okie wrote:BernardR, I agree with you, and in regard to WMD in Iraq, this has to be one of the weirdest and strangest, and I think one of the worst and most underhanded political tricks by an opposing party, in conjunction with a willing press, to turn public opinion against a president for their own political advantage - that I have ever observed in my lifetime. There are a number of things going on that only history will possibly, I say possibly, find out. I am talking about the undercurrents in the CIA and other agencies in conjunction with the politicians in terms of how this is all playing out.
And two things here. The Democrats have selective amnesia about what they have said, believed, and supported, and continue to try to isolate Bush out on a limb and to saw the limb off. Perhaps this is simply symptomatic of a generation that does not wish to take personal responsibility for anything, kind of like the lady that sued McDonalds for serving hot coffee. And the question of WMD in Iraq is still an open question in my opinion as to whether they existed or not, but even assuming they did not exist, we know the programs did exist or had been active, and Hussein had no intention of abandoning them for good, yet we are expected to think that all of this is now written in stone that Hussein had no WMD, had totally abandoned his programs, and was no threat whatsoever.
Whats so weird and strange about a whole country realizing they were deliberately deceived by Bush and his administration. You are among the very few in denial in the face of mountains of evidence proving deliberate deception. You will not allow yourself to see the truth. Thats why it is the strangest weirdest thing you have ever seen. You can not bring yourself to to admit it is true that Bush lied to drag the American people Democrat and Republican into war.
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The Washington Post reported last month that a U.S. fact-finding mission confidentially advised Washington on May 27, 2003, that two truck trailers found in Iraq were not mobile units for manufacturing bioweapons, as had been suspected.
Two days later, President Bush still asserted the trailers were bioweapons labs, and other administration officials repeated that line for months afterward.
Barton's memoir says that well into 2004, pressure from Washington kept the U.S. public uninformed about the true nature of these alleged WMD systems.
Former senior CIA officials denied such information was stifled.
The debunking of the "mobile biolabs" claim began in classified reports long before the U.S. invasion, when German intelligence in 2001 and 2002 told U.S. officials that the story's source, an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," was unreliable, official investigations later found. U.N. inspectors determined in early 2003, before the war, that parts of Curveball's story were false.
This story quickly fell apart behind the scenes, it has since emerged. Testing the equipment in early May 2003, U.S. experts found no traces of biological agents, and later that month the U.S. fact-finders filed their negative report from Baghdad.
But on May 29, Bush assured Polish television: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." Then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell later made similar statements. As late as January 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney called the trailers "conclusive evidence" of Iraqi WMD, one of the reasons given for invading Iraq.
The experts' findings were classified, never to be released, The Washington Post reported last month.
Returning to Baghdad in late 2003 to join the CIA-commissioned Iraq Survey Group in a senior role, Barton found that specialists had dismissed the "biotrailer" suspicions. Strong evidence showed the units were instead designed to make hydrogen for weather balloons, as Iraqis claimed.
(I cut article in pieces to emphasize highlights)
http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/05/13/ap2743802.html
At one point, former U.N. arms inspector Rod Barton says, a CIA officer told him it was "politically not possible" to report that the White House claims were untrue. In the end, Barton says, he felt "complicit in deceit."
