration was resisting initiating any substantial action to understand, much less fix, those problems.

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.
---------------------------------------------

The writer is a former Democratic senator from Florida. He is currently a fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics.

Gosh, too bad he didn't share his belief with the other democrats who voted yes. Might have made a difference.

Funny how he's the only one smart enough to come to the conclusions he now says he came to. Guess y'all need smart democrats like him in congress and need to kick out all those many dumb ones.

Of course, maybe I'm just a bit suspicious of politicians lately. He could be telling us the truth about why he voted like he did, couldn't he?

Well, he did vote no.

Snood- Your point is fascinating. "Cherry Pick Evidence" you say.

Could you refer me to a source which SHOWS SPECIFICALLY WHICH EVIDENCE WAS CHERRY PICKED?

Who did the Cherry picking? When? Where did the "Cheeries" come from? Who told who where the good "cheeries" could be found? Why?

Please, no more ambiguous baloney, Snood-GIVE FACTS AND REFERENCES!!!

Yes he did. And I'm glad he voted what he thought was the correct way to vote, after all, that is what we want.

But the whole explaination of why just strikes me as false. If he had data to come to the conclusion to vote no, why didn't he share it with others? Or maybe he did and they just ignored him?

Naw, something rings false on his explaination for his vote. He's trying to play politics and mold the current democrat line around his reasons for voting no. So if we take him at his word, the majority of democrats who voted to authorize the use of force were stupid and ignored evidence, in which case the people who elected them were very poorly served. Or he is lying about why he voted no.