old europe wrote:FreeDuck wrote:There is another underlying assumption that makes it difficult to have this conversation. That is the assumption that a president, by nature of his high position, is well informed and makes an effort to avoid making false statements and to verify his information thoroughly before speaking.
But..... isn't there another point to it: the responsibility to present information that is not verified or disputed as such? For example, if I rely on a single source of information - let's say a defector from somewhere - and subsequently use the information from that source in order to make my point, isn't it my responsibility to say "Well, look, there is some information about this and that" - instead of saying something like "We know for a fact that this is true."
I think that the public, when listening to the president speak, assumes that he wouldn't be saying something if it had not been verified.
Brandon9000 wrote:old europe wrote:FreeDuck wrote:There is another underlying assumption that makes it difficult to have this conversation. That is the assumption that a president, by nature of his high position, is well informed and makes an effort to avoid making false statements and to verify his information thoroughly before speaking.
But..... isn't there another point to it: the responsibility to present information that is not verified or disputed as such? For example, if I rely on a single source of information - let's say a defector from somewhere - and subsequently use the information from that source in order to make my point, isn't it my responsibility to say "Well, look, there is some information about this and that" - instead of saying something like "We know for a fact that this is true."
Sometimes on very important issues, one only has evidence which presents a range of probabilities.
So no responsibilities to verify information?
For example, if I state something like that:
Quote:We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
source
Should I mouth something like that without actually verfying it? You know, as President of the United States? Yes? No?
Did the press lie when news of the miners were found alive in West Virginia?
Now this news:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,195546,00.html
Did they know it wasn't true?
Did they know it was true?
It was an unconfirmed report.
In case this hasn't sunken in with you Brandon, "the truth" is a complex thing, and subject to a good deal of manipulation. So, in fact, McNamara did not willfully lie to the President by making a false statement (he didn't actually say that the destroyers were in international waters when they were fired on on August 4th). He told the President that the destroyers were fired upon in international waters on August 2nd (true), and that they were fired upon again on August 4th (not true, but mistakenly believed by McNamara, as well as the other Naval authorities at Defense). But he did not mention to Johnson that the destroyers were operating in North Vietnamese waters on August 4th. That is what the Catholics call "a sin of omission." He neglected to point out that little detail to the President.
To take the example of the yellow cake story: Bush could in good faith assert that there had been a report that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium in Africa. In that he would have been mistaken, but still telling the truth as he knew it--sort of. But the story was discounted as unreliable before he told it, and his omission of that information could be described as intent to deceive because it was convenient to the agenda upon which he had already determined. The entire Wilson/Plame affair grows out of the assertion by Wilson that Central Intelligence had already discounted the story as being an unreliable report by Italian intelligence sources, which had been shot down by regional experts--Wilson was one of those experts, who had been consulted upon the matter.
old europe wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:old europe wrote:FreeDuck wrote:There is another underlying assumption that makes it difficult to have this conversation. That is the assumption that a president, by nature of his high position, is well informed and makes an effort to avoid making false statements and to verify his information thoroughly before speaking.
But..... isn't there another point to it: the responsibility to present information that is not verified or disputed as such? For example, if I rely on a single source of information - let's say a defector from somewhere - and subsequently use the information from that source in order to make my point, isn't it my responsibility to say "Well, look, there is some information about this and that" - instead of saying something like "We know for a fact that this is true."
Sometimes on very important issues, one only has evidence which presents a range of probabilities.
So no responsibilities to verify information?
For example, if I state something like that:
Quote:We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
source
Should I mouth something like that without actually verfying it? You know, as President of the United States? Yes? No?
I am saying that the real world isn't always that neat and precise. On extremely vital questions, it may be, at a given moment in time, impossible to say exactly what is right. You seem to believe that it is always possible to decide an issue to a certainty. In the real world it isn't. The president may have little choice but to act on a potential danger, or else ignore it at our peril.
I am very much afraid that the master Historian, Setanta, is not aware of another presentation concerning the "Uranium" controversy, but he is so erudite and reliable that I am sure that with one or two chosen sentences he will utterly destroy the information below:
I would like an answer from Brandon, McGentrix, Bernard, Foxfyre, Ticomaya, et. al. regarding the "16 words" in the 2003 State of the Union speech.
Was it or was it not a lie, and why?
Wow, he did destroy it. I can't even see it anymore.
Hook
Bait . . .
Did anything rise?
Oops, no . . . too bad, so sad.
The information that the erudite Setanta will be able to utterly destroy with one or two well chosen paragraphs is below: I do hope he doesn't use vocabulary which may be too difficult for some of us to understand.
Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious sixteen words inserted?-after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department?-into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the "lie" Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the Vice President's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the Vice President sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed non-role in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:
My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . . , both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.
More than a year after his return, with the help of Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the sixteen words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the President's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary?-for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the sixteen words at issue was true.
That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore?-and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited?-Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.
As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing6), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:
He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.
And again:
The report on [Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.
This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research?-which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons?-found support in Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it?-which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Bush in the famous sixteen words.
The liar here, then, was not Bush but Wilson. And Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report,
[t]he forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].7
More damning yet to Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:
[Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ?'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'" Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.
To top all this off, just as Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flatout lie." Yet?-the mind reels?-if Cheney had actually been briefed on Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much acclaimed book whose title alone?-The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity?-has set a new record for chutzpah.
When you copy and paste, have the decency to cite your source, Italgato.
So, three separate inquiries that drew the same conclusion, and the director of the CIA sends a memo to the National Security Advisor about it.
Still think Bush didn't intentionally mislead the American people?
DrewDad wrote:I would like an answer from Brandon, McGentrix, Bernard, Foxfyre, Ticomaya, et. al. regarding the "16 words" in the 2003 State of the Union speech.
Was it or was it not a lie, and why?
I already gave an answer on this thread. Was it not satisfactory for you, or did you not see it?
When I get a question directed to me, I will answer it.
DrewDad- I am very much afraid that you l. did not read my entry about the British Intelligence Uranium report and 2. You did not read Ticomaya's post. Would you be so good to go back to read those entries? Thank you?
You do know, of course, that the Wikipedia source has been criticized for innaccuracies.
